Under the Eye of the Clock: A Memoir

Front Cover
Arcade Publishing, 2000 - 163 pages
Oxygen-deprived for two hours at birth, Christopher Nolan lived to write, at age twenty-one, the autobiography of his childhood, told as the story of Joseph Meehan. He wrote the book, using a "unicorn stick" attached to his head, letter by painful letter. The result is astonishingly lyrical, filled with powerful description, touching moments of triumph and humiliation, and, above all, disarming wit. It is, in the words of London's Daily Express, "a book of sheer wonder".

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Contents

A Modicum of Aloe
1
Hell Guffawed
2
White Sheets of Life
25
The Stirring of the Muse
35
The EightLegged Pony
43
Knife Used
50
The Night That Was In It
60
An Eyeful of Derravaragh
68
Slavery was Abolished
103
The Cool Green Garden
106
head the ball
114
Is The Sound of Footsteps
123
A Dream Being Shattered
132
Kernelled Loneliness
142
Academics Thesaurus of Thoughts
149
His Human Wasteland
156

If He Could But Earth Himself
80
My Boyhood Epiphany
87

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About the author (2000)

Author Christopher Nolan was born in Ireland on September 6, 1965. Due to being deprived of oxygen at birth, he suffered from cerebral palsy and could only move his head and eyes. He used a pointer attached to his head to write his books. At the age of 15, he published his first book Dam-Burst of Dreams (1981). His other novels are The Banyan Tree (1999) and Under the Eye of the Clock, which won the Whitbread Book of the Year in 1988. He also won the Medal of Excellence from the United Nation's Society of Writers, The Sunday Independent-Irish Life Arts Award for Literature and Ireland's Person of the Year Award in 1988. He died due to oxygen deprivation caused by ingestion of food into his airways on February 20, 2009 at the age of 43.

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