“What did I do to deserve such a life”

The expression “What did I do to deserve such a life?” is a recurring lament in John McGahern’s memoir, where its variations connect his father’s violence and self-pity to the children’s sardonic resistance. First spoken after John survives a beating without yielding, it returns as a complaint about being excluded from family decisions and, in a final echo, as words John and Maggie mimic together.

After the confrontation

After John rises repeatedly from his father’s blows, laughing, the father breaks off and turns away. His lament—“God, O God, O God. What did I do to deserve such a life, to get saddled with such a pack! A son that would raise a hand to his father.”—casts the confrontation as an injury done to him. The complaint about deserving a hard life sits beside his accusation against his son, shifting attention from the beating to the father’s own grievance. John and his father both recognize that something has changed, but the father’s words frame that change as filial defiance rather than as the consequence of his violence.

A complaint of exclusion

The expression recurs in another form when the father protests that he is not consulted: “Of course I’m told nothing. I don’t count,” he says, insisting that he does not exist and must carry the burden for everyone else. His complaint culminates in, “God, O God, O God, what did I do to deserve such a cross.” The language of undeserved suffering turns exclusion from family decisions into another trial borne by the father. That night he recites the Rosary in a rage, joining religious devotion to the same aggrieved refrain.

The family’s echo

When Maggie is terminally ill, the father travels to Dublin and stands at her hospital bed to tell her, “Margaret, not my will but thine be done.” John finds Maggie distraught after the visit; once she has calmed, he reassures her and stays until she can laugh a little. The two then mimic the father’s familiar complaint: “God, O God, O God, what did I do to deserve being born into such a crowd.” The echo turns his language into a shared family performance. For John and Maggie, the repeated lament is no longer simply a claim of suffering: spoken together, it becomes a means of recognizing and resisting the father’s self-pity. Its bitter force is sharpened by the contrast John draws between the father’s journey to confront Maggie and his refusal to visit his dying wife.