RaveTotally DublinA work of autofiction-cum-essay-cum-memoir exploring her lifelong reading of the earlier woman ... It is, rather, an exploration into how the act of translation moves beyond the page. The work of researching, and of emotionally imagining, Eibhlín’s life becomes entwined with Ní Ghríofa’s own. Eventually she comes to think that perhaps ‘the past is always trembling inside the present, whether or not we sense it’ ... Research and translation are recounted alongside a narrative of the other materials of daily life which are female texts in their own way: the author writes next to ‘a family calendar scrawled with biro and pencil marks, each in the same hand; her breastfeeding body, an experience which joins the women across the centuries, develops ‘a vocabulary of bruises’; The more Doireann searches for Eibhlín, the more she is confronted with gaps. As if she can make amends, she lets herself slip into obsession: ‘whenever there wasn’t space for both of us in my days, I chose her needs over mine’. However, in the end, the book she produces comes as much out of the exploration of those spaces as it does out of the collision of lives. It is a rich and compelling ‘oblique kind of holding’, and a work of deep love.
