This is a short, very personal book, but it is also an act of fairly radical reframing ... The reparative quality of Wills’s work, at least for me, is to reframe that sense of illegitimacy as the definitive article, an inheritance just as true in its way as the bottle of Lourdes water or the family farm.
An expertly crafted work, at once vigorous and subtle, which manages its effects and conserves its revelations with all the skill of a master novelist.
Utterly engaging, fearless and acute ... It takes great courage to hold this painful material up to the light without being overwhelmed or overwhelming the reader but Wills manages to do just that. Not only an impeccable researcher and critic, she is a profound storyteller, operating with the economy of a poet, packing decades of research and thought into this riveting volume.
What separates this book from the glut of Angela’s Ashes-style tragic Irish memoirs is Wills’s insightful analysis of social history at each step ... It makes for a circumlocutory book, as Wills shifts between generations, telling us multiple versions of events. There is too much chat about methodology ... But this is only frustrating because the stories, once we get to them, are so compelling.
As a cultural historian and critic, Clair Wills is particularly adept at weaving the social, cultural and historical context through her own family story. She focuses on the personal, then zooms out to the collective. It is not entirely satisfactory, though, as she returns to the same stories again and again, but from a slightly different angle.
Wills situates her own ambivalent, hesitant desire to find out what happened in her family in this larger story of the treatment of women and babies ... Clair Wills deals delicately with the pressure of writing about living relatives, especially her mother ... At times in this moving and thoughtful book a certain opacity prevails, a manifestation of the awkwardness of having a quarrel with your mother on the page, probing her secrets and coming to conclusions that aren’t hers.
The author’s prose is stellar; her cadence complements this compelling tale, which grew increasingly complex over years of meticulous research ... Fascinatingly, viscerally haunting.
