Missing Persons: Or, My Grandmother’s Secrets

Wills (Lovers and Strangers), a professor of English literature at Cambridge University, excavates her own family’s secrets in this intimate and probing history of Irish mother-and-baby homes, Catholic institutions where unwed women and girls were sent to deliver babies throughout the 20th century. Beginning her research in the wake of the international outcry over the 2013 discovery of 800 bodies of babies and children in an unused septic tank on the grounds of a former mother-and-baby home in West Ireland, Wills seeks to understand how so many women and children could have gone “missing”—not just sent away, but “disremembered” by their communities. Eventually, the search leads to her discovery of an erased lineage within her own family. An uncle impregnated a neighbor, who was deemed ineligible for marriage due to disability, and was sent to a mother-and-baby home, where she gave birth to a daughter. Afterward, the mother moved to Cork, far away from her family; the child, who was never adopted, grew up at the home and later died by suicide; and the uncle left for England, never to return. Driven onward by a sense of indignation, Wills’s narrative voice is wounded (“How could it have been worth it?”) and her conclusions heartbreaking. It’s a devastating reckoning with cruelty and conformity. Agent: Sarah Chalfant, Wylie Agency. (Apr.)