"As an Irish immigrant in America, I inhabit a strained space", Carmel Mc Mahon writes, deep into her memoir In Ordinary Time: Fragments of a Family History.
Having moved to New York City in 1993, aged 20 with just $500 dollars to her name, Mc Mahon joined the procession of Irish immigrants to the US, and in doing so waded into the no man's land of Irish abroad.
It’s from this strained space, however, that she produced this astounding "hybrid novel", a work that embraces and dissects the often complicated experience of being Irish, and what that means depending on where – and when – you are.
In her efforts to unpack the historical, societal and political traumas carried by herself and all Irish people across centuries, In Ordinary Time excels as a work of naming that which hurts us, individually and collectively.
Mc Mahon opens with the death of Grace Farrell, an Irishwoman living in New York who was found dead beside St. Brigid's Church in 2011 and who suffered with alcoholism like Mc Mahon. It was this death that inspired the writer to examine how "women like me and Grace Farrell might end up drunk and destroyed in foreign lands".
Mc Mahon is candid about her ruined parts, from the poverty that "shrank" her family in her childhood, to the loss of her brother while she was living abroad. The crux of this is the awareness, proven in studies, that trauma can be passed through generations, a revelation that send Mc Mahon interrogating the legacy of pain in both her life and Irish lives at large.
"There is restorative power in the intimate exchange of speaking and listening, hearing and being heard", she writes, and similarly the reader emerges on the other side of this novel with a deeper understanding of a collective trauma.
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Listen: In Ordinary Time - Carmel Mc Mahon talks to Ryan Tubridy
She charts her own attempts to understand the shady parts of our culture, and writes of being unable to visit her mother’s home on Mount Drummond Avenue for years, a wall of maternal trauma blocking them all. "Where were the women?" she asks at one point. Her mother shrugs, a "chaotic silence" hanging between them "that signals the end of the conversation".
"The past is off limits", she adds.
As an Irish woman living in New York Mc Mahon skilfully explains Irish history and culture to outsiders, like St. Brigid and St. Patrick while making it as compelling for Irish readers too. She deepens our understanding of these cultural icons, joining dots that maybe we can’t because we’re too close to the "narrative threads of Ireland’s history".
She’s also keenly aware of how these narrative threads knotted into cultural hurdles for us centuries later, such as how St. Patrick by signifying the light of Christianity in Ireland also ushered in a period of the "wrong side, the bad side, the side that needed to be denied and dismissed, ignored and punished".
This finds its outcome when, years later, Mc Mahon discovered a coworker was pregnant, which no one mentioned. "She just had the baby, gave it up for adoption, and kept on working like nothing had happened", she writes.
McMahon is just as skilled when it comes to crafting scenes that capture a time and a feeling, such as when she arrived in New York and entered the bubble of other Irish abroad. She recalls supping pints with Irish men, saying that "halfway through a pint, their features began to relax back into their natural, gentle expressions".
"You’d have to be careful, though, not to meet their eyes. The loneliness in them … mute and dangerous, a mirror of your own".
One of the most compelling sections comes when Mc Mahon, staying in a borrowed house in Iowa with a friend from New York, finds herself contemplating the Irish Famine. A key note here is how she cannot name it accurately. "To name a thing, to call it out, you have to know its weight and dimensions", she writes.
We follow as she unpacks it in real time – through recounted memory in the novel – unlearning what she’d been told in school through historical documents, then only newly released, and grasping the gravity of the role the British government played in the disaster. There’s also a reckoning with the brutal behaviour of some Irish immigrants at the time, driven to the brink with poverty.
By the end, she’s able to name it: the "Famine-Genocide".
This exercise speaks to the entire novel, which is a bold and empathetic work of learning to better name the traumas we carry. In Mc Mahon’s highly personal account, a reader emerges with greater insight into the mechanics of their own hurt, regardless of where, or when, or how it was first dealt.
In Ordinary Time is published by Duckworth
