Clair Wills was in her twenties when she learned she had a cousin she’d never met.
It wasn’t as though their families drifted apart. She’d never been told of this person’s existence. It was shrouded in shame and secrecy, and she wanted to understand why.
She pieced the story together from forgotten anecdotes, dim memories and institutional archives spanning four generations of her own family, and the history of Ireland from the 1890s to the 1980s.
Her memoir explores questions of memory and loss, motherhood and emigration, guilt and blame — and it may change how you think about your own family, and your family secrets.
Clair Wills is the author of Missing Persons, Or My Grandmother’s Secrets, The Best Are Leaving: Emigration and Post-War Irish Culture, and other books. She is the King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at the University of Cambridge, and a frequent contributor to the London Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, and other publications.
We spoke about Ireland’s mother and baby homes, the stigma of illegitimacy, and how secrecy can shape a family and a society.
These are the books we mentioned in the podcast:
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