Cells
memories for my mother
-
- 13,99 €
-
- 13,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
‘Are you going into town today?’ she says, which annoys me because it’s something she says all the time, having forgotten she said it before, and I say, ‘Jesus, Mum, not this again,’ and she says, ‘What again?’ and I say, ‘Town is shut down,’ and while she can see I am upset and wants not to upset me like this, she is also wounded by my tone, and I am ashamed then and can only look at my plate, and I decide not to bring up what I intended to bring up, about the past, and about my need for her to apologise for it.
Gavin is spending the quarantine in a small flat in south Dublin with his eighty-year-old mother, whose mind is slowly slipping away. He has lived most of his adult life abroad and has returned home to care for her and to write a novel. But he finds that all he can write about is her.
Moving through a sequence of remembered rooms — the ‘cells’ — Gavin unspools an intimate story of his upbringing and early adulthood: feeling out of place in the insular suburb in which he grew up, the homophobic bullying he suffered at school, his brother’s mental illness and drug addiction, his father’s sudden death, his own devastating diagnosis, his struggles and triumphs as a writer, and above all, always, his relationship with his mother. Her brightness shines a light over his childhood, but her betrayal of his teenage self leads to years of resentment and disconnection. Now, he must find a way to reconcile with her, before it is too late.
Written with unusual frankness and urgency, Cells is at once an uncovering of filial love and its limits, and a coming to terms with separation and loss.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this exceptional memoir, McCrea (Mrs. Engels) unflinchingly untangles his family's history and its effects on his adult self. Returning to his native Dublin after years abroad, McCrea became his mother's caretaker as she succumbed to dementia during Covid lockdowns. From their shared apartment, he reflected on his years spent closeted and bullied in school, his family's legacy of mental illness, and his own HIV diagnosis, preparing at first to spin the material into a novel. Instead, he felt compelled to unpack his and his mother's once beautiful, now tenuous relationship. Dividing the text into "cells"—a nod to Louise Bourgeois's sculpture series—McCrea reconstructs rooms where he remembers key episodes from his life with sometimes-uncomfortable intimacy. He spares no one the microscope, including himself, writing with wide-open vulnerability about how his upbringing planted a scorching desire for acceptance that parlayed into bad relationships in adulthood. "I seek out and thrive in the sort of closeness in which the bathroom door is left open," he writes early on, as a sort of mission statement, hoping to renounce the passive attitudes he learned from his family, a "belief that expressing things gets you nowhere." He succeeds in spades, delivering a powerful and complicated reckoning with the ghosts of family dysfunction. This one isn't easy to shake.
