Missing Persons, Clair Wills
Missing Persons, Clair Wills
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Missing Persons

Author: Clair Wills

Narrator: Clair Wills

Unabridged: 6 hr 4 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 04/02/2024

Synopsis

In 2015, the Irish government commissioned an investigation into the state’s network of Mother and Baby Homes after the discovery of a mass grave containing the remains of up to eight hundred children prompted international outrage. The homes, which operated from the 1920s to the 1990s, were responsible for nearly nine thousand child deaths and countless other abuses. Yet in the face of overwhelming evidence, everyone seemed to forget what had actually occurred. No one remembered who the babies were, how they died, or where they were buried. A whole society had learned not to look, or not to look too closely, and certainly not to ask too many questions. Clair Wills’s investigation leads her back to the discovery that nearly thirty years ago a cousin of hers had been born in one of the Homes and her existence had been covered up. As she finds out more about her own family’s secret chronicle of loss, her investigation expands into an exploration of the secrets and silences that make up our family stories, the limits of record-keeping, and the fragility of memory itself. Wills unravels a history of illegitimacy that stretches back into her grandmother’s life in Ireland a hundred years ago and forward to her own generation today. Missing Persons reveals the truth that seeps through the gaps in our stories about the past and that is encrypted in things left unsaid—if you learn how to read what is missing.

About Clair Wills

Clair Wills is the King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at the University of Cambridge. Her books include Lovers and Strangers: An Immigrant History of Post-War Britain, winner of the Irish Times International Non-Fiction Book of the Year, and That Neutral Island: A Cultural History of Ireland During the Second World War, winner of the PEN Hessell-Tiltman History Prize, among other works. She is a frequent contributor to the London Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, and other publications. She lives in London, England.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Sue on April 12, 2024

Missing Persons, or My Grandmother’s Secret is Clair Wills’ combined memoir, family history, and social history of Ireland and the Irish since the famine. Willis’s initial concerns about her family’s past grew out of her sense of missing people within her family going back at least to her grandmothe......more

Goodreads review by Brianna Hart on May 01, 2024

The premise of this one is super interesting and I like that she had to kind of keep peeling back layers of the story. I feel like there is a lot more that could be said and written about this kind of stuff but the pieces of history and those holding the keys either won’t share or have passed away.......more

Goodreads review by Stephen on March 18, 2024

This book looks at the author's Irish family and about missing persons more being born in mother and baby homes which were common in Ireland and tracking a mixture of cultural history and that of her mother's family. interesting and thought provoking......more

Goodreads review by Elena on October 06, 2024

this was extremely interesting. i think i would have preferred a little more structure in terms of fitting the family story into the larger story so that I could keep it all in my head but the history-focused chapters were very well written and i feel like i learned a lot not only about the mother a......more

Goodreads review by Jim on March 06, 2024

Although this is a family history examining the stigma and the secrets surrounding to pregnancies outside marriage in rural Ireland, I also learnt a lot regarding the social and cultural history of Ireland after the Famine. Clair Wills unearths a lot of secrets and trauma in her own family but the b......more

Quotes

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.

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