A Ghost in the Throat

"“We cannot know from whose mouths the echoes of our lives will chime,” the Irish poet and translator Ní Ghríofa writes in this gorgeous memoir about mothering, love and literary excavation. During her third child’s nursing days, the young writer embarked on a furious quest to put flesh on the ignored bones of Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill, whose long lament for her murdered husband, “The Keen for Art Ó Laoughaire” Ní Ghríofa first read in grade school. Virtually nothing is known about the woman who wrote what’s considered the greatest poem of Ireland’s 18th century, and as Ní Ghríofa enters the bog of that silencing, she excavates hidden elements of her own voice. Intensely poetic and freewheeling and connecting the bodily details of mothering and erotic love – "female texts" – to linguistic hierarchies and erasures, this book creates its own form: a critical biography of the body, of bloodshed and babies born, of the word made flesh."

"People really can’t decide what genre this book is in, probably more so than any of the other books. They even tried to say it was fiction! Turf war, part two! I think there’s no doubt it belongs in autobiography. Ní Ghríofa interweaves the earthbound realities of her life as a young mother with her literary obsession with an 18th-century poem. It’s quite remarkable. She explains that she knew this poem from it being taught to her at school, and then she encountered it at a different time in her life. She had never realised before that the woman poet was a young mom at the time she was widowed; I think she says that this was the detail that pushed her over the edge into obsession. She has a xeroxed copy under her pillow that she pulls out and reads in stolen moments. She researches everything that can be known about this woman’s life (which is both more than you’d think and less than she wants), and she makes her own translation from the Irish, which is included in the book. “‘Autobiography’ is a pretty old-fashioned word for this category. I think it’s closer to what people now call ‘creative nonfiction’” The poem itself is almost kind of goth in its details. She drinks her dead husband’s blood, she takes his dead horse’s skull and buries it in her fireplace. It’s also unbelievably romantic, quite in contrast to the diaper pails and floor-mopping and everything else she has going on. But the thing is that she embraces both. She is not downtrodden by her duties as a mother. There’s an interesting discussion over whether this is a feminist book, because she does kind of love her dishwashing and breast-pumping and such. It has been more traditional in feminism to package up domestic duties as part of female oppression. That’s not really Ní Ghríofa’s approach at all. She finds a beauty in the duties of care. She’s a romantic in the traditional sense. She finds an intensity and romance in her own life. You know how there was a turn in feminist thinking about sex? Instead of being exploited or ashamed or whatever, you could be ‘sex positive’ and proud of it. This book is, like, housework positive. Right. That’s a great example of what I’m talking about—the extreme romance of the way she sees her own life."