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. To discover the missing pieces of her family's story, Clair began a journey that would take her from the 1890s to the 1980s, from West Cork to rural Suffolk and Massachusetts.
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.
