We live in a time when so much of our language feels insufficient to describe the complicated world in which we find ourselves. It feels right to be named with something definitive that also marks what is unknown — a destination that will, like all of us, necessarily and always evolve.
McPhail has built a whole career on examining the minutiae of human interactions with fond exasperation and impish humour, the kinds of autopilot-patter we all deploy to smooth our passage through life. As a regular cartoonist for the New Yorker, McPhail pokes gentle fun at social conventions and the ludicrousness of following them when, in the end, we’re all going to die anyway.
How can traumatic flashbacks of this sort override reality and erode our hard-won insights? Why do they feel as if they are occurring in the present? What neural processes make this possible? How does any memory, good or bad, cause us to re-experience events and emotions?
These questions provoked O’Keane’s roving, riverine inquiry into memory, experience, the brain — and how these elements come together to produce a self.
The book, a powerful, bewitching blend of memoir and literary investigation, centers on this search, and is as much about what she doesn’t find as what she does. Ni Ghriofa is deeply attuned to the gaps, silences and mysteries in women’s lives, and the book reveals, perhaps above all else, how we absorb what we love — a child, a lover, a poem — and how it changes us from the inside out.