Starting with the familiar notion that the Irish do death well, or at least distinctively, journalist Ann Marie Hourihane covers ground familiar to folklorists by exploring traditional and contemporary death observances, using them as a lens through which to perceive and characterize Irish culture and society today. Hourihane’s access to and chronicling of the occupational folklife of embalmers, grave diggers, and undertakers is compelling and should serve folklorists as inspiration and goad to do more in-depth and longer-term ethnographic fieldwork. Altogether, the book is largely well-observed, mostly humane, and sometimes funny (but more so when the author jokes at her own expense).

Bear in mind that Sorry for Your Trouble is written by a self-described urban bourgeois journalist (from the Irish Times), one who reveals a pervasive anti-Church and anti-republican orientation, not to mention a fair amount of class snobbery. She may be a cosmopolitan, but she is one who is nonetheless willing to slum it for a sell-able story or at least to get in snarky digs about local color. She never fails to note neck tattoos, spray tans, track suits, unfortunate stilettos, tacky cocktail dresses, out-of-date fringe, and other working-class and/or culchee(i.e., redneck) markers at, for instance, the funerals of Dublin drug dealers or of County Monaghan country music singer Big Tom McBride. Would a folklorist do that? Would a folklorist think such things but not write them? Would not writing such things support the dismissal by some of our discipline as merely celebratory? Or do folklorists and journalists share an allegiance to something like the truth, while tone is another matter?

At the risk of essentializing what folklorists do (and how and why) vs. what journalists do (and how and why), I think that the book raises certain contrasts that are worth considering. For example, on the one hand, the author’s genuine human connection to Bernie, dying in hospice in the first chapter, is certainly clear, as is her connection to Bernie’s family in the penultimate chapter. And Hourihane is at her most relatable and affecting when discussing in the last chapter the events surrounding her father’s death. On the other hand, it is striking when and how often she disengages and keeps her distance from the people and events she seeks out, and one may be forgiven for thinking that some journalistic research may look superficially like ethnographic fieldwork but is not as sustained or nearly as intimate. For all the soul-searching and hand-wringing that ethnographers do—as well we should—journalistic methods in this book look much more transactional; the policeman dying in hospice in the first chapter who did not want to speak to the author “because journalists can be very sly” may have been on to something. Equally important—or am I still just harping on tone?—the product of at least this journalist’s efforts are often far more glib than most (though perhaps not all) folkloristic, ethnomusicological, and anthropological ethnography.

Hourihane has heard of folklore and folklore studies, which is nice. To establish a baseline of traditional beliefs and customs involved in Irish wakes and funerals, the author depends largely on the work of folklorists such as Gearóid Ó Crualaoich, Patricia Lysaght, and Seán Ó Súilleabháin. Although she could have made considerably more hay with their research, she did marshal folklore materials and analysis to set contemporary practices in relief. But how much relief is to be seen? How different are death observances and their significations now vs. a century ago and more? They are different—of course, no question—but also not entirely so, and that is a potentially very interesting thread that is largely dropped here.

As a journalist Hourihane cannot seem to help herself from foregrounding change and commenting on all the hot-button, Ireland-in-crisis issues of our day, as if checking them off a list of topics that must be addressed for the book to be deemed relevant: immigration and the multicultural nature of contemporary society, the rise of secularism, Catholic church and institutional abuses (from pedophile priests to mother-baby homes), backward stances on women’s health, the continuing legacy of Troubles-era violence (by which she seems to mean only republican violence), and needless deaths due to alcohol, drugs, and drugs-related crime.

These issues are part of the big picture; there is nothing to be gained from ignoring them, and by no means would I call for a return to blinkered, romantic visions of happy dancing throngs (Gummere 1907) or comely maidens dancing at the crossroads (de Valera 1943), visions that ignore anomie, fragmentation, or genuine dissolution. It is possible, however, that the methods and goals of Hourihane’s field—and the assumptions of her class and subject position—eclipse a folkloristic eye toward cultural continuities despite inevitable adaptation and innovation. Or, if vernacular expressive culture is not entirely or always a matter of deep continuity, despite surface change, perhaps the key to the conundrum between cultural continuity vs. change is something like traditionalization as characterized by Hymes (1975) and Bauman (2004) or the productive tensions involved in the life cycle of tradition that Honko modeled (2013).

Not all folklorists are invested in death ways or in Ireland, of course, but Sorry for Your Trouble may serve to set in relief what folklorists are in a position to do well, in terms of methods and what they afford—not least, sustained and often intimate engagement with others and an appreciation for cultural continuity as much as change.

Works Cited:

Bauman, Richard. 2004. “‘And the Verse is Thus’: Icelandic Stories About Magical Poems.” In A World of Others’ Words: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Intertextuality, pp. 15-33. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.

De Valera, Éamon. 1943. “The Ireland That We Dreamed Of" (Taoiseach of Ireland’s St. Patrick’s Day Address), Raidió Éireann.

Gummere, Francis Barton. 1907. The Popular Ballad. New York: Houghton Mifflin.

Honko, Lauri. 2013. “The Folklore Process.” In Theoretical Milestones: Selected Writings of Lauri Honko, ed. Pekka Hakamies and Anneli Honko, pp. 29-54, Folklore Fellows Communications no. 304, Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica.

Hymes, Dell. 1975. “Folklore’s Nature and the Sun’s Myth.” Journal of American Folklore 88: 345-369.

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[Review length: 1002 words • Review posted on March 11, 2022]