Join McNally Jackson's Fiction/Non-Fiction conversation series where brilliant writers discuss the similarities and differences in format, tone, and style of their respective genres. In her electrifying memoir, Missing Persons, Clair Willis examines the dark history of Ireland's baby homes, family secrets, and their complex impact across generations. Megan Nolan explored similar themes in her highly acclaimed novel, Ordinary Human Failings. 

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About Missing Persons by Clair Wills

Blending memoir with social history, Clair Wills movingly explores the holes in the fabric of modern Ireland, and in her own family story.

“Clair Wills shines a brilliant, unsparing light into the dark recesses of her family’s history—and the history of Ireland. Missing Persons is a stunningly eloquent exploration of how truth-telling, secret-keeping, and outright lies are part of all family stories—indeed, the stories that unite all communities—and how truths, secrets, and lies can both protect and destroy us.” —Jeannette Walls, author of The Glass Castle and Hang the Moon

When Clair Wills was in her twenties, she discovered she had a cousin she had never met. Born in a mother-and-baby home in 1950s Ireland, Mary grew up in an institution not far from the farm where Clair spent happy childhood summers. Yet Clair was never told of Mary’s existence. How could a whole family—a whole country—abandon unmarried mothers and their children, erasing them from history? To discover the missing pieces of her family’s story, Clair searched across archives and nations, in a journey that would take her from the 1890s to the 1980s, from West Cork to rural Suffolk and Massachusetts, from absent fathers to the grief of a lost child.

There are some experiences that do not want to be remembered. What began as an effort to piece together the facts became an act of decoding the most unreliable of evidence—stories, secrets, silences. The result is a moving, exquisitely told account of the secrets families keep, and the violence carried out in their name.

"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 Guardian

“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 Wills’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, Financial Times

About Ordinary Human Failings by Megan Nolan

When a 10-year-old child is suspected of a violent crime, her family must face the truth about their past in this haunting, propulsive, psychologically keen story about class, trauma, and family secrets from “huge literary talent” (Karl Ove Knausgaard).

It's 1990 in London and Tom Hargreaves has it all: a burgeoning career as a reporter, fierce ambition and a brisk disregard for the "peasants" -- ordinary people, his readers, easy tabloid fodder. His star seems set to rise when he stumbles across a sensational scoop: a dead child on a London estate, grieving parents beloved across the neighborhood, and the finger of suspicion pointing at one reclusive family of Irish immigrants and “bad apples”: the Greens.

At their heart sits Carmel: beautiful, otherworldly, broken, and once destined for a future beyond her circumstances until life - and love - got in her way. Crushed by failure and surrounded by disappointment, there's nowhere for her to go and no chance of escape. Now, with the police closing in on a suspect and the tabloids hunting their monster, she must confront the secrets and silences that have trapped her family for so many generations.

"This novel is a philosophical investigation of family... Carmel Green is at odds with herself... the extraordinary richness of interiority creates a character you will insist is real. You may not get the life you want. You may just get life. Nolan wants to tell you that this is a gift, even if others have tried ruining it, even if you might want to ruin it yourself.”—Kyle Dillon Hertz, ELECTRIC LIT

“A subtle, accomplished and lyrical study of familial and intergenerational despair, a quiet book about quiet lives... an excellent novel: politically astute, furious and compassionate... a genuine achievement.”—Keiran Goddard, The Guardian 

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Clair Wills is the King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at the University of Cambridge. Her books include Lovers and Strangers: An Immigrant History of Post-War Britain, named the Irish Times International Nonfiction Book of the Year, and That Neutral Island: A Cultural History of Ireland During the Second World War, winner of the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize, among other works. She is a frequent contributor to the London Review of Books, the New York Review of Books, and other publications. She lives in London.

 

 

Megan Nolan was born in 1990 in Waterford, Ireland and is currently based in London. Her essays and reviews have been published by the New York Times, The White Review, The Guardian, and Frieze amongst others. Her debut novel, Acts of Desperation, was published by Jonathan Cape in 2021 and was the recipient of a Betty Trask Award, short-listed for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, and long-listed for the Dylan Thomas Prize. Her second novel, Ordinary Human Failings, is nominated for the Nero Book Awards and the Gordon Burn Prize.

 

 

 

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