Summary

Chapter 15 opens with a short description of Maureen’s childhood and young adulthood, including her fraught relationship with the Una Phelan, her incredibly pious mother, and her parents’ choice to send her away to Dublin and then London when she announced she was pregnant.

The narrator then returns to the present. Maureen is visiting the “Industrial School and Laundry,” which her mother had held over her daughters’ heads as where “all the bad girls went” (194). The building is now “only a shell[…]all stained and falling down” (196). Maureen finds a vagrant man behind the building, and he tells her that the Laundry had burned down twice. Maureen wants to get inside to set another fire, but the man says that is not possible. He tells her that “nothing [is] as cleansing as a fire,” and she leaves (199).

Chapter 15 ends with an italicized...