This hybrid book, which is not quite a memoir and not quite a conceptually linked essay collection, begins with the death of a young Irish woman called Grace Farrell, whose body was discovered outside St Brigid’s Church in Manhattan’s East Village on 20 February 2011. Having arrived in New York from Ireland in 1993 with the dream of becoming an artist, Farrell was 35, homeless, and an alcoholic when she froze to death in an alcove of the church on Avenue B on the coldest night of the year.
Carmel McMahon came to New York a few years after Farrell, part of a wave of young, pre-Celtic Tiger Irish people whose “background music”, as she puts it, was “sectarian violence, mass unemployment and rising emigration”. Like Farrell, she succumbed to alcoholism, her initially exciting but uncertain life of waiting tables, hanging out and partying turning by stages darker and more chaotic. In desperation, she too gravitated to a familiar haven: a mass at another of Manhattan’s many Roman Catholic churches, Old St Patrick’s on Mott Street. Often she would turn up there, she writes, with a “thrift-store trenchcoat thrown over my pyjamas, reeking of cigarettes and booze, yesterday’s makeup sliding down my face”.
Unlike Farrell, though, McMahon’s life was transformed by the almost miraculous intervention of a passing stranger, a third-generation Irish American man, who, having sensed her despair, called out to her as she exited the church. Having persuaded her to have a coffee with him, he sat down with her on a nearby park bench and, unbidden, related his own struggle with alcohol and newfound sobriety. The next morning, she emailed him and asked to be taken to a AA meeting.
In this deftly woven meditation on memory, grief, addiction, family, exile and cultural belonging, McMahon’s personal story is the unifying strand in a much bigger, constantly shifting narrative that explores even more complex cultural and historical terrain. Her abiding subtext is transgenerational trauma, the idea that the physiological changes caused by a traumatic experience can “be passed from mother to child, from generation to generation”.
In her instance, it is the death of her mother’s first child, Michelle, in a horrific road accident, and the familial silence that descends in its wake, which, she suggests, may have had some bearing on her own unravelling. Michelle’s death occurred just three months before McMahon was born, altering for ever the atmosphere in which she and her siblings were raised: “Six more children were born in quick succession, a year or two apart, and Michelle’s name was never spoken in our house.”
McMahon’s life is punctuated by other family tragedies: the death of a brother, the loss of another to prolonged mental illness. For her, though, it is the realisation that we are shaped not just by cataclysmic events in our family’s constantly unfolding narrative but by historical traumas from our collective past that carries the full force of a revelation. It underpins her decision to cast a cold, accusatory eye on the brutalities of British colonial rule – plantation, transportation, the cataclysm that was the Great Famine (1845-1852), and the mass emigration that ensued for generations afterwards – as well as the ongoing denial of the same. Add to that the crimes committed by the Irish Catholic church on those trusted to their care: the sheer scale of sexual abuse, the existence of the Magdalene Laundries, the uncovering of mass graves of “disappeared” women, girls and infants.
In Ordinary Time is an ambitious undertaking that draws on a variety of disparate sources, including Carl Jung, St Brigid, Virginia Woolf and the poet Anne Carson. Its title is taken from the Catholic liturgical calendar in which ordinary time is the periods between saints’ feast days, but its four-part structure is based on the pre-Christian festivals that marked the cyclical changing of the seasons. Time, memory, transience and mortality are constants throughout, at odds with what McMahon sees as the “forward-marching linear time” that defines postindustrial capitalism.
At times, I found the sudden shifts from the deeply personal to the historical slightly disorienting. Here and there, too, some of the more esoteric ideas, such as the philosopher Henri Bergson’s complex theory of durational time, felt like they had been dropped into this heady conceptual mix, but not sufficiently explored. For the most part, though, McMahon is a sure-footed and constantly thought-provoking guide as she navigates “landscapes both familiar and strange” in her often painful journey of self-discovery. Having turned 50, returned to Ireland, and settled in rural Mayo, McMahon’s unsettled life may have ended, but, one senses, her exploration of how “we are connected to all that has gone before” remains urgent and ongoing: a lifetime’s work.
• In Ordinary Time: Fragments of a Family History by Carmel McMahon is published by Duckworth (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
