Missing Persons, or My Grandmother’s Secrets

/ Clair Wills

A book about how we tend to know even those things we do not want to know that we know. Wills, a Cambridge academic who contributes frequently to the London Review of Books, is half-Irish and writes here about the discovery of a cousin born in the 1950s in a mother-and-baby home in the same town in Ireland where she spent her childhood summers. She begins to investigate a family tragedy hidden in plain sight and ends up writing broadly about the culture of secrecy that abetted the brutal treatment of unmarried mothers in Ireland.

The book is a bit circuitous — put more generously, Wills finds no easy answers and many dead ends — but it’s the best thing I’ve read about these homes and their normalization. “There was a whole system set up that made disappearing look ordinary,” Wills writes. She challenges the facile assumptions we might make about prudishness or repression in this context. Writing about the grandmother who banished the young pregnant woman, for example, she says, “Looking back now I can interpret her anxiety as rooted not so much in sexual puritanism as sexual awareness. Sex was everywhere, always waiting to waylay you, and you had to be permanently on guard.” Wills shares some of her own personal history too. In all, the book is moving, disturbing, and an important contribution to a growing body of knowledge about these entrenched forms of not-knowing. It made me think about all that we resist knowing or remembering, in families and elsewhere.

—Nina Renata-Aron/ Reviewed January 2020

April 1, 2025/ Picador USA / 
208  PAGES