Missing Persons, Or My Grandmother's Secrets

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About this listen

Brought to you by Penguin.

Non-Fiction Book of the Year 2024, Irish Book Awards
Shortlisted for the TLS Ackerley Prize 2025

How far would you go for the missing?
Blending private and public history, cultural analysis, family memoir and autobiography, Clair Wills explores profound questions about memory, loss, motherhood and emigration. She traces a history of sexual secrecy through four generations of unplanned pregnancies in her own family, stretching from the 1890s to the 1980s and from the West of Ireland to Massachusetts, London and the English countryside, dramatizing the power of secret-keeping as a form of care, particularly between women, but also as violence and exclusion.
At the heart of her search is a cousin who went missing from her own family, born in a Mother and Baby Home in the 1950s, and brought up in an institution. Wills asks not only what happened, but why? Why did families consent to the institutional care and control of unmarried mothers and their children? Why did the system make sense to ordinary families, and how can we make sense of it now? What questions should we be asking about guilt, blame, and responsibility?
In order to uncover how people thought about illicit sex, illegitimacy, and institutions, Wills followed the tracks laid down in family stories and anecdotes. She interprets the gaps in stories – the missing bits—as places where the past was both preserved and disavowed.
We are all born into families, whether or not we are allowed to belong to them. Wills asks us to undertake a radical reshaping of our idea of the family, and of the history of generation. We are all part of the historical archive—the remembering and forgetting is in us, whether we like it or not.

© Clair Wills 2024 (P) Penguin Audio 2024

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Critic reviews

Missing Persons is as close to perfect as a memoir can be; the richness of its subject honed to a poised and discerning brevity, written in unexpectedly lambent prose. It is the sum of the author’s life: both the family history she carries with and within her, but also the four decades of research and analysis that have been her intellectual existence. Only she could have written it, but it will speak to and about the lives of many (Lucy Scholes)

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 (John Banville)

The stories she uncovers are remarkable: touching, tragic and terribly human… Her book, written with care, wit and vulnerability, shows that ordinary tragedies deserve our anger and attention. (Laura Hackett)

She is deft at unpicking lies, evasions and gaps in the record, grasping that these things have political as well as private meaning… an act of fairly radical reframing (Olivia Laing)

An affecting and enraging book, part memoir, part national history, about Wills’s attempt to uncover the truth about her family and the hundreds of others like it. (Pippa Bailey)

Always compelling and deeply moving… an unforgettable account, in microcosm, of the world of Catholic Ireland in the 20th Century: the incarceration of the so-called sinful and the emigration of others, leaving a fragmented country of secrets, enigmas and buried guilt (Ysenda Maxtone Graham)

Not just a vivid, compelling account of Clair’s family and ancestry, but an intriguing snapshot of Ireland’s social history… rigorously researched... empathetic

Among the most supple and illuminating explorers of the intertwined cultural histories of Ireland and Britain... a dark history of loss and forgetting

Utterly engaging, fearless and acute

In its account of one family's history of silence and secrecy, Clair Wills has written a compelling book which demonstrates the uncanny universality of even the most personal stories. Attending to the ways that the past ruptures and grows through the present, this is a history shaken by intimacy - a brave and rigorously humane book (Seán Hewitt)

Most relevant

An in depth exploration of the why's and how's of Irish culture, as well as the discovery of hugely personal family history. Helps to make sense of it all. Thank you Clair Wills.