Launch of Clair Wills' "Missing Persons: or, My Grandmother's Secrets"

Join us for the launch of Missing Persons: or, My Grandmother's Secrets. Blending memoir with social history, Clair Wills movingly explores the holes in the fabric of modern Ireland, and in her own family story.

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.

How could a whole family—a whole country—abandon unmarried mothers and their children, erasing them from history? To discover the missing pieces of her family’s story, Clair searched across archives and nations, in a journey that would take her from the 1890s to the 1980s, from West Cork to rural Suffolk and Massachusetts, from absent fathers to the grief of a lost child.

There are some experiences that do not want to be remembered. What began as an effort to piece together the facts became an act of decoding the most unreliable of evidence—stories, secrets, silences. The result is a moving, exquisitely told account of a family's secrets, and the violence carried out in its name.

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, named the Irish Times International Nonfiction Book of the Year, and That Neutral Island: A Cultural History of Ireland During the Second World War, winner of the PEN Hessell-Tiltman 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.

Host or Publisher Glucksman Ireland House NYU