Missing Persons, Or My Grandmother's Secrets
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- €11.99
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- €11.99
Publisher Description
'This is a history shaken by intimacy - a brave and rigorously humane book' Seán Hewitt
How far would you go for the missing?
When Clair Wills was in her twenties, she discovered she had a cousin she had never met. Born in a Mother and Baby Home in 1950s Ireland, Mary grew up in an institution not far from the farm where Clair spent happy childhood summers. Yet she was never told of her existence.
How could a whole family - a whole country - abandon unmarried mothers and their children, erasing them from history?
To discover the missing pieces of her family's story, Clair searched across archives and nations, in a journey that would take her from the 1890s to the 1980s, from West Cork to rural Suffolk and Massachusetts, from absent fathers to the grief of a lost child.
There are some experiences that do not want to be remembered. What began as an effort to piece together the facts became an act of decoding the most unreliable of evidence - stories, secrets, silences. The result is a moving, exquisitely told story of the secrets families keep, and the violence carried out in their name.
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.
