Emily's Shoes Author:Dermot Bolger “The same dream has haunted me for some years, the dream that I have killed someone...” So begins the strange tale of Michael McMahon, a tale that is almost an emotional detective story -- a search through a man’s ghosts and dreams using loss and memory for clues and with both real and imaginary corpses. — At the beginning there... more » is a lonely but enchanted boyhood in Dublin. Then, having lost an unseen father to the sea and his desperately loved mother through cancer, Michael embarks upon a troubled adolescence: a few brief months in England spent with his glamorous but distracted aunt, Emily, then the return to Ireland, and manhood.
Throughout his life Michael is running, both running away and running to keep up with his own emotional turbulence, a dark confusion and a curious obsession with high-heeled shoes. For Michael is a man who loves women's shoes: obscure objects of desire which he chases and collects and sometimes even wears. This frightening and sometimes amusing fixation is the hidden center of Michael’s life: a half understood symbol of the many things left unspoken and of a mourning that has been tragically suspended.« less