“It’s not a conventional family, David,” David McWilliams says politely. “No,” says David Baddiel (60). And he wasn’t kidding.
The Irish Times columnist and founder of Dalkey Book Festival interviewed British author and comedian Baddiel on Friday evening at Dalkey’s Church of the Assumption. Baddiel once pioneered stadium comedy in Wembley Arena and opened up the taboo on anti-Semitism in the UK, but lately his focus has been even closer to home: getting to grips with his mother’s affair with a golf memorabilia collector. Baddiel will soon publish My Family: The Memoir, which delves into his remarkable relationship with his parents before their passing.
“The whole book in a way is about memory and the tricks that memory plays on you and the way you construct a version of yourself depending on how your memory makes sense of sometimes a very dysfunctional life.” READ MORE Brianna Parkins: I’m leaving Ireland. I don’t have the energy for life here CMAT in Dublin: A night of real emotion in one of the best gigs of the year Grá Pizza takeaway review: Stunning sourdough pizza served from a converted horsebox An Irishwoman in New York: I’m flattered, but why do Americans love the Irish so much? His parents are Jewish: his father was Welsh-Jewish, while his mother fled Nazi Germany with her family as a baby.
“It’s kind of terrifying that I’m here in the world at all,” he says. “They got out in August 1939.” Baddiel’s 2021 polemic, Jews Don’.
