Hear writers Carmel McMahon and Alice Kinsella read from their books 'In Ordinary Time: Fragments of a Family History' and 'MILK: On Motherhood and Madness'.
'MILK: On Motherhood and Madness' by Alice Kinsella
'A book of women and water, babies and art - the herstory of Ireland - but mostly this is a book about the raw, riotous, brutally beautiful act of being alive.' –-Kerri Ní Dochartaigh, author of Thin Places
A radiant, meditative, truly powerful and beautiful book.-Joseph O'Connor, author of Star of the Sea
Wielding a panoply of shattered literary forms, Alice Kinsella expertly depicts the gradual disintegration of a woman into the motherbaby dyad. MILK is an important addition to the growing canon of work about the physical, political, and philosophical destabilization of motherhood. -Sarah Manguso, author of Very Cold People
This is a book for the ages. It truly is mesmeric, stunningly beautiful, open and intense, revelatory and generous. I love the short bursts, and the sublime way that Alice ranges through life, mental health, art, society, and all the vast complexities, the dangers, the 'pull and sway' of motherhood. I knew what an incredible writer Alice was before I started but this surpasses my highest expectations.-Donal Ryan, author of The Spinning Heart
A map of motherhood, Milk is at once a gentle and meditative story of one woman’s experience of new motherhood as well as a confronting and often painful examination of the experience of having children in contemporary Ireland. Alice Kinsella is a young mother, giving birth to her son in her mid-twenties, adrift in a new town and navigating her newly accompanied life. A powerful and yet delicate mix of the personal and political, Milk is an unflinching and unique memoir that looks at the experience of motherhood against the backdrop of a seemingly changed Ireland.
Alice Kinsella was born in Dublin in 1993, and raised in Co. Mayo. She studied English Literature and Philosophy in Trinity College Dublin. Her poetry pamphlet Sexy Fruit was a Poetry Book Society Spring 2019 Selection. She edited Empty House: poetry and prose on the climate crisis. She received an Arts Council Next Generation Award 2022/23. Milk is her debut book of prose. She lives on the west coast of Ireland with her family.
'In Ordinary Time: Fragments of a Family History' by Carmel McMahon
A multi-layered exploration of trauma, memory, grief, and addiction 'A vivid, evocative and resonant counterpoint of time, memory and meaning’-Joseph O'Conner
Beautiful, compelling, thought-provoking… McMahon draws us a kind of map for our broken hearts. She knows that, even in unflinching personal stories like hers, the past has lessons for all of us. An uncompromising reflection on what it means to be of Irish heritage today, whether at home or abroad’ Tara Flynn
'Stunning. A work of great emotional and intellectual heft, about how familial trauma and the collective past suffering of a nation can engender the nameless psychic pain of the individual. Truth and honesty shine out of every line’-Mary Costello
Magnificent. In Ordinary Time is a brilliant combination of the personal and impersonal, of the collapsing of the two worlds one into the other. Spare, pristine, bracing – a marvelous book’.-Carlo GeblerIn
1993, aged twenty, Carmel Mc Mahon left Ireland for New York, carrying $500, two suitcases, and a ton of unseen baggage. It took years, and a bitter struggle with alcohol addiction, to unpick the intricate traumas of her past and present Candid yet lyrical, In Ordinary Time mines the ways that trauma reverberates through time and through individual lives, drawing connections to the events and rhythms of Ireland’s long Celtic, early Christian and Catholic history. From the grief of lost siblings to the broader social scars of the Famine and the Magdalene laundries, in this dazzling memoir, Mc Mahon sketches the evolution of a consciousness – from her conservative 1970s upbringing to 1990s New York, and back to the much-changed Ireland of today.
Carmel Mc Mahon grew up in Ireland in Ashbourne, County Meath, and lived in New York from 1993–2021, when she returned to renovate a house in North Mayo on the West Coast of Ireland. She is a graduate of CUNY. Her writing has been published in the Irish Times, Roanoke Review and Humanities Review, and shortlisted for the Hennessy Literary Award. In Ordinary Time is her first book.
