Just before the death of his mother, when he was aged nine, John McGahern and his siblings were moved from the small house that they had shared with her in Aughawillan, County Leitrim and into the garda barracks at Cootehall, County Roscommon, home and workplace of their father. That move, the breaking apart of the beds with hammers to get them out of the house, the loading of the truck for the trip to Cootehall, troubles the heart of both The Leavetaking and of Memoir. That small crossroads village on the river Boyle was to be McGahern's home until he left it as a young man for Dublin and St Patrick's teacher training college. The barracks in which he lived became one of the most important and fertile wellsprings of his imagination and gave the title and location for his first published novel. He describes it thus in Memoir: ‘Below the bridge was the barracks and the large barrack garden. An avenue with a single line of sycamores ran from the road to the barracks and continued under the high stone archway before climbing between the thick banks of laurel to Lenihan's Bawn’.

Cootehall takes its name from the residence of a notorious Cromwellian general and settler, Chidley Coote. The young McGahern, living next to the still extant ceremonial archway leading into the long ago ruined home of Coote, could not but have been intrigued by the history of the place and the provenance of its name. ‘All that remained of Chidley Coote's old castle’, he remembers, ‘was a corner tower where the Cannons lived between the Finans and the Lenihans.