Summary

Ciaran’s brooch and note in tow, the narrator departs Dublin to visit her mother in suburban Waterford for the holidays. Eight years after divorcing the narrator’s father, her mother, Keelin, remarried an academic, a rugged outdoorsman enthralled by Gaelic history and culture. Together the two have found a rewarding and stable life. Despite the sense that things had worked out for her, Keelin always seems ready for disaster to strike, as if good fortune is “unnatural” and “pointless” (69). The narrator settles into her old room. As Christmas approaches, the narrator frequently calls Ciaran but gets no answer. Being home, surrounded by old photos and shelves of gimcracks from her childhood, reminds the narrator of the failures in her life, the promise she once had. “I would always look like a misshapen version of my True Self” (71). In an interchapter, in...