"Wish Mooney's earliest memory in life is finding a corpse in the Waterford River. Jarring stuff for a four-year-old, yet far from the most shocking or bizarre event he would witness growing up in west-end St. John's, next door to the Waterford Hospital. Or as it was unabashedly labelled before the advent of political correctness: The Mental. An unfortunate moniker by today's politically correct standards, but one legitimately derived from the original name of the place - The Hospital for Mental and Nervous Diseases - when it opened in 1854. Not until 1972 would it be renamed after the river that runs by it. But in Mooney's world, which revolves mostly in and around the asylum's drab, depressing confines, it was colloquially The Mental, just as its largely despondent inhabitants were the mental patients. Of course, they were called a lot of other things, too. Such terms and corresponding attitudes were still very much par for the course in the mid-1970s, as the bullied Mooney and co-horts traipsed all over The Mental, and its adjacent field, with reckless abandon and little regard for the consequences of what they did or, maybe more importantly, what they said. Even less consideration was given to any risk in all that, since run-ins with patients - for whom the field was allegedly put there - were usually harmless and sometimes honestly comical. Thus was the oft-surreal environment that unavoidably enveloped Wish and the rest of his strictly Irish-Catholic eight-member Mooney clan, including the quietly acknowledged other realities of the place - the sad, the tragic, the maniacal. Little did Wish ever consider that any or all of that would come full circle later in life when, as the court reporter for the Daily News, he is thrust into the middle of his own life story, replete with shocking conclusion."