Keegan’s book was published nearly two months ago, but this week I noticed it occupied an entire window display of the bookstore around the corner from my office, displacing Sally Rooney’s latest. There is a growing demand that the future be different. Women live with an ever-present threat of brutality. Irish authors continue to return to the subject of systemic abuse against women in what was a near-theocratic state because the history of violence and coercion is far from over. The stretch of canal where she was murdered is named for another woman who went missing and has never been found. And, on January 12 of this year, a twenty-three-year-old woman was murdered while jogging along a typically well-populated stretch of the Grand Canal in County Offaly at four o’clock in the afternoon. It has been reported that Ireland has only a third of the refuge centers it needs. A redress scheme for survivors of the mother and baby homes has been soundly criticized because of everyone it leaves out.
Domestic abuse reports against women (and some men) skyrocketed because of pandemic lockdown measures. There was more news of ingrained misogyny over the past year. (It was later determined that the recordings could be retrieved from backup storage.) Official indifference to the voices of victims could not have been more blatant - or infuriating. A commission charged with issuing a major government report on the crime faced a public backlash when it was discovered (after it was unceremoniously leaked before publication) that the recorded testimony of around 550 survivors had somehow been deleted. Many of these children had been “adopted” - trafficked really - without their mothers’ consent. But the unfortunate truth is that there is only one way to approach this book: with the realization that ordinary life in Ireland is so appalling that justice demands that books like Keegan’s be written.ĭuring 2021 we learned that upwards of nine-thousand Irish children died in the so-called “mother and baby homes.” These were institutions used by both church and state to hide, abuse, and extract labor from more than fifty-thousand single, pregnant women between 19, when the last of these “homes” closed. (The book was published at the end of November.) That’s because I was searching for different ways to review Claire Keegan’s latest novella. There has been an unforgivably long delay between when my editor asked for my evaluation of Small Things Like These and its delivery.
Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan. Claire Keegan’s novella expertly shows how the culture of idle talk in certain Irish communities is like a secret code - an intricate language that both obscures and reveals.
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