Amnesiac

Neil Jordan is one of Ireland's leading film directors and also a novelist. His fiction includes The Past, Sunrise with Sea Monster and Night in Tunisia, and his films include Angel, Mona Lisa, The Crying Game and Interview with the Vampire. In this memoir he goes back through his own past and his family's, recording a life given to cinema and writing. His mother was a painter, and his father was a school inspector who was visited by ghosts. Jordan grew up beside an abandoned aristocratic estate in north Dublin, and its mysterious ruins fired his imagination. He loved music and played in bands and theatre groups. At University College Dublin he met a young radical named Jim Sheridan, and together they staged dramatic productions that pointed toward their later careers. Jordan's first story collection, Night in Tunisia, and his first novel, The Past, were well received. Even so, he was drawn to the freedom and visual richness of film and worked with English director John Boorman on the Arthurian epic Excalibur. His own first feature, Angel, made with Stephen Rea, took an angular and striking look at the violence of the Troubles. His films since have combined supernatural elements with reflections on violence and sexuality. He writes about working with Rea, Jaye Davidson, Bob Hoskins, Tom Cruise and others. The book is not a standard account of life in the film industry. It is an eerie, reflective work on loss, love, creativity, inspiration and influence.