Missing Persons
or, My Grandmother's Secrets
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
How far would you go for the missing?
Blending private and public history, cultural analysis, family memoir, and autobiography, Clair Wills explores profound questions about memory, loss, motherhood, and emigration. She traces a history of sexual secrecy through four generations of unplanned pregnancies in her own family, stretching from the 1890s to the 1980s and from the West of Ireland to Massachusetts, London, and the English countryside, dramatizing the power of secret-keeping as a form of care, but also as a form of violence and exclusion.
At the heart of her search is a cousin who went missing from her own family, born in a mother-and-baby home in the 1950s, and brought up in an institution. Wills asks not only what happened, but why? Why did families consent to the institutional care and control of unmarried mothers and their children? Why did the system make sense to ordinary families, and how can we make sense of it now? What questions should we be asking about guilt, blame, and responsibility?
In order to uncover how people thought about illicit sex, illegitimacy, and institutions, Wills follows the tracks laid down in family stories and anecdotes. She interprets the gaps as places where the past was both preserved and disavowed. We are all born into families, regardless of whether we are allowed to belong to them. In Missing Persons, Wills asks us to undertake a radical reshaping of our idea of the family. We are all part of the historical archive—the remembering and forgetting is in us, whether we like it or not.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Wills (Lovers and Strangers), a professor of English literature at Cambridge University, excavates her own family's secrets in this intimate and probing history of Irish mother-and-baby homes, Catholic institutions where unwed women and girls were sent to deliver babies throughout the 20th century. Beginning her research in the wake of the international outcry over the 2013 discovery of 800 bodies of babies and children in an unused septic tank on the grounds of a former mother-and-baby home in West Ireland, Wills seeks to understand how so many women and children could have gone "missing"—not just sent away, but "disremembered" by their communities. Eventually, the search leads to her discovery of an erased lineage within her own family. An uncle impregnated a neighbor, who was deemed ineligible for marriage due to disability, and was sent to a mother-and-baby home, where she gave birth to a daughter. Afterward, the mother moved to Cork, far away from her family; the child, who was never adopted, grew up at the home and later died by suicide; and the uncle left for England, never to return. Driven onward by a sense of indignation, Wills's narrative voice is wounded ("How could it have been worth it?") and her conclusions heartbreaking. It's a devastating reckoning with cruelty and conformity.
