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I'll Know It When I See It: A Daughter's Search for Home in Ireland
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I'll Know It When I See It: A Daughter's Search for Home in Ireland Overviews
As a young girl, Alice Carey realized that “home” can mean different things. The only child of poor Irish immigrants, her isolated childhood in a cold-water flat in Queens is transformed when her mother becomes the maid to legendary Broadway producer Jean Dalrymple. In Miss Dalrymple’s Upper East Side townhouse, young Alice absorbs with delight a sophisticated theatrical culture that includes encounters with such notables as Jed Harris and Marilyn Monroe. Then, a visit to Ireland with her mother thrusts the girl into another novel culture, one that simultaneously enchants and traumatizes her.
When Alice returns to Ireland as an adult, she and her husband serendipitously find and fall in love with a ruined Georgian farmhouse. As they begin to convert the stables into a livable cottage, Alice unearths buried memories of a childhood played out in wildly divergent homes. I’ll Know It When I See It is the witty and rueful examination of her struggles to make sense of—and peace with—her recollections of a bittersweet past. It is a book certain to appeal to anyone who’s ever loved, lost, and reclaimed a home of their own.
I'll Know It When I See It: A Daughter's Search for Home in Ireland RelateItems
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I'll Know It When I See It: A Daughter's Search for Home in Ireland Specifications
Although the author opens with a visit to her mother's native Ireland at 12 and ends with lighting candles in her new home in County Cork four decades later, this is no nostalgic memoir about getting back to your roots. Alice Carey has crafted a tough-minded examination of her complicated relationship with her heritage, a warm tribute to the theatrical free spirits who helped liberate her from an unhappy childhood. She grew up in Queens; her father often hit her and flew into a rage when his wife dared to augment the family's meager finances by working as a maid for Broadway producer Jed Harris. Helping Mammie in the afternoons, Alice glimpsed a glamorous, sophisticated world beyond the constraints of Catholic school and Celtic fatalism. She moved to Greenwich Village in her teens and made her life as a Manhattanite with a weekend home in Fire Island. When AIDS decimated that community in the 1990s, she and her husband moved to Ireland. Making an 18th-century farmhouse habitable is a black comedy Carey describes with a sardonic wit that echoes her Irish forebears and gay friends but is uniquely her own (she names "the Seven Dwarves of Restoration: Happy, Reluctant, Fearful, Suspicious, Wary, Hopeful, and Doubtful"). Her journey towards a new identity as "a real New Yorker living in Ireland" is all the more moving because it is chronicled with sharp perceptiveness and without sentimentality. --Wendy Smith
I'll Know It When I See It: A Daughter's Search for Home in Ireland CustomerReview
Alice Carey read at the West Side YMCA's Writer's Voice on February 18, 2005. This is from my introduction to the event.
For most people, what probably drew them, or will draw them to this memoir, this author, this event, is one word in the subtitle of this marvelous book: Ireland. Whether you are as Irish as the characters described within "I'll Know it When I See It," or have a last name that sounds more like...Raucher...for instance, the word Ireland still conjures up a multitude of images, of the place itself, its long, difficult and complex history, and how it is also interwoven with the myths and tales of this country. And many of those images have little connection to any reality about the place; but, nevertheless...the romantic image of Ireland persists.
But "I'll Know it When I See It" is not a soft clover travel guide; for one, we spend as much time in Astoria, Queens and on 55th Street right here in Manhattan as we do in County Cork. The events that take place not five miles from the spot where this reading takes place are as indelibly recalled, and as potent for our narrator, as any that take place across the Atlantic, on that verdant island.
But, to this reader at least, the key word in the title is not Ireland; it is something even deeper and more universal: Home.
In this moving yet remarkably unsentimental book, Alice Carey makes it clear that no one finds "home" without a cost, a reckoning of what is lost. Whether it is letting go of--leaving--what one thought was their "home," or coming to terms with simply letting go of what other people expect you to accept as your place in the world, "I'll Know it When I See It" tells a powerful and entrancing tale. One that, because of Alice Carey's expert hand and ear for the beauty and power of language, her ability to make her words come alive on the page, takes us right into the places she, her family and dear friends inhabit, or even only visit.
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