Barry, Dan 1958-

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Barry, Dan 1958-

PERSONAL:

Born February 11, 1958, in New York, NY; son of Gene (a salesman) and Noreen (a homemaker) Barry; married Mary Trinity; children: Nora, Grace. Education: St. Bonaventure University, B.A., 1980; New York University, M.A., 1983.

ADDRESSES:

Home and office—Maplewood, NJ.

CAREER:

Journalist. Journal Inquirer, Manchester, CT, reporter, 1983-87; Providence Journal-Bulletin, Providence, RI, 1987-95; New York Times, New York, NY, reporter and columnist, 1995—.

AWARDS, HONORS:

George Polk Award (with others), 1992; Pulitzer Prize for reporting (with investigative team), 1994; American Society of Newspaper Editors Award for deadline reporting, 2003, for coverage of first anniversary of September 11th terrorist attack; Mike Berger Award, Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, 2005.

WRITINGS:

(With others) A Nation Challenged: A Visual History of 9/11 and Its Aftermath, introduction by Howell Raines, photographs by Nancy Lee and Lonnie Schlein, New York Times/Callway (New York, NY), 2002.

Pull Me Up: A Memoir, Norton (New York, NY), 2004.

City Lights: Stories about New York, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 2007.

SIDELIGHTS:

Written for adults but recommended for a high-school audience, Pull Me Up: A Memoir is the work of Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Dan Barry. Rather than reflecting on his lengthy career, Barry—who was only in mid-career when his book was published—focuses on his experiences growing up in a first-generation Irish-American family during the 1960s. Barry grew up Irish and Roman Catholic in a New York suburb, and Pull Me Up follows him as he deals with hazing as a student in his Catholic high school as he moves into adulthood. He describes, in detail, his mid-twentieth-century childhood, lingering over such iconographic childhood memories as seasoning a leather baseball mitt. Much of his later narrative is involved with his efforts to deal with not only the loss of his mother, but his own cancer diagnosis received months after his mother's death. Asked why he decided to write a memoir at such a young age, Barry told Chip Scanlan for Poynter Online: "The short answer is that I thought I had some stories to share. The long answer is a little messier." While undergoing treatment for his cancer, he began to consider all the stories of his life that would never be told if he should die. "My stories were ordinary," Barry admitted to Scanlan, "but they were mine."

The title of Pull Me Up is inspired by a phrase Barry's mother used during the last stages of her cancer when asking her son to help her move from the living-room sofa. Dealing with serious topics such as alcohol, death, illness, and the sexual abuse that existed within the Roman Catholic Church even before it became an international scandal, Barry also ventures into more personal territory, discussing his search for faith in spite of darkness and doubt. Rather than portraying himself as a victim or skirting the problems in his own life, "Barry explores the tragedy of illness, bravely turning his keen journalistic lens on himself to produce a memoir that is riveting, moving, and not the least bit cheap," according to David Gibson in a review of Pull Me Up for Commonweal. Gibson also noted Barry's devotion to his faith in spite of his own doubt; "Barry himself is an inspiring messenger, whether he intends it or not," Gibson wrote.

Kathy O'Connell, writing for America, felt that Pull Me Up has "equal measures of grace and guts." Commenting on Barry's forthright prose, O'Connell deemed the book a "gracefully written yet hardheadedly realistic … argument for living in the moment" that avoids "the rampant hedonism with which that is usually associated." Janet Julian, writing in Kliatt, also praised the author's honesty, writing that "Barry's memoir is hilarious, honest, and poetic. It is a model of writing for mature high school students." A Publishers Weekly contributor cited Pull Me Up as "a beautiful book," and Wendy Wasserstein concluded in the New York Times Book Review that "Barry has managed to find the richness of heart of a now oddly distant America."