Walking with Ghosts: A Memoir

Written by Gabriel Byrne

Narrated by Gabriel Byrne

A highly anticipated memoir by Gabriel Byrne, the award-winning star of over eighty films, Walking with Ghosts is an exquisite portrait of an Irish childhood and a remarkable journey to Hollywood and Broadway success

As a young boy growing up on the outskirts of Dublin, Gabriel Byrne sought refuge in a world of imagination among the fields and hills near his home, at the edge of a rapidly encroaching city. Born to working-class parents and the eldest of six children, he harbored a childhood desire to become a priest. When he was eleven years old, Byrne found himself crossing the Irish Sea to join a seminary in England.

Four years later, Byrne had been expelled and he quickly returned to his native city. There he took odd jobs as a messenger boy and a factory laborer to get by. In his spare time, he visited the cinema where he could be alone and yet part of a crowd. It was here that he could begin to imagine a life beyond the grey world of sixties Ireland.

He reveled in the theater and poetry of Dublin’s streets, populated by characters as eccentric and remarkable as any in fiction, those who spin a yarn with acuity and wit. It was a friend who suggested Byrne join an amateur drama group, a decision that would change his life forever and launch him on an extraordinary forty-year career in film and theater. Moving between sensual recollections of childhood in a now almost vanished Ireland and reflections on stardom in Hollywood and on Broadway, Byrne also courageously recounts his battle with addiction and the ambivalence of fame.

Walking with Ghosts is by turns hilarious and heartbreaking as well as a lyrical homage to the people and landscapes that ultimately shape our destinies.

“A poetic journey into those secret realms of memory which dominate our lives, but are rarely spoken about. By revealing himself with such courage, compassion, and exquisite poise, Gabriel Byrne gives readers that rare gift of being able to see themselves in the feelings of another person. This book is more than a memoir—it’s a mirror that reflects the deepest parts of us in exile.”—Simon Van Booy

• Language: English
• Publisher: Recorded Books, Inc.
• Release date: Jan 12, 2021
• ISBN: 9781705010846

Gabriel Byrne

GABRIEL BYRNE was born in Dublin and has starred in over eighty films for some of the cinema’s leading directors. He won a Golden Globe for his performance on HBO’s In Treatment. On Broadway, he won the Outer Critics Circle Award for Best Actor and has been nominated twice for the Tony Award. He lives in Manhattan and Maine.

Reviews for Walking with Ghosts

[bobbieharv · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Beautifully written, achingly honest. To think that so much darkness dwells inside that gorgeous face and sublime actor. Ireland, and growing up Catholic will do it to you.

[brenzi_3 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I'm a sucker for an Irish brogue so listening to this was a no brainer. I'd seen Byrne in a few movies so I recognized him but wasn't terribly familiar with his work ("The Usual Suspects" was one movie I knew very well.) But the reviews for the book, and really mostly for the audiobook because the written book could never have the same impact, were absolutely gob smacking. And well-deserved they were. This memoir will probably seal his legacy as an Irish performer, if it wasn't already. From the first few words I was transported to Dublin of the 50s and 60s, where Byrne came of age, living a working class childhood with his five siblings. It's a rough and tumble existence. His father wants him to guarantee his future by having a trade. He wants him to be a plumber. Byrne knows it's not really for him. He loves poetry and drama and when a friend suggests he join a drama club his life is completely changed. But that's just a tidbit because the main story is of his childhood, his abuse at the hands of his priest, his years when he thought he would train to be a priest until he realized it was not who he was at all. His descriptions of his home life bounce around as Byrne travels back and forth in time, settling on his relationship with his father, and his love for this rough man. Hollywood and the celebrities take a back seat to the importance of his early years. Absolutely wonderful!

[hemlokgang · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Full disclosure: I am of Irish descent! I am a sucker for a lilting, lyrical Irish accent! Nonetheless, this memoir, narrated by the author is marvelous. Be sure to listen to the audio version. I laughed out loud, cried, cringed, and ached. This is the story of a boy who had a rich inner life. The anecdotes from his acting career are few and fantastic, but this memoir is anything other than a Hollywood tell-all Byrne welcomes the reader/listener into the inner life of a boy, becoming a man. It felt honest, and consequently possibly universal. Not being a boy, I cannot be sure. If this narration is a performance, let it be so. Bravo, Mr. Byrne. The world is a better place for your memoir.

[beamis12 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

He starts his memoir with a then and now look at the Dublin neighborhood in which he had spent his youth. His Catholic schooling, Christian Brothers, his first Communion with all the pagentry, pomp, and hidden cruelties. I found relate to both, the neighborhood I grew up in is much changed and I may have attended Catholic school in the states but much was familiar. There is also some amusing incidents anecdotes. The Dublin he carries will never leave him just as my old neighborhood will not leave me.In between we learn of various endeavors, failings and his start in acting. Past and future. What is so touching is his total honesty, his openers and self deprecating humor. He makes clear that some of the sadness, griefs in his life will never leave him, he carries this wherever he goes. A man I would love to meet, he never appears arrogant but grateful for the opportunities he has been given. A terrific story and one I wish I had listened to as I've read he is his own narrator.

[porte01 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I just finished reading Gabriel Byrne’s “Walking with Ghosts” and I had to pause for a minute, to collect myself. So transported was I into the author’s world, as I devoured this book, that I was left with a huge sense of loss as it ended, which I guess is ironic as this ties directly to the themes explored with grace, compassion, and heart-rending vulnerability in this treasure of a book. The author writes with an ease, a fluidity, that dips and weaves through story after story, some poetic as in the pastoral and sublimely descriptive tales of his boyhood in Ireland, to others crackling with vivid characters and often humorous adventures. The tales skillfully cross timelines back and forth in the authors life, winding through the events and relationships that have shaped him, from the uplifting and formative, to those that can only be described as (in the author’s words). “blackness”. Now in his twilight years, the author is thinking about life and big themes like death, memory, escape, fame, identity, imagination, judgement, loss and yearning, and how all have tied into his lifelong quest to belong, somewhere and with someone, in a way that would allow him to live a truly authentic life. The resulting book, one of the most beautiful I have read in a long while, touched me in a way that illustrates an author, a man, a soul, whose deeply introspected journey, holding nothing back, has succeeded in sparking an intimate and authentic connection with this reader, and no doubt, with all of those who have the great luck to experience it. 5 very enthusiastic stars. Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher Grove Atlantic for an advance copy of this book.

[kimkimkim-7 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This Memoir was antithetical to what I was expecting. Whenever I saw that Byrne was to appear on Broadway, I moved heaven and earth to get tickets. So it wasn’t unreasonable to think his Memoir would give some insight into the character he played in “Moon for the Misbegotten” and how he paired and fared alongside his co-star Cherry Jones. I wanted to understand where and how he found the chops to take on “Long Days Journey Into Night”. After all, he is an accomplished actor of the Irish persuasion interpreting Eugene O’Neill, an American playwright and writer of Irish descent. They both draw from tragedy and experience with the downtrodden. Byrne admits to finding refuge in imagination, stories being his safety net from hurt and loneliness. Oh well, I didn’t find the answers I was seeking but I did wade through the most extraordinary stream of consciousness and was better able to see the man as a whole, well as much as he allowed. But damn I really would love to know what he thought about O’Neill and those parts he played to near perfection.Thank you NetGalley and Grove Press for a copy

[pivic-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The very first I saw of this book was something that slightly tainted my expectations. Colum McCann, author of Apeirogon, called it a masterpiece. Well. Before this, my expectations of Gabriel Byrne were limited, to say the least: I’ve only seen him in big-budget Hollywood films and TV-series, where I often found myself thinking he played quite the same character.In spite of however he looks on screen, let me tell you this: there’s a lot for what McCann has said about this book. It is very, very good, especially in how Byrne speaks of himself, of how he jumps in time, and portrays his childhood. This book is nearly the result of a psychotherapeutical form of writing, albeit very reigned in, either thanks to Byrne, his editor, or both.I dreamed of first love. A dark-haired girl with pale skin. How I loved Mary Foley in her pink cardigan, smiling. For her I would ride my invisible horse to the doors of Wild West saloons, shoot at Nazi stormtroopers, and score the winning goal for Ireland in the final moment of extra time. Alas, she loved another. Elvis Presley.I consider that paragraph: it’s brief, sparing with words in a Bukowskian way while telling us a lot: the time is probably the 1950s or 1960s, there’s love, Ireland, national pride, rock ‘n’ roll and youth.Then a quick jump to the future:Later, I was seated at the bar of a restaurant on my block. The couple came in and sat across from me. The girl looked at me and whispered something to her boyfriend. He emptied a handful of peanuts into his mouth. —Hey, dude we know you, right? You live in the neighborhood? No, that’s not it, it’s from somewhere else. You look very familiar. —I got it, she said, excited. He was in a movie, right? What was the name of it? This is going to drive me crazy. It is him, isn’t it? I know I’ve seen him before. And I’ve seen you before, I thought. —He’s so familiar, isn’t he? she said to her man. —C’mon dude, tell us. Who are you?Byrne allows the reader to think. Whenever I read a book and the author—or their editor—has decided that the reader is an intelligent person, I subconsciously sigh of relief and feel a bit more safe. A coddling and demeaning writer quickly loses its reader, and this probably won’t happen to the reader who’s delving into this book.Byrne’s sense of a child’s acuity tightly had its grip of me:A smell like rotten eggs came over the walls of the school on the wind. It was from O’Keefe’s yard, where they killed animals to make shoes and rosary beads. They hosed the blood off the walls. You could hear the cows and horses roaring with fear for miles.He describes what is Catholic/Protestant in Ireland:—What is the Holy Ghost? she asked another day.—Sometimes, Sister, one of the boys said, the Holy Ghost comes down on the earth disguised as a pigeon. Like the time when He was telling the Virgin Mary she was going to have a baby, because she didn’t know. The pigeon has a kind face and sits on a windowsill with a halo around his head like in our catechism book. She shouted at him:—The Holy Ghost is a dove. Not a common dirty pigeon off the street.The sister told us we were lucky because Ireland is a Catholic country.The funny moments, of which there are quite a few strewn throughout the book, make sure to be in the same vein as the rest of Byrne’s writing:The Los Angeles heat had weakened my body. A blanket of smog hung low in the breezeless day. Melting in my room, I called the front desk: —My room is lovely, but I’m roasting. Do you think you could send up a fan? The receptionist assured me she would attend to it immediately. An hour passed before the phone finally rang: —I am sorry but I’m not having any luck. I’ve looked in the dining room and the garden and the pool area. —I mean a fan for cooling the room . . . not, like, a human fan. There was a pause. —I’m sorry, I’m new here.He tells stories by using very short sentences. It works, especially when regaling about celebrities. His story about Gianni Versace and Leonardo DiCaprio rang especially interesting.I thought of Gianni bowing that night and then murdered, lying alone in a pool of blood on the steps of his house, having just returned from breakfast at his favorite cafe. His sister Donatella said he died like an emperor. Facing the sky.Also, meeting Richard Burton seems to have had quite the impact on Byrne.—Fame, Burton said, doesn’t change who you are, it changes others. It is a sweet poison you drink of first in eager gulps. Then you come to loathe it.There is a lot of introspection shared throughout the book, much in the same form as Aesop’s Fables: see me, I am flawed. There’s no narcissism hidden in Byrne’s text, nor is there any hiding that his writing unveils him as the human being that he is: nuanced, fragmented, prone to make mistakes, learning from those mistakes, taking steps throughout life, all while being subject to the world around you. As an actor, he has often faced being framed into a world by others. There’s a lot of waiting as an actor. A lot of wills forced upon your choices while you attempt to create art, at your most free.When Byrne writes about his best friend, the grease monkey, and how he lied to lads about having had sex with her, that’s simply heartbreaking without any shred of sickly-sweet storytelling:We didn’t speak again. By 1973, I’d heard she was working in the shoe factory, and on my way home from university one day I saw her coming toward me, but she crossed the street to avoid me. I never saw her again after that. Later someone told me she left Ireland, pregnant. I didn’t believe them. —The Lord knows who the father is, could be any dog or divil. —Her own poor father drinking himself into a stupor every night since she went. —Having to carry that cross, God love the poor man. —But wasn’t she let run like a wild animal around the place. I never forgot her. In 2004, I was walking on a footpath among Christmas trees in Brooklyn when I heard Marty Robbins singing “El Paso,” and I saw myself and the grease monkey in a convertible, speeding along the freeway to that faraway place. They say that the songs you love when you’re young will break your heart when you’re old. I stood for a moment and spoke her name aloud, and asked her forgiveness, wherever she was.Byrne’s language is both powerful and brief, a combination that is rare to me.His paragraphs on alcohol and drug addiction is a plain story, and he doesn’t attempt to play it any other way.In short, this book is written in a very non-flamboyant manner. Byrne has steeped in fame and fortune and shed it, too. This is a book written by an individual who is leaving something behind that is a testament of what lies in all humans: the good, and the bad, without the lacquer sheen that Hollywood can provide while at its worst.I enjoy anecdotes like this one:The truth is, I don’t know what acting is. Many actors have told me the same thing. Where it comes from, why it comes to one and not another.I’ve always remembered the story I was told once by an old actor who had been in countless productions. He said it had been a wondrous night. He had been transported to another place beyond the stage, beyond the theater itself. He had performed the role so many times but that night was unlike any other. His dresser came to the wings, the other actors stared at him, understanding something marvelous was taking place. They gazed in awe, knowing they would never see the like of this again.When he lifted himself from the floor at the play’s end, covered in sweat and tears, to face the audience, they rose instantly as one. There were ten curtain calls that night before he stormed off the stage, pushing past his applauding fellow actors and stage crew to his dressing room. He slammed the door behind him. They could hear him shouting fuck fuck fuck, over and over. Finally the dresser tapped lightly on his door and the actor shouted for him to come in. The actor was staring into the mirror.—If I may be permitted to say, sir, I have never seen anything like what you did on that stage tonight. It was transcendent.—I know, I know, said the actor.—Then why are you so angry, sir?—Because I have no fucking idea how I did it, he replied, his head in his hands.This is, in my eyes, not a masterpiece, but a deeply human autobiography that travels a long, long way, enough to make a memorable dent in the annals of autobiographies.