Book Review: “Missing Persons” by Clair Willis
Every Child Matters
During the 1930s and ’40s in Nova Scotia, in my native Canada, unwanted babies were sold for adoption by the Ideal Maternity Home, an illegally run home for unwed mothers. Some 400 to 600 of these children who were “unmarketable” for being of mixed race or having deformities (and so on) were killed by starvation and buried in “butter boxes” obtained from a local dairy or in open graves. However, this story isn’t endemic to Canada. It turns out that Ireland had a similar problem with its own orphanages and industrial schools in terms of how it treated unwed mothers and their offspring. In 2014, the bodies of more than 800 children aged from pre-term to about five years old were found to have been deposited over decades into a disused septic system at one of these institutions, which the Catholic Church usually ran. It had been believed that these institutions were putting children up for adoption, usually to couples elsewhere in Great Britain or in the United States. When the truth was revealed, and the scope of the abuse and murder was peeled back, this, too, became something of an outrage. Clair Willis, the author of Missing Persons, thus tells her story of how various members of her family, including herself, were complicit in giving birth out of wedlock and having a hand to play in the necessity of these schools from the church and state’s points of view.
It’s hard for me to summarize the contents of this exceptional book, as I usually do in the second paragraph of my reviews because the story being told here is so personal, if not multi-layered. Even though this book is less than 200 pages long, it’s hard to summarize accurately what the book is about because it is about many different things. However, part of the thread is that the author’s uncle knocked up a woman in rural Ireland in the 1950s, and she was sent away to one of these institutions. The uncle was (possibly) forced to find work in England as a laborer. Her daughter grew up and lived to be a young woman who, in turn, also became pregnant and took her own life when the father refused to marry her. That’s not all, however, to this family history. It turns out that Willis’ grandmother may have had the uncle out of wedlock in 1920, necessitating a marriage to a Protestant. This was, of course, during the times of the Irish War of Independence, so intermarriage to someone of a different religion was a very dicey thing. There’s also the secret of another daughter dying as a young girl, possibly through negligence. So, the secrets begin piling up on each other, culminating in the fact that Willis’ first child was the product of sex outside of marriage.
It’s also difficult for me to come up with a critique of this novel for the very same reasons outlined above. This is a very personal story; criticizing it would be an injustice. However, Willis has done excellent detective work only with the barest scraps of information to be found. (Some of what she presents here is conjecture, ideas about what may have happened in the past within her family.) This is a bold and daring deep dive into not only the narrative of one person’s family history but also the backstory of how an entire nation was complicit in forming state and religious institutions that could hide a problem that plagued the good Catholic society of Ireland. This is a probing and penetrating account of sexual morals in one Western country and serves as a reminder that what’s happening in the United States now in reproductive rights being taken away from women could lead to a similar situation that Ireland faced in the 20th century. To wit, these institutions are not a distant phenomenon. The last such orphanage/industrial school closed only in 1998. To that end, Willis is taking this book on tour throughout the U.S. this autumn to capitalize on the growing government movement to legislate away women’s rights to agency over their bodies. That in and of itself lends currency to this read.
In the end, Missing Persons is a bona fide detective story. It gazes through the murky lens of the past to say something about humanity’s present situation. It is a reminder that in the world of Donald Trump, anything could happen through the rise of white Christian nationalism. It’s interesting to note just how the current situation in the U.S.A. mirrors what happened in Ireland a generation or two ago. That alone should make this a vital book to read. However, one can enjoy this book as a glimpse into the lives of a complicated family, too. Suppose you’re the type to pore over family genealogies. In that case, Missing Persons will be a refreshing and page-turning account of one family’s gaps in its family tree. It’s a penetrating and resounding look at an age-old problem and how things stay the same even as times change. This will be a sterling wake-up call for those who need the reminder that mother-and-baby homes were a part of Irish society not long ago. It is a must-read story about a family divided by multiple children born out of wedlock in a culture that views children outside of marriage as somehow lesser. For that, this book is a keeper and well-worth reading.
Clair WIllis’ Missing Persons: Or, My Grandmother’s Secrets was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on April 2, 2024.
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