The title story of a recent rerelease of Brennan’s work is a beautiful and sad description of one family, and the children who make fun of their illiterate, sentimental father who becomes attached to the pigs he raises for butcher. Maeve Brennan died impoverished in New York in 1993, despite having worked for the New Yorker for many years.
First published in The New Yorker, March 1972, and available to subscribers to read here. Collected in Christmas Eve, Scribner, 1974; also in The Springs of Affection, Houghton Mifflin, 1997, republished by Peninsula Press, 2023
A Personal Anthology 