This is an Almost True Irish Story. Murphy was a child of the newly emerging 1950's Irish middle class. He was raised in the environment of a conflicted marriage that never should have happened. While his privileged upbringing seemed idyllic to the outside world, his reality was starkly different. Life at home was always turbulent; he never knew what daily chaos would erupt.
Murphy was unsettled by the rigid Irish class system where social status predetermined one's future, thereby condemning innocent children and adults to the inevitability of an impoverished life. Signs of his destruction from alcohol were evident in his early teens. He became a meteor raging through the lives of those who loved him and many who didn't. Eventually, he emigrates to America where he reinvents himself and becomes another American success story.
About the Author: Michael Cassidy was born in 1950 and raised in Limerick, Ireland. The date of his death has not yet been determined. Eager to escape the realities of his Irish upbringing and Jesuit education, at nineteen, he talked his way onto a Dutch vessel in Dunmore East and worked his passage to Holland. He then joined the Dutch fishing fleet in the North Sea.
He has traveled extensively throughout his life. Apart from Ireland and Holland, he has lived in Canada, the United States, Costa Rica, and Brazil. He now lives on an island in the Philippines.
His life experiences, many of which are shared in this memoir, include being a failed but eventually successful father, a permanently unsuitable husband, a homeless street person, a hopeless drunk but subsequently a non-drinker, an uninterested insurance clerk, an incompetent deckhand, a decent stage actor, a dish washer, waiter, bartender, then restaurant owner, a non-practicing attorney, a newspaper owner and publisher, a TV presenter, a movie producer, a good friend, a bad enemy, a failed then successful businessman, and now, the author of The Longfellah's Son: An Almost True Irish Story. His most cherished life achievement are his three wonderful children. His next novel, More Almost True Irish Stories, about the Irish immigrant experience in America will be published in 2018.
