Discover the Penguin books that shaped us

Missing Persons, Or My Grandmother's Secrets

byClair Wills, Clair Wills (Read by)

Format:

PaperbackEbookAudio Download

Buy the book from:

Apple BooksOpens in a new tabAudibleOpens in a new tabGoogle PlayOpens in a new tabHiveOpens in a new tabKoboOpens in a new tabLibro.fmOpens in a new tabSpotifyOpens in a new tabxigxagOpens in a new tab
Brought to you by Penguin.

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.


© Clair Wills 2024 (P) Penguin Audio 2024

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 the author’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 Clair Wills

Clair Wills is a critic and cultural historian. She is the author of Lovers and Strangers: An Immigrant History of Post-War Britain, which won the Irish Times International Non-Fiction Book of the Year and was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize, That Neutral Island: A History of Ireland During the Second World War, which won the PEN Hessell-Tiltman History Prize, Dublin 1916, The Best Are Leaving, and most recently The Family Plot: Three Pieces on Containment. Wills is the regius professor of English Literature at the University of Cambridge.
Details
  • Imprint: Penguin
  • ISBN: 9781802065565
  • Length: 365 minutes
  • Price: £14.00
All editions