How many loved your moments of glad grace, And loved your beauty with love false or true, But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you, And loved the sorrows of your changing face. ~ W. B. Yeats
I've come to realise that I have a different, perhaps more generous, method for using the Goodreads five star rating with memoirs vs. fiction – to get four or more stars, I think a memoir should have nice sentences, either tell a totally unique tale or reveal something universal to all humanity, and ideally, give me something philosophically interesting to ponder on. So, while Alison Wearing's Moments of Glad Grace does have a lack of action (as other reviewers have noted), and while her Progressive self-loathing rants were a little over the top for me (if only she wasn't born white when white people are the worst), I did find this to be both a touching portrait of a daughter's evolving relationship with her aging dad and an interesting meditation on just whose stories have been preserved in written records (spoiler: rich white people). This is definitely a four star read: maybe not because I “loved it”, but I think Wearing is an excellent writer who accomplished what she intended with this book.
The more I look into all of this, the less I wish to find any part of myself here at all.As her father – an avid genealogist and sufferer of a slow-progressing Parkinson's – was approaching eighty, he asked Alison if she would accompany him as a research assistant on a trip to Dublin in order to track down the answers to his ultimate family mystery: Just why did so many of his Irish ancestors immigrate to Canada in the decades before the Potato Famine? Alison was delighted to be offered this time with her dad (he was the subject of her first memoir, Confessions of a Fairy’s Daughter), but as their stay in Ireland saw day after day spent reading through giant books of records, written in spidery and faded fountain pen script, Alison began to sour on the project, and especially because of what she learned in the process: Apparently, Alison knew very little of Irish history before, so as she learned about England's history of confiscating Irish land to give to English settlers (which turned the Irish people into tenant farmers in their own country), she realised that if she did find a deed in one of these record books with one of her ancestor's names on it, she would need to make peace with being descended from one of these evil English colonisers. And as she learned that Irish army officers were offered land tracts in Canada in exchange for their pensions, she realised that if she found evidence of one of her ancestors accepting this offer, she would need to make peace with being descended from one of these evil Irish displacers of Canada's First Nations. (Alison was even surprised to learn that the wreck of some of the Spanish Armada's ships on Ireland's western shores might explain hers and her father's dark and curly hair, but fortunately, this information delighted her.)
The war between father and daughter's worldviews on history, and how to intersect with those from the past, was very interesting to me. Alison knew she couldn't learn anything intimate about her ancestors in records of deeds and births; she would have preferred to spend some time in their home villages, breathing their same air and walking their worn lanes. On the other hand, as a retired poli-sci professor (and despite being a gay man with Progressive-leaning politics himself), her father could only be satisfied with firm data and was proud to claim his ancestors whoever they might be, saying, “Well, like it or not, reliable history is an assemblage of facts, not poetic stories.” To which Alison replies, “The only people who believe in history are those who are well represented by it...Women, indigenous people, the colonized – ask them about the power of omission and whether facts can just as easily be used to tell a false story as a truthful one.” And she's not wrong about that.
There is much rumination thereafter on the nature of truth and those transcendent experiences we can engage in in order to feel its presence. Alison's father finds this genealogical research to be thusly transcendent, his partner experiences it through opera, and Alison's own partner, Jay, reaches it through birding (of the obsessive nature, involving middle-of-the-night alerts to drive five hours in order to see a familiar bird in an unusual setting). Describing a night in which Jay tried to point out faint birdsong in the distance as they fell asleep, Alison recounts:
Our son moaned and turned in his sleep, tucked a foot under the small of my back. I lay for a while, listening to Jay descend into sleep, listening to the night quilt of cicadas, the faint descant of coyotes yipping in the distance. And then I heard them. Pinpricks of light in the darkness. Wisps of song falling from the night sky. A matrix of astral passage, of miraculous flight. An ancestral map spun into wings. A casual, unassuming portal into infinity.Pretty sentences like that added quite a bit to a book where, admittedly, not a whole lot happens. Alison and her father spend their days reading the records, do a little bit of touristing in the evenings, and when their time is just about over, Alison suddenly realises just how old and frail her father is becoming; deciding at that point to stop arguing with him over the value of his project.
We will never do anything like this again. I may never have the privilege of spending so much carefree time with my dad as I have just now, scurrying around Dublin, father and daughter on a lark. And it is so obvious, yet just as easily forgotten, that this time we have – with our parents, our children, the people we love – is so very finite, so very fleeting, so very, very small.I think that Wearing is a talented writer (I did especially like her faithful rendering of the enchanting Irish brogue she encountered), and beyond the nice sentences, the bits about truth and transcendence and just whose stories the genealogical record preserves were all interesting to think about. Four stars all day long.
