Missing Persons: Or, My Grandmother's Secrets

Blending memoir with social history, Clair Wills movingly explores the gaping holes in the fabric of modern Ireland, and in her own family story.

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 Clair was never told of Mary's 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 account of the secrets families keep, and the violence carried out in their name.

Binding Type: Hardcover
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 04/02/2024
ISBN: 9780374611866
Pages: 208
Weight: 1.00lbs
Size: 8.25h x 5.38w x 1.00d

Review Citations: Kirkus Reviews 02/01/2024