Then read 'Life with Mae: A Detroit Family Memoir' by the late Neal Shine.

This is not 'Angela's Ashes.' It is the story of an indomitable, witty woman, Mary Ellen 'Mae' Conlon Shine from Carrick-on-Shannon, who got the most out of life and never let life get the better of her.

Mae was born in Carrick-on-Shannon in 1909, one of thirteen children of Bridget Downs Conlon and James Conlon, an employee of Carrick's Guinness distribution depot.

She attended the Marist Convent School until, at the age of 12, she was put to work helping her mother, a housekeeper in a local hotel. At the age of 14 Mae went into service at the home of a local physician.

In 1927, at the age of 18, wanting more than a lifetime as a servant, she sailed off to the United States. In 1929, she married a Detroit streetcar conductor, Patrick Shine, who was born in 1890 in Co Kerry.

They had three boys: Bill became a policeman in Detroit; Jim became a lawyer in Boston; Neal started out as a copyboy for the Detroit Free Press; he retired some 45 years later as the paper's publisher, one of the most beloved and respected figures not only in Detroit, but in all of U.S. journalism.

Mae died in 1987, aged 78 years. Some of her ashes were buried next to her late husband's grave in a Detroit cemetery.

Neal and his brothers, according to her wishes, strewed the remainder on the River Shannon in Carrick. In a short epilogue in the book, he writes movingly of this, concluding with poet Michael J. McManus' moving paean to his native Carrick.

Neal Shine's reminiscences of his parents, of his relatives in Carrick and Kerry, and of the Detroit of his youth constitute a magnificently written and warmly recalled account of what is to be Irish and what it is to be Irish-American. And what it is to be loved.

'Life with Mae: A Detroit Family Memoir' by Neal Shine is published by Wayne State University Press.