“Every woman becomes their mother. That’s their tragedy.” So wrote Oscar Wilde and is the subtitle of Noelle McCarthy’s debut memoir, Grand: Becoming My Mother’s Daughter, and feels like an invocation and a rejection of that aphorism. Becoming her mother’s daughter could have been McCarthy’s tragedy, as Grand tells the story of her complicated relationship with her alcoholic mother and her own struggle with alcoholism. That sounds like the least appealing read but the book has hit the number one spot in McCarthy’s adopted homeland of New Zealand and won a non-fiction prize at the country’s main book awards, which indicates, rightly, that there is more to this memoir than that specific and well-worn story.
It begins at the end. McCarthy’s mother is dying from cancer in the Mercy hospital in Cork. McCarthy is returned to her bedside from New Zealand, where she has lived for two decades. We get early notification of the humour that glitters darkly like quartz throughout this book when, 10 days into her trip, McCarthy writes: “I’m here for a funeral, and she’s still not dead.”
From this opening chapter, McCarthy abseils straight down the cliff-face of her story, taking the reader with her through her earliest memories and childhood marked by her mother’s drinking and unpredictable behaviour. We learn about her life as a teenager at St Angela’s, a posh secondary school that her mother campaigned to get her into, her early experiences of boyfriends and sex, and her own inevitable drinking. Even as a schoolgirl McCarthy’s drinking was already different from that of her peers. She was blacking out, waking up covered in bruises, her clothes torn and her friends filling in the gaps for her.
Despite the chaos, she is a dazzling student, winning prizes for debating and getting straight As in her Leaving Cert. At UCC she studies English and a professor notices her original thinking and earmarks her for academia, but she drops out of an MPhil and departs for New Zealand. There she rapidly progresses from waitress to student radio broadcaster to well-known presenter for a New Zealand radio station, all while managing her continued heavy drinking and its effects on her life.
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A panic attack live on air is a turning point. She doesn’t labour her own recovery process on the page, rather mentions a few difficult months, some AA meetings, and the inevitable difficulty and frustration of being sober and Irish. As a reader I wanted more on this part of her story but as a writer she makes a smart decision to move on quickly, as this book is not about McCarthy’s alcoholism but mothers and daughters, identity and how we shape each other. To understand this, we need to understand how McCarthy’s mother became who she was.
We get our first real insight into McCarthy’s mother when she writes: “I am either the eldest of four or third of six, depending on whether you want the official history of our family or the secret one.” The secret history is that, before she was married, McCarthy’s mother had a baby daughter who was adopted in Dublin, followed by a baby son who died soon after he was born. McCarthy recounts the painful detail that her mother would drunkenly scream their names around the time of their birthdays. It is a piercing image of the lasting psychological damage caused by the inhumane treatment of unmarried mothers in Ireland. Late in the book McCarthy’s mother’s sister explains: “All the cousins who got pregnant after that, they kept their babies. They saw what it did to your mother.”
The book is dense with the rich detail of Irish life. Religion is everywhere, from the fear of speaking out against a punitive god to the culture clash of the generation born in the 1970s, to those who were raised in the grip of the church. When McCarthy gets close to top marks in her Leaving Cert, her mother’s response is: “Thank God and his blessed mother! Sure they did the novena.” To which McCarthy drily responds: “It’s not the fucking priests mam. I studied.”
How mental illness was treated in Ireland until relatively recently is also highlighted in the devastating stories of McCarthy’s grandmothers. She learns that her maternal grandmother tried to kill herself by walking into a river when she was pregnant with McCarthy’s mother, and later suffered debilitating postnatal depression. McCarthy’s mother plays it down: “Ah sure she was sick. And there was no help for women those days.” Her paternal grandmother drowned herself.
When McCarthy has a baby the experience is worrying as the dynamic with her mother has been so fraught. But the birth of her daughter seems to neutralise much of the tension between them and make their relationship a more loving one.
Shame is everywhere in this most Irish of memoirs, from an infuriating attempt to get the morning after pill in the 1990s to her own drinking. Even the reason her maternal grandmother didn’t kill herself but instead came out of the river is given as, “she was afraid a neighbour would see her”.
McCarthy is a natural storyteller and an observant writer with a Sedaris-like eye for black humour. There are sharp splinters of comic relief, particularly around family dynamics. When McCarthy gives birth to her daughter she wants to call her Hero. The response is comic and familiar: “Hero? What? A Hero? That’s not a name.” Or the scene where she is trying to gauge when her mother might die. “The ideal scenario, I gather, is for Mammy to die some evening before the 8pm deadline of the local paper.” Or when McCarthy goes to talk to the funeral director and she worries that she is betraying her mother’s privacy. “Mammy will die if my father’s family finds out that she is dying.”
Grand is a sad and difficult read and the biggest effect on the reader is the painful knowledge of the lasting impact of the cruelty, lack of care and education that her mother’s generation experienced
The book ends at the beginning and McCarthy caps an iceberg of trauma with the lockdown funeral, as she says goodbye to her mother via weblink from New Zealand.
Grand is the moving story of two women but it is also a fascinating account of two Irelands, the Ireland of the 1970s, still in the grip of Catholic control and the drastically different Ireland of the 1990s, the burgeoning Celtic Tiger, freely-available contraception, free education and the internet. McCarthy had the good luck to come of age in a changing Ireland. Her story often feels like what her mother’s story could have been had she been born in a different time. McCarthy’s is ultimately a lucky and privileged story. She avoided her mother’s fate.
How far do you have to go to escape yourself? McCarthy eventually learns that you can’t, even if you move to the furthest corner of the earth. “Even if I spend my whole life until I die, on the other side of the planet, as far away as it’s possible to get from here, I’m never leaving. Mammy and Daddy, and Hollymount, and John Paul and Sarah and Robert, no matter where I go, they will always be part of me.”
The nature of memoir is that it is unreliable, subjective and McCarthy acknowledges this by showing that her siblings had different relationships with their mother. One knew her as an advocate, the other a confidante, the other a partner in crime. For McCarthy she was mostly an antagonist.
Grand is a sad and difficult read and the biggest effect on the reader is the painful knowledge of the lasting impact of the cruelty, lack of care and education that her mother’s generation experienced, along with the lack of help, never mind compassion, available for mental illness, addiction problems and unmarried young mothers. What’s different about this memoir is that McCarthy skilfully highlights through her personal story the national story of how that dark period in Ireland’s history is still reverberating through generations of mothers and daughters.
In this compelling and nuanced memoir, McCarthy has given her mother’s extraordinary life story the attention and historical context it deserves. In her author’s note she writes: “I may not be the hero of my own story in the way I thought I would be.” She doesn’t gloss over the fact that she was at times unkind, unforgiving, impatient and intolerant of her mother and by the end of this book our sympathy lies as much, if not more so, with McCarthy’s mother as it does with her. But it’s easy to feel sympathy from the comfort of our armchair. A sentence that stayed with me through the reading of this book was one McCarthy uttered early on: “Try living with her ... try being her daughter.”
Further reading
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? (Jonathan Cape, 2011) by Jeanette Winterson
The author of the internationally best-selling novel Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit wrote this breathtaking account of her childhood growing up in an adopted Pentecostal family and how her search for her biological mother shaped her understanding of her own identity.
Are You Somebody? (Henry Holt, 1998) by Nuala O’Faolain
This book was supposed to be a collection of O’Faolain’s columns but became a defining memoir of Irish women’s history, with details of how O’Faolain’s mother’s thwarted life went on to shape the woman she became and the kind of life she chose.
My Mother, Myself (Delacorte Press, 1978) by Nancy Friday
Part-memoir, part research study, the American author’s 1977 book was an exploration of daughters’ identities in relation to their mothers. Friday spoke to hundreds of women to investigate the conflicted feelings of daughters towards their mothers and why we so often end up turning into our mothers.
