The labyrinth of lineage …

… Broken Family, Broken Country by John Waters | Articles | First Things. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Michael Brendan ­Dougherty dug his way to Ireland through American sentimentalism and wishful thinking, which is perhaps the best mode of approach. After all, Irish kitsch is the product of the Irish-American imagination, the remembered symbols of a life that grows greener with distance and lachrymose with time. Raised in New Jersey and New York by his American mother, Dougherty hardly knew his Irish father or Ireland. His attempt to rediscover them both culminated in this book, a series of open letters to his father.