As a child, Clair Wills spent her summers at her grandmother’s farm in West Cork, Ireland, playing in semi-fallow fields alongside her sisters and cousins. They would visit the local creamery, ride donkeys, collect potatoes, and play with the hens and piglets before returning at summer’s end to London, where most of the family had migrated for work. Idyllic childhood memories, in short. Yet in adulthood, Wills learned there was one family member who was never invited to these gatherings. Cousin Mary grew up a few miles down the road. Her banishment was so complete it was like she’d never existed.

Mary was the result of a liaison between Wills’s uncle Jackie and a teenage neighbor, Lily. They might have married, but the match was resoundingly rejected by Jackie’s mother (and Wills’s grandmother), Molly. In keeping with the custom of the time, Lily went to an institution for unwed mothers, paid for by the state and run by the Catholic Church. Wills’s new book Missing Persons, or My Grandmother’s Secrets is an attempt to understand why her grandmother chose to break up the family rather than allow an illegitimate child into it. In the process, she realizes that “the farmhouse that had seemed the centre of a world was, in fact, a ghostly void.” 

Wills’s story is a microcosm of Ireland’s wider grappling with its past, for Mary’s story is one detail in a dark chapter of 20th-century history: the institutionalization, over nearly 80 years, of some 56,000 unmarried women and 57,000 children. The “mother-and-baby homes” came into being through a combination of stringent Catholic morality, the social stigma of single motherhood, and widespread poverty. They were seen as an opportunity to “reform” women who had strayed, who were also put to work for their room and board. The lucky babies were adopted within Ireland or by families in the United States; the unlucky ones lived in the homes until they came of age or, in many cases, died of disease or neglect. 

While the institutionalization of unmarried mothers wasn’t unique to Ireland—the United States, England, Canada, and Australia all had similar schemes, as did France and Spain—the Irish case stands out for its longevity. Women were still being sent to mother-and-baby homes into the 1990s. The Irish system was also particularly cruel: In 2016, on the grounds of a home run by nuns of the Bons Secours order, the remains of nearly 800 infants and children were found in a septic tank. A 2021 report concluded that 15 percent of children born or raised in these homes died, while the survivors experienced discrimination and abuse.  

At once memoir and social history, Missing Persons is the story of modern Ireland as told through the lens of the author’s multiple family tragedies. Exploring the cultural background—of social change, religious control, and migration so massive it emptied large swaths of the country—takes Wills only so far. The past she looks back on is truly a lost world in every sense. Beyond history, understanding this past requires imagination: to place yourself in century-old shoes, to realize that you could make the same decisions, to understand that the past is more than a foreign country where things are done differently. The drive to understand without condemning may be necessary when the subject is the author’s own family, but it also gives the book a novelistic touch, an ability to see—or at least imagine—Molly as a flesh-and-blood person.      

Far from being solely a domestic drama, Missing Persons takes in the famine, the Irish Civil War, national literature, and the postwar migration to England, as well as the horrific mother-and-baby homes. It is a book that sees the task of uncovering the motivations and mistakes of our ancestors as vital, but acknowledges there can be no final knowing. “I am frustrated by a gap in my own understanding,” Wills writes:

I find it extremely difficult to grasp why, for so long, ordinary people consented to, and even approved of institutions such as the Magdalene Laundries, the mother-and-baby homes…this despite the fact that some of the people who consented were my own parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles…. The chasm between belief systems seems so huge.

This chasm sends Wills to the archives to understand the forces that shaped her grandparents’ world. There were major incidents of the Irish Civil War taking place in rural Cork just a few miles from the farmhouse where census records place her grandmother as a live-in servant. Wills researches the local boys who joined the IRA, the extrajudicial killings and cross-border raids. And yet:

The trouble with all this ‘background’ is that it takes the place of the foreground. I see my grandparents disappearing under the weight of an established set of stories…. There would be a way of telling my grandmother’s story by placing her directly in the centre of this revolutionary history…. But it would not get me any closer to her.

In any case, neither Molly nor her grandfather were particularly political. “But,” Wills says, “politics happened to them anyway.” 

Politics happened anyway to Lily and Mary as well, and to Uncle Jackie (self-exiled to England to escape the scandal) and myriad other members of the family. Molly’s older siblings fled poverty to America, along with up to 4.5 million of their compatriots in the 19th century and up to the First World War. (The entire population of Ireland just before the famine, when mass migration started, was about 8.2 million.) A generation later, most of Molly’s own children emigrated to England in search of work. Politics also happened to the family that remained: to Protestant grandfather Tom, forced by the Catholic Church to change his religion, and to Uncle Stephen, who inherited the farm and was buried by the work of an already obsolete economic model. Politics happened to them all.

Untangling what happened in 20th-century Ireland means exploring the tension between history, politics, the forces that set the rules (the background), and the individual people and their personal choices (the foreground). In a similar vein to another recent Irish memoir, Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s A Ghost in the Throat, Wills grounds her history around female fertility and motherhood. She pictures generations of her family standing in a row stretching back in time, but her figures are all female and all heavy with child. The personal here is political, because “pregnancy and childbirth don’t happen outside history either.”

This all-female lineup is appropriate because even when they are not birthing and child-rearing, it is the women who keep family history, right down to the silences and secrets. A younger Wills is shown a photograph of Cousin Mary from her Holy Communion, by an aunt who was “hiding it, but…also keeping it safe.” Throughout Wills’s investigations, her mother is revealed as a vibrant and tricky storyteller, while Wills herself emerges as a canny, sometimes skeptical consumer of these family tales. “I like my mother’s stories,” she tells us.

You think you are being led into a fairy tale—you meet old men dispensing wisdom, weird sisters, travelling people with rhymes and extraordinary skills with a needle.… And then she turns a little matter-of-fact pirouette at the end and offers a perfectly rational gloss on her own tale.

Even in her mother’s firsthand accounts, the truth proves slippery. Of the story of another lost baby, Wills writes: “I don’t think she’s lying but she’s not telling the truth either: The truth has got lost, like the baby, inside the story.”

Literature, Wills argues, shines a light on an Irish psyche that is “full of images and stories of the undead and half-alive,” from Dracula to Joyce’s “The Dead,” and from the Gaelic-language writer Máirtin Ó Cadhain to Irish letters’ most estranged son, Samuel Beckett. “Half-alive” as a concept stretches from Lily and Mary in their banishment, to Molly on her empty, collapsing farm, to all the many family members gone to America and England. Wills herself is afflicted: She’s worried that she’s only half-qualified to tell this story, as an English woman who hasn’t lived in Ireland. Does she have the authority to say what kind of country Ireland was, or is? 

Yet Wills is adamant that “we are our own archives,” and that recovering the past is an act of imagination as much as it is one of documentation. She imagines her way into the mind of a woman experiencing her first labor pains a mere three months after marrying, while an IRA standoff happens just down the road. She imagines a woman so attached to respectability that she chooses to destroy her family over it. And she questions her own childhood understanding of the farm, whose stability she always imagined to be her grandmother’s reward after a hard life—but was it in fact a punishment?

“They were Victorians,” the author’s mother says of her own parents, more than once, as an explanation and defense. But Wills questions this too. Ireland is famous for being a nation of devout Catholics, and the church stoked the excessive piety and horror of illegitimacy that led to the mother-and-baby homes. Wills points out, though, that 19th-century Ireland was in fact a nation of lax Catholics. Fairy and folklore beliefs lingered, intermarriage between Catholics and Protestants was common, and the church warred for cultural supremacy with Irish nationalist aspirations.

Her great-grandmother, a vague outline in Wills’s mind, was a child in the starving years of the 1840s, when children were so hungry they no longer played. Some 1.8 million people emigrated to America from 1845 to 1855 alone. Ironically, migration and starvation recalibrated the ratio of priests to the laity and swept the poorest (and most religiously lax) of the latter out of the country, leaving a more docile population for an ascendant Catholic Church.

A national crisis that took place nearly half a century later, in the late 1880s, would come to define the church’s influence on every facet of Irish life: When leading nationalist politician Charles Parnell was revealed to have been in a decades-long affair with Katharine O’Shea, public opinion turned against him, the Irish parliament was divided, and the church benefited from the power vacuum to establish its moral influence and advocate for traditional family values. 

“How ironic,” Wills writes, “that the seeds of my family’s crisis around unmarried motherhood should have been laid in an Irish national crisis over sex, dishonour and marital respectability.” This manufactured scandal altered the national psyche.  Imagining the people of the past, for Wills, means understanding that her own family could change from laissez-faire Catholics to devout social conservatives in one generation.

“Ireland has had only one export and that is its people,” said President John F. Kennedy on a tour of the Emerald Isle in 1963. It was a sentimental visit—like millions of Americans, Kennedy was himself a product of Irish migration. At the time of his words, Wills, another product of Irish migration, was a baby in England, her mother part of the 20th-century Irish diaspora that was “nursing in psychiatric hospitals, laboring on farms, and building the motorways and power stations of England’s postwar boom.”

Missing Persons also tries to tell the story of a man who begot a child and then chose, or felt forced, to give up everything else in his life—his family, the farm he had inherited—and start all over again digging ditches in England at the age of 34. For the author, “the most missing person of all in this story is Jackie.”

Wills has already written a book about the postwar migration to Britain. Nonetheless, this personal account of Jackie’s peripheral life and early death is a moving record of a largely unrecorded existence, in which imagination must work overtime to make up for the gaps. History and imagination are buttressed once more by cultural products: Philip Donellan’s documentary films about Irish laborers abroad, the accounts of middle-class Irish writers who took summer construction jobs, Beckett again.     

The Irish laborers of the documentary films are working-class archetypes—silent, stoic, given to drinking. Jackie died after some years of itinerant living and hard labor. Like many of the men who built postwar Britain, he left few personal traces behind. All Wills can do is search for his face in the background of films and try to imagine the rest: the paths he walked, his relationship with the soil and the seasons.      

Missing Persons is a story about change, both demographic and cultural. It considers how pregnancy and childbirth are political acts, an idea that cannot fail to seem relevant again as abortion is legalized in some parts of the world (among them, Ireland) and recriminalized in others. It is a book that insists on digging up old horrors to “drag it all into the open so we can’t pretend we didn’t know.” 

In much of the world, it is becoming clear that politics are happening to us anyway, all over again. Wills’s personal and political memoir is a reminder of how deeply, and sometimes secretly, this can transform our families and countries, and ourselves.