The Same Age as the State is the memoir of Máire Cruise O’Brien, who is best known for her poetry and criticism published in the Irish language under her maiden name, Máire Mhac an tSaoi. She was born on the 4 April 1922—within months of the establishment of the Irish Free State—into a family committed to the political and cultural nationalism of this period. Her father, Seán MacEntee, was sentenced to death for his role in the 1916 Rising; this was commuted, and he lived to serve in several Fianna Fáil governments. Her mother, Margaret Browne, was active in the revolutionary movement, while Margaret's brother, Fr Paddy Browne, was an important scholar and poet in Gaelic. In 1962, she married Conor Cruise O’Brien, a man of significant intellect who is known for his often controversial engagements with politics and culture. This memoir is her story, but also the story of these families, and, as the title indicates, she believes that their narrative is bound into the development of independent Ireland. There is no doubting that this book is the product of an establishment figure, and she knows it.

Cruise O’Brien immediately establishes the undemanding anecdotal style, graced with the occasional memorable phrase, image, or knowing reference, which is characteristic of her memoir. On the whole her conversational approach is an asset, but it can prove irritating as when she asks the reader's permission to include a poem or as she calls down formulaic blessings upon the souls of the dead; this occurs with increasing regularity toward the end as bereavements accumulate in a Peig-like manner. The recurring interpolation of newspaper reports, letters, a curriculum vitae, poems, and passages from books is a mixed success. Reprinting excerpts from an unrevealing Irish Times interview with her father from 1974 is an ineffective means of providing political context whereas the account of her time in postwar Paris is enhanced by the vivid contemporary reports that she wrote for the Irish Press.

Readers who anticipate in-depth discussion of her life as Máire Mhac an tSaoi, the poet, will be for the most part disappointed. She believes that her poems have rarely received convincing translations into English and so includes but a few. This is to be regretted as, among those incorporated, The First Shoe (translated by Breandán Ó hEithir) and For Your Sake (translated by Aidan Hayes) are beautiful. The closest she comes to discussing the intellectual approach that informs her poetry is the portrait of her uncle, Paddy Browne, and his life in Dunquin in the Kerry Gaeltacht. This is by far the best section of the book in which he emerges as a man of passion and learning who brought a European humanist sensibility to his study and production of Gaelic poetry. Cruise O’Brien rejects—just as her uncle did—the advocates of “nativism” and “know-nothing Philistinism” who have argued that the only authentic expressions of Irish culture are insular and uncontaminated. The commonplace europhilism and varied intellectual enthusiasms of many within the Irish nationalist elite of her childhood stand as a counterpoint in the memoir to Daniel Corkery and his less-sophisticated devotees.

In the introduction Cruise O’Brien attempts to distance herself somewhat from her memoir. She muses upon the fictional qualities of memory and states that having set her remembrances down “old animosities seem childish, or unworthy” (9). Childish, unworthy, or otherwise, some rivalries and injuries rankled as she wrote. Corkery's Hidden Ireland is described as a great book, but his intellectual credentials as a Gaelic scholar are quite expertly knifed. The advancement of the historian T. D. Williams is unabashedly ascribed to the bias of the “Fine Gael university establishment” (143). The unprincipled nature of the British government's attitude toward Conor Cruise O’Brien's efforts in the Congo is again rehearsed while her disgust at Francis Stuart's elevation to the position of Saoi within Aosdána, despite his anti-Semitism, is put on record once more. The saltiest hurt, however, was her ill-treatment by the authorities at the Institute of Advanced Studies in 1946. She takes the opportunity, as she sees it, to vindicate her actions, but the incident effectively ended her hopes of an academic career. This is a key turning point in her life, and the sense of loss is palpable. Another crucial moment is the controversial conclusion to the Cruise O’Briens' adventures in the Congo and their marriage shortly afterward. The subsequent concluding section is entitled “Wrap Up,” and the forty years covered (half her life) read like an afterthought. Perhaps she felt that there is less to interest the reader in her self-avowed role as support to her husband in his often peripatetic academic life or perhaps she was sensitive to her family's privacy: in earlier passages she was occasionally unflatteringly honest and self-critical concerning her private life.

The sound track to this book is the constant clanging of names dropping from moderate heights. Again and again Cruise O’Brien reveals an obsession with lineage and influence. When her grandmother's beauty is attested to then the witness is a professor. The Browne family's old serving man was, of course, a “by-blow” of the Kickham family. The caterers are named when related to a celebrated actress. When describing her wedding she tells us that she was given away by a young man who was once one of her third secretaries when she worked in the Department of Foreign Affairs; he is not named. In the succeeding sentence we learn that they honeymooned with the O’Duffy family in Trinidad; this family was related to the playwright Eimar O’Duffy. The young man would surely have acquired a name if he too had been related to a playwright.