In his groundbreaking memoir, Jarred McGinnis tells a family epic unlike any other – tracing a life shaped by abuse, a near-fatal accident, and fatherhood as a disabled parent.
Jarred McGinnis was born to a Southern US clan where masculinity, resilience and physical violence were intertwined. In ‘There Is No Meant to Be’ he unearths the legends, secrets and scars that have shaped his family line, from his outlaw Irish ancestors to his mother Momo’s gift of foresight, and the ghosts – both real and remembered – that follow him into adulthood.
Two decades on from the near-fatal accident that left him in a wheelchair, McGinnis is married and the father of two girls, living first in East London and now Marseille. He writes about love within the context of care and of the particular vulnerability that comes from being a parent with a disability. In a daring imaginative leap, he writes of the end of life too, reaching beyond his own death to look at what truly makes a life.
Inventive, funny and deeply moving, this is a family epic unlike any other: part love story, part elegy, part reminder that even in the mess of family and memory there is something to laugh about.
Tickets: £10
Part of City of Literature weekend — a Norfolk & Norwich Festival and National Centre for Writing presentation, programmed by the National Centre for Writing.
