Missing Persons: Interview with Clair Wills
As I was reading Missing Persons: Or, My Grandmother’s Secrets by Clair Wills, I was reminded of my own journey of digging into my family’s past in order to understand our present. Generational trauma is very real, and we are affected by what our ancestors did, as well as what they chose not to do. In Missing Persons, Wills uncovers the story of what happened to her cousin Mary, whom she never met and who was born “illegitimate” in an Irish mother-and-baby home. She faces her family’s role in this as well as the broader cultural context of sexual shame in 1950s Ireland. So often we want to bury the pain, trauma, and guilt of our family’s past, but I am of the opinion that it is through truth telling and reckoning with reality that we truly heal and stop cycles of abuse. Missing Persons does this with both compassion and honesty, and I believe many who have experiences with religious/cultural sexual shame in their family will find something to hold on to in this book.
Clair Wills kindly answered some of my questions about the book and her writing process, and I’m pleased to share them here with you.
Cait West: Why did you decide to write this book? Did you ever have any doubts about publishing it?
Interested in more content like this? Subscribe to our newsletter here.
Clair Wills: The book began with an essay about the death of my baby shortly after birth, back in the 1990s, and the story of my cousin Mary, who was born in Bessborough Mother and Baby Home in Cork, and who I never got to know. The essay almost wrote itself, and I don’t think I really acknowledged what I was doing until it was published in The New York Review of Books in 2018. It was then that I thought, What have I done, putting this out into the world? But the compulsion to keep going was very strong. Writing the book was a way of coming to terms with a family history that contained violence as well as love—I mean by this the violence of exclusion, rather than physical violence—and of trying to understand it in the context of broader trends in Irish society. How did my grandmother and the other adults involved in excluding my cousin and her mother in the 1950s make sense of what they were doing? I didn’t have a plan when I began writing. I didn’t know what I would find. The book slowly turned into an exploration of connections between my family and Catholic Ireland. Before I published it, I sent it to my sisters and cousins, and showed it to my mother—I wasn’t exactly asking for their agreement, but for their permission, and luckily for me they gave it.
West: Mother-and-baby homes in Ireland in the twentieth century were part of a culture of hiding away unwed pregnant women and their babies—what your book calls “missing persons.” Can you give us an idea of how common this was and what the cultural environment was like to make this normalized?
Wills: It was so common it was almost universal in families. That is one reason I felt I could and maybe even should publish the book, because although this story is about one particular family, my family was typical in mid-century Ireland. Remember, contraception wasn’t legalized in Ireland until 1979 (and then for “bona fide” married couples only). Mother-and-baby homes were common in the United States, Britain, and Europe in the first half of the twentieth century, but by the 1950s their use was declining—except in Ireland, where they were expanding, with the highest proportion of births in the homes in the 1960s. The Irish government commission of investigation found that, at the lowest estimate, 57,000 children were born in the homes (and 9,000 of them died). All those children had parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, siblings; there was a vast bureaucracy involving priests, nuns, and county council officials involved in managing and running the homes. When you think that in the 1960s the population of Ireland hovered around 2.8 million, there was hardly a family who wasn’t touched by this is some way.
Initially I thought the story I had to tell was Mary’s story, and that of her mother—I felt it as a kind of duty, to do justice to the people who were shunned by the family and forced into institutions. It took me a long time to understand that in fact my story concerned the people who did the shunning. Central to this is the figure of my grandmother, who refused to accept my cousin as part of the family and never saw her son (Mary’s father) again. I wanted to understand how a woman I knew very well when I was a child, a woman I loved, could have consented to a system that to us, a few generations later, seems immeasurably unjust and cruel.
Want to help people on the healing journey in the aftermath of Spiritual Abuse? Give a donation to support survivors here.
How did my grandmother and the others who were involved in disappearing my cousin make sense of what they were doing? Where did the sense of shame and the need to keep illegitimacy secret come from? What was the work it did for families? The fact that my family functioned despite, and maybe even because of, its missing persons, the fact that it made enough sense—is part of my inheritance, and the inheritance of a great many people of my generation. I don’t think as a society we can come to terms with our missing persons unless we start to talk about them—and the book is my contribution to that conversation.
West: Your book explores generational trauma, which is something that many people shy away from addressing because it’s too painful. What did you learn in the process and how did it affect you?
Wills: Recently someone pointed out to me that I don’t use the word trauma in the book. It wasn’t something I was deliberately avoiding, but I think I felt some embarrassment about referring to the idea of generational trauma explicitly when I am, in effect, writing from the position of having “escaped.” The book is partly about the way that my mother and her sister tried to bring the cycle of shame to an end, enabling me and my sisters and cousins to live a life unshadowed by sexual and religious guilt and everything that entails. But I am very influenced by the work of the psychoanalysts Nicolas Abraham and Mária Török, who argued that we are haunted not so much by what happened in the past as by the gaps left in the stories told to us about the past. That seems absolutely true in my case—I knew, as my sisters and cousins knew, that there were pieces missing in the stories I grew up with, and even people missing from the farm in Ireland where I spent my summers. It was that feeling of being haunted that propelled the search in the book. And I have to say, I enjoyed spending time with those ghosts. Writing the book was an intense experience, but also a very pleasurable one.
West: Many of our readers at Tears of Eden will relate to the complex nature of loving people who have also caused harm, as you write so compassionately and yet realistically about your grandmother and her decision to not accept her son’s lover and child into the family. Did you find yourself having to process grief or anger about this as you dug into your past?
Wills: I went through all manner of feelings of anger, and rage at injustice, while writing the book. For a long time, I kept beating at the door of my mother’s refusal to express the same rage that I felt about the fate of my cousin Mary. She expressed sadness, but I couldn’t get her to go further than that. She absolutely refused to blame her, and it left me feeling very stuck. It seemed so clear to me that what my grandmother (and the other adults involved) had done was wrong. Then, during the course of writing the book, I found out that my grandmother too had been pregnant before marriage. I tried to imagine what that was like for her—in a small rural community in 1920. It must have been so frightening, and so difficult to live down.
In the end what I felt I was uncovering was not so much a series of secrets and scandals, but a history of women’s powerlessness. It took me a very long time to see that my mother’s sadness was her way of acknowledging how little autonomy her mother had had—it was, in a way, a means of taking care of her. In the end I have given voice to something that was in me all along, but that I failed to recognize – I had been carrying my mother’s grief and sorrow. The book is an attempt to acknowledge that grief and sadness without condoning the actions of those who excluded my cousin.
West: You write this about shame and secrecy: “It’s strange the way shame travels. The mother-and-baby homes were supposed to provide a refuge for unmarried girls and a place to hide the ‘shame’ of their pregnancy. But shame stuck to everything. The shame of sex and pregnancy, the shame of rejecting a child, the shame of being that child who was rejected, the shame of the misery that leads to suicide. Even talking or asking about what had happened felt somehow shameful, but I find it hard to put my finger on exactly why. It is not as though anyone said to me explicitly, ‘Just leave the past alone. Why do you want to drag it all up? What good will it do?’ But in the great reluctance of anyone to volunteer information I felt it was implied, and since I had no answer to what good it would do, I kept my inquiries as quiet as possible. And because I wasn’t being completely open about my search for my cousin, I created something else to be ashamed of. The very act of keeping something secret engenders shame.”
Why was there so much shame about these things?
Wills: The first answer has to do with the power of the Catholic Church, and in particular a strongly held, rigidly puritanical attitude to the body—the belief that sexuality in itself was sinful, that “occasions of sin” were always and everywhere about to waylay you. My grandmother, who was born in 1891, was formed by that culture, as was everyone she knew. Priests and bishops thundered from the pulpit every week about the dangers of the sexual body—think of the terrifying passages in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, when the schoolboys are learning to flagellate themselves for their desires.
But religion wasn’t the only component in this environment of shame. Post-famine Ireland was a place obsessed with land ownership—and for good reason when you consider that the majority of those who had died or were forced to emigrate during the famine were those without land. In the early twentieth century, families became emotionally as well as financially tied to their farms and to the idea of legitimate inheritance. Children conceived outside marriage were a threat to inheritance patterns and therefore to a form of hard-won stability. In the book I describe the shame culture in Ireland as a kind of unholy alliance between the church and small farming landowners. It was the poor and those who were considered sexually wayward who lost out.
But a generation later, people like my mother and her siblings weren’t ashamed of sex and sexual desire—they were ashamed of the things that had been done to hide and control it by their parents—like sending unmarried women to mother-and-baby homes. So the secrets of extramarital pregnancies were still kept, but for different reasons. And part of what I try to do in the book is to unravel the way those reasons changed over the years—down to my own feelings of shame in writing about the story. I think of myself as one of the archives I’m investigating. The way shame was passed down through the generations is expressed in me and my own attitudes, and those of my sisters and cousins. I’m part of the historical archive—the remembering and forgetting is in me, whether I like it or not. One of the things I do in the book is try to interpret the gaps and silences and holes in my own understanding and in the stories that were handed down to me, and the stories that were kept from me.
West: Both systemic issues (church, government, etc.) and personal decisions (your grandmother, uncle, etc.) led to your cousin being hidden away. Why is it important to address both aspects of this?
Wills: Your question is really asking, how do we approach the aftermath of the scandals of institutional abuse in Ireland? What questions should we be asking about guilt, blame and responsibility?
My own feeling is that, outside of legal claims for reparation and financial redress—both of which I see as absolutely vital and necessary—but outside of these legal claims against the state the term responsibility is not a useful word to bring to this history because it so quickly falls into binary arguments about blame and guilt. I’ve tried to think in terms of a wider category of “answerability” or obligation. In this wider sense I am answerable to this history. I got to belong when my cousin didn’t; I have suffered the loss of my cousin, but I also benefited in complex ways from her absence. I think that people feel relatively comfortable when I say I feel responsible for, in the sense of answerable to, this injustice. But not always when I suggest that they are too.
If we take this seriously, one of the things it means is that, in addition to the work of legal and financial repair and reparation, which involves church and state bodies, there’s a process of reparation that has to happen in families too.
West: Our readers are survivors of spiritual abuse and their loved ones. Given your deep understanding of how religion can be used to harm and oppress, do you have any words you’d like to leave with them?
Wills: I said earlier that writing the book was a pleasurable experience, despite the awful history that I was investigating. Finally, I think I did edge closer toward something like coming to terms with the violence done to and by my family. And that’s because in writing the book I came face-to-face with the forms of love and care that are also an inheritance from the family. Terrible decisions were made in the 1950s, and after, and they cost people like my cousin Mary very dear. But Mary has not been forgotten. Her legacy is, in part, a determination to make sure such violence doesn’t occur again.
Clair Wills is a critic and cultural historian. She is the author of Lovers and Strangers: An Immigrant History of Post-War Britain, which won the Irish Times International Non-Fiction Book of the Year and was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize, That Neutral Island: A Cultural History of Ireland During the Second World War, which won the PEN Hessell-Tiltman History Prize, Dublin 1916, The Best Are Leaving, The Family Plot: Three Pieces About Containment, and most recently Missing Persons: Or, My Grandmother's Secrets. Wills is the regius professor of English Literature at the University of Cambridge.
Read more of her work here:
“Architectures of Containment”
“Quickening, or How to Plot an Abortion”
