Missing Persons, Or My Grandmother's Secrets

Non-Fiction Book of the Year 2024, Irish Book Awards
Shortlisted for the TLS Ackerley Prize 2025

How far would you go for the missing?

Blending private and public history, cultural analysis, family memoir and autobiography, Clair Wills explores profound questions about memory, loss, motherhood and emigration. She traces a history of sexual secrecy through four generations of unplanned pregnancies in her own family, stretching from the 1890s to the 1980s and from the West of Ireland to Massachusetts, London and the English countryside, dramatizing the power of secret-keeping as a form of care, particularly between women, but also as violence and exclusion.

At the heart of her search is a cousin who went missing from her own family, born in a Mother and Baby Home in the 1950s, and brought up in an institution. Wills asks not only what happened, but why? Why did families consent to the institutional care and control of unmarried mothers and their children? Why did the system make sense to ordinary families, and how can we make sense of it now? What questions should we be asking about guilt, blame, and responsibility?

In order to uncover how people thought about illicit sex, illegitimacy, and institutions, Wills followed the tracks laid down in family stories and anecdotes. She interprets the gaps in stories – the missing bits—as places where the past was both preserved and disavowed.

We are all born into families, whether or not we are allowed to belong to them. Wills asks us to undertake a radical reshaping of our idea of the family, and of the history of generation. We are all part of the historical archive—the remembering and forgetting is in us, whether we like it or not.