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In Ordinary Time: Fragments of a Family History
In 1993, aged twenty, Carmel Mc Mahon left Ireland for New York, carrying two suitcases and a ton of unseen baggage. It took years, and a bitter struggle with alcohol addiction, to unpick the intricate traumas of her past and present.
Candid yet lyrical, In Ordinary Time mines the ways that trauma reverberates through time and through individual lives, drawing connections to the events and rhythms of Ireland’s long Celtic, early Christian and Catholic history. From tragically lost siblings to the broader social scars of the Famine and the Magdalene Laundries, Mc Mahon sketches the evolution of a consciousness – from her conservative 1970s upbringing to 1990s New York, and back to the much-changed Ireland of today.
Candid yet lyrical, In Ordinary Time mines the ways that trauma reverberates through time and through individual lives, drawing connections to the events and rhythms of Ireland’s long Celtic, early Christian and Catholic history. From tragically lost siblings to the broader social scars of the Famine and the Magdalene Laundries, Mc Mahon sketches the evolution of a consciousness – from her conservative 1970s upbringing to 1990s New York, and back to the much-changed Ireland of today.
177 pages, Kindle Edition
Published February 2, 2023
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February 12, 2023
Irish-born Carmel McMahon travelled to New York City in 1993 when she was in her early twenties, hoping to gain a modelling contract and make something of herself. She ended up staying in New York and becoming an American citizen, but has recently returned to her homeland. Her book is a sometimes lyrical, quasi-mystical mix of memoir, literary snippets, Irish history and Celtic myth, served with a dose of postcolonial theory.
The first pages of the memoir signal the author’s preoccupation with trauma. I was almost immediately reminded of two other recent books: Canadian physician-author Gabor Maté’s The Myth of Normal and the Irish war correspondent Fergal Keane’s The Madness. Like Maté, McMahon is interested in intergenerational/inherited trauma, an emerging and still somewhat uncertain science. She refers to the work of psychiatrist/PTSD researcher Rachel Yehuda and that of Marianne Frisch, whom she calls a “scholar of memory studies”—a description that is slightly misleading. Frisch is, in fact, William Peterfield Trent Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and Professor in the Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality. Her writing concerns “the transmission of memories of violence across generations.” A cursory online search suggests that Holocaust narratives are a focus of hers.
Like BBC journalist Fergal Keane’s, McMahon’s temperament is melancholic and her life, like his, was ruled by alcohol for many years. She mines her familial past and the cultural history of Ireland to understand her distress and the decisions she’s made. Unlike Keane, however, McMahon regards her history through the sometimes distorting lens of colonialism. To my mind this produces strained and overly simplistic interpretations. Take, for example, the life of the author’s paternal great-grandfather, Laurence Bradley, whose forbears left Ireland for Glasgow during the Irish Potato Famine—which McMahon refers to using the controversial label “the Famine-Genocide.” Bradley lost his 37-year-old wife to Bright’s Disease. Heartbroken and drinking heavily, he was unable to care for his four children, all under the age of ten. They ended up in the poorhouse. Bradley ultimately enlisted with the British army. A sapper in World War I, he was “blown to smithereens” in Flanders Fields in 1916. Later, his 25-year-old son, George, would travel to New York and vanish. No one knew what had become of him. According to the author, Laurence and George Bradley were “two bodies literally and figuratively erased by colonial history.” This strikes me as a facile and inaccurate conclusion. Wars are almost invariably about imperialism, disputes over territory and resources, the expansion or retention of them. Dying in one is hardly a uniquely Irish experience of oppression. As for attributing a young Irish immigrant’s disappearance in a bustling metropolis to colonialism: that’s quite a stretch. McMahon can’t even resist framing the “Kafkaesque nightmare of bureaucracy” that her family encounters as they try to bring her brother back from India. She refers to the country’s red tape as “the frayed remnants of British colonial rule.” Even Dublin-born short story and New Yorker magazine writer Maeve Brennan and colonization are mentioned in the same breath, though it’s the booze not the British that did the colonizing in Brennan’s case.
McMahon’s fragmentary memoir has a creative structure that supports the goal of reconnecting with the ancestral past. The book is divided into four parts, which are named after ancient Celtic festivals: Imbolc (also called St. Bridget’s Day) which marks the beginning of spring and is celebrated on February 2; Beltane, the Gaelic May Day festival that falls midway between the spring equinox and summer solstice; Lughnasadh, the early August festival that marks the beginning of the harvest; and, finally Samhain, on November 1, the first day of winter and the beginning of the new year, when the veil between this world and the next is lifted and the living can mingle with the dead. McMahon tells about the festivals and relates stories about herself and her family that occurred in the “ordinary time” between those special days.
The author initially presents tells herself as a lost, soul-sick young woman in New York. The ancient Irish phrase uaigneas an chladaigh, meaning “the sense of loneliness on the shore; a haunting presence of people who lived and died long ago” resonates with her. Having always felt the pain of disconnection, she “set about facing the silences” that caused the problem. McMahon explains that her character may have been set before she was born; her young self was troubled in ways she could not access or articulate. McMahon’s mother was in deep grief when Carmel was born. “Childhood,” she writes, “was for other children. Death was my deepest and most primary concern.”
The book contains some family and ancestral stories, but personal ones form the bulk of it. Most focus on McMahon’s time in New York City: her pipe-dream of a modelling career; the humorously depicted, early attempts at waitressing to supplement the far-from-adequate modelling income; later jobs in the office at the Whitney Museum of American Art and as a personal assistant to a wealthy New York woman; her various friends and odd living arrangements; the death of a drug-addicted younger brother back home ; a road-trip across America, during which she studied US history for her citizenship test; the realization that she’d moved from one colonized land to another; her eventual enrolment at City College in New York City where she studied English, with an emphasis on women’s and postcolonial writing; her ongoing problem with alcohol and her eventual coming to terms with her addiction; and finally, her return to Ireland in 2021.
McMahon’s writing is strong overall, especially when she refrains from funnelling her experiences and those of her ancestors into the restrictive box of postcolonial theory. However, there are a few frustrating lapses into fuzzy prose that sounds profound but whose meaning is elusive. For example, she describes the Irish Hunger Memorial in Battery Park, which consists of a partial cottage, rebuilt from the original County Mayo stones that were transported across the Atlantic: “The missing roof and walls are sketched in with words like these. Words that reach for meaning in absences and try to make links between people and stones.” What?
I also had trouble with the author’s tendency to self-dramatization and her penchant for mystical interpretations of events. Carl Jung’s eccentric spiritual ideas about subjective experience have clearly influenced the way she views her life. In his later years, Jung believed that “some personal experiences might be attributed to unresolved ancestral issues.” They “manifest in individuals” but are of a “collective nature.” McMahon seems to believe this is her problem—that she’s carrying the pain of her forbears. When her road trip takes her onto the Great Plains, she feels her ancestors are trying to communicate with her. Elsewhere in the book, she states that if a story wants to be told through her, it’ll arise of “its own accord in its own time.” Even her coming to New York is viewed in this rarefied, fateful (can I say “slightly grandiose”?) light: “What is buried, secrets and stories, will in time find a way to surface and be told. Maybe this is why I went to New York, all those years ago, an unknown motive behind the escape, to heal the family haunting that showed up in me to see my forebears fully, and through them to draw a timeline and to see my place on it, to acknowledge their lives and their suffering, so that those who come after us can tread little lighter, not on Ireland, or England, or America, but on the earth that will hold the dust of us all.”
Mystical musings and postcolonial interpretations aside, I enjoyed McMahon’s work of creative nonfiction. It’s an unusual book, and those interested in Irish culture, myth, and personal memoir may also find value in it.
Rating: 3.5 rounded down.
The first pages of the memoir signal the author’s preoccupation with trauma. I was almost immediately reminded of two other recent books: Canadian physician-author Gabor Maté’s The Myth of Normal and the Irish war correspondent Fergal Keane’s The Madness. Like Maté, McMahon is interested in intergenerational/inherited trauma, an emerging and still somewhat uncertain science. She refers to the work of psychiatrist/PTSD researcher Rachel Yehuda and that of Marianne Frisch, whom she calls a “scholar of memory studies”—a description that is slightly misleading. Frisch is, in fact, William Peterfield Trent Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and Professor in the Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality. Her writing concerns “the transmission of memories of violence across generations.” A cursory online search suggests that Holocaust narratives are a focus of hers.
Like BBC journalist Fergal Keane’s, McMahon’s temperament is melancholic and her life, like his, was ruled by alcohol for many years. She mines her familial past and the cultural history of Ireland to understand her distress and the decisions she’s made. Unlike Keane, however, McMahon regards her history through the sometimes distorting lens of colonialism. To my mind this produces strained and overly simplistic interpretations. Take, for example, the life of the author’s paternal great-grandfather, Laurence Bradley, whose forbears left Ireland for Glasgow during the Irish Potato Famine—which McMahon refers to using the controversial label “the Famine-Genocide.” Bradley lost his 37-year-old wife to Bright’s Disease. Heartbroken and drinking heavily, he was unable to care for his four children, all under the age of ten. They ended up in the poorhouse. Bradley ultimately enlisted with the British army. A sapper in World War I, he was “blown to smithereens” in Flanders Fields in 1916. Later, his 25-year-old son, George, would travel to New York and vanish. No one knew what had become of him. According to the author, Laurence and George Bradley were “two bodies literally and figuratively erased by colonial history.” This strikes me as a facile and inaccurate conclusion. Wars are almost invariably about imperialism, disputes over territory and resources, the expansion or retention of them. Dying in one is hardly a uniquely Irish experience of oppression. As for attributing a young Irish immigrant’s disappearance in a bustling metropolis to colonialism: that’s quite a stretch. McMahon can’t even resist framing the “Kafkaesque nightmare of bureaucracy” that her family encounters as they try to bring her brother back from India. She refers to the country’s red tape as “the frayed remnants of British colonial rule.” Even Dublin-born short story and New Yorker magazine writer Maeve Brennan and colonization are mentioned in the same breath, though it’s the booze not the British that did the colonizing in Brennan’s case.
McMahon’s fragmentary memoir has a creative structure that supports the goal of reconnecting with the ancestral past. The book is divided into four parts, which are named after ancient Celtic festivals: Imbolc (also called St. Bridget’s Day) which marks the beginning of spring and is celebrated on February 2; Beltane, the Gaelic May Day festival that falls midway between the spring equinox and summer solstice; Lughnasadh, the early August festival that marks the beginning of the harvest; and, finally Samhain, on November 1, the first day of winter and the beginning of the new year, when the veil between this world and the next is lifted and the living can mingle with the dead. McMahon tells about the festivals and relates stories about herself and her family that occurred in the “ordinary time” between those special days.
The author initially presents tells herself as a lost, soul-sick young woman in New York. The ancient Irish phrase uaigneas an chladaigh, meaning “the sense of loneliness on the shore; a haunting presence of people who lived and died long ago” resonates with her. Having always felt the pain of disconnection, she “set about facing the silences” that caused the problem. McMahon explains that her character may have been set before she was born; her young self was troubled in ways she could not access or articulate. McMahon’s mother was in deep grief when Carmel was born. “Childhood,” she writes, “was for other children. Death was my deepest and most primary concern.”
The book contains some family and ancestral stories, but personal ones form the bulk of it. Most focus on McMahon’s time in New York City: her pipe-dream of a modelling career; the humorously depicted, early attempts at waitressing to supplement the far-from-adequate modelling income; later jobs in the office at the Whitney Museum of American Art and as a personal assistant to a wealthy New York woman; her various friends and odd living arrangements; the death of a drug-addicted younger brother back home ; a road-trip across America, during which she studied US history for her citizenship test; the realization that she’d moved from one colonized land to another; her eventual enrolment at City College in New York City where she studied English, with an emphasis on women’s and postcolonial writing; her ongoing problem with alcohol and her eventual coming to terms with her addiction; and finally, her return to Ireland in 2021.
McMahon’s writing is strong overall, especially when she refrains from funnelling her experiences and those of her ancestors into the restrictive box of postcolonial theory. However, there are a few frustrating lapses into fuzzy prose that sounds profound but whose meaning is elusive. For example, she describes the Irish Hunger Memorial in Battery Park, which consists of a partial cottage, rebuilt from the original County Mayo stones that were transported across the Atlantic: “The missing roof and walls are sketched in with words like these. Words that reach for meaning in absences and try to make links between people and stones.” What?
I also had trouble with the author’s tendency to self-dramatization and her penchant for mystical interpretations of events. Carl Jung’s eccentric spiritual ideas about subjective experience have clearly influenced the way she views her life. In his later years, Jung believed that “some personal experiences might be attributed to unresolved ancestral issues.” They “manifest in individuals” but are of a “collective nature.” McMahon seems to believe this is her problem—that she’s carrying the pain of her forbears. When her road trip takes her onto the Great Plains, she feels her ancestors are trying to communicate with her. Elsewhere in the book, she states that if a story wants to be told through her, it’ll arise of “its own accord in its own time.” Even her coming to New York is viewed in this rarefied, fateful (can I say “slightly grandiose”?) light: “What is buried, secrets and stories, will in time find a way to surface and be told. Maybe this is why I went to New York, all those years ago, an unknown motive behind the escape, to heal the family haunting that showed up in me to see my forebears fully, and through them to draw a timeline and to see my place on it, to acknowledge their lives and their suffering, so that those who come after us can tread little lighter, not on Ireland, or England, or America, but on the earth that will hold the dust of us all.”
Mystical musings and postcolonial interpretations aside, I enjoyed McMahon’s work of creative nonfiction. It’s an unusual book, and those interested in Irish culture, myth, and personal memoir may also find value in it.
Rating: 3.5 rounded down.
March 29, 2024
In Ordinary Time is one of those wonderful finds, when a number of your own disparate interests collide and someone has managed to put together a work that spans years, across two countries, reflecting on different events in their own life and the background of a country and culture's history, with these continuous threads running through it, that make it almost seamless.
Carmel McMahon has written these fragments of a family history and structured them into four parts of three chapters, beginning with Part One: Imbolc: February, The Feast of Saint Brigid and ending in Part Four Samhain: January, Notes on A Return where the story comes full circle. There are 21 black and white illustrations scattered throughout the text, ordinary photos that amplify the message and create a sense of travel through time. I looked back at the index page for each photo and scribbled my pencilled note underneath it, such was the joy of words meeting image.
Full circle feels appropriate to describe a work that despite that linear structure of months and parts, is not that, it is points on the spiral of life that goes through cycles, repeating cycles, short cycles, long cycles, interconnected and intergenerational cycles.
Each of the events that she describes in her family history have a shadow history in the culture and while she reflects on her own situation, she finds resonance in the voices of others who have gone before, in particular those whose story we might not have heard, or if we have, might not have been aware of the full picture.
Her story begins somewhere in the middle of her own self-imposed exile, living in New York City.
She questions whether it begins here, or in 1937 when the new Irish state ratified its constitution to reflect a strengthened church-state partnership, that would have a devastating effect on thousands of lives of girls and women and their children, and the unborn future generations who might inherit that affected DNA. All those sent to the Magdalene laundries. In 1966, her mother would live a version of the shame that surrounded pregnancy out of wedlock, managing to avoid institutional incarceration by disappearing for a while.
Or did the story begin when she had her first drink, at the age of ten, at a family gathering, feelings of inferiority and shame, dulled by the dregs of the adults drinks that replaced that unwanted feeling with one of warmth, of a circle of golden light.
McMahon left Ireland in the 1990's and did not return permanently until the pandemic era, 2021. Ironically, it seems to this reader, that the return has allowed the distance to reflect on the journey and the learning and to piece the interconnectivity of so many people's lives past, present and future into this text. Science has proven and is now able to show how stress and trauma can be passed on biologically from one generation to the next.
Listening to the podcast On Being, she hears Dr. Rachel Yehuda remind us that:
These intertwined fragments thus reveal the events, experiences, the slow realisation of all that is working on her, the understanding and the aspects that will aid the healing.
There are the endless jobs she tries to hold down, while numbing herself nightly; the visits back home precipitated by a tragedy, the road trip across American, an escape that only brings her closer to understanding loss and aloneness.
McMahon reads and shares anecdotes and reflections on the lives of other women who immigrated before her, the young Irish immigrant Maeve Brennan who was a staff writer at the New Yorker before the disease of alcoholism colonized her life; Mary Smith, one of many Irish women used for gynecological experiments in New York hospitals in the mid nineteenth century, Grace Farrell.
She reflects on the famine, on the role of church and state, on the complicit silences and forgetting, on the advances that were made at the expense of the vulnerable, the now removed statues, the little known memorials of the unnamed - acknowledging the collective impact of a nation's traumas on individuals and families, with brief insights into a way forward, towards speaking up, sharing stories, creating meaning, allowing a space for healing, for moving towards the light, to enable the passing on of a lighter legacy to our future generations.
Sharing her story is part of that, not just for the writer, but for those who might find resonance in her journey, towards their own and to remember the forgotten, the ordinary women like Mary Smith.
Highly Recommended.
Carmel McMahon has written these fragments of a family history and structured them into four parts of three chapters, beginning with Part One: Imbolc: February, The Feast of Saint Brigid and ending in Part Four Samhain: January, Notes on A Return where the story comes full circle. There are 21 black and white illustrations scattered throughout the text, ordinary photos that amplify the message and create a sense of travel through time. I looked back at the index page for each photo and scribbled my pencilled note underneath it, such was the joy of words meeting image.
Full circle feels appropriate to describe a work that despite that linear structure of months and parts, is not that, it is points on the spiral of life that goes through cycles, repeating cycles, short cycles, long cycles, interconnected and intergenerational cycles.
Each of the events that she describes in her family history have a shadow history in the culture and while she reflects on her own situation, she finds resonance in the voices of others who have gone before, in particular those whose story we might not have heard, or if we have, might not have been aware of the full picture.
Her story begins somewhere in the middle of her own self-imposed exile, living in New York City.
The city had not yet woken on the frigid Sunday morning of February 20,2011, when the body of a young Irish woman was found outside St. Brigid's Church in Manhattan's East Village. The news reports cited alcoholism, homelessness, and hypothermia as contributing factors in her death. They said that earlier that month, on St. Brigid's feast day she had turned thirty-five years old. They said she wanted to be an artist. They said her name was Grace Farrell.
She questions whether it begins here, or in 1937 when the new Irish state ratified its constitution to reflect a strengthened church-state partnership, that would have a devastating effect on thousands of lives of girls and women and their children, and the unborn future generations who might inherit that affected DNA. All those sent to the Magdalene laundries. In 1966, her mother would live a version of the shame that surrounded pregnancy out of wedlock, managing to avoid institutional incarceration by disappearing for a while.
Women and children were not afforded the rights of citizenship, of subjecthood, of being. They lived under threat of being erased, hidden, buried. This is why my mother tells me - halting, hesitating - that in her day it was the worst thing in the world for a girl to find herself pregnant, but worse still was for her to talk about it.
Or did the story begin when she had her first drink, at the age of ten, at a family gathering, feelings of inferiority and shame, dulled by the dregs of the adults drinks that replaced that unwanted feeling with one of warmth, of a circle of golden light.
McMahon left Ireland in the 1990's and did not return permanently until the pandemic era, 2021. Ironically, it seems to this reader, that the return has allowed the distance to reflect on the journey and the learning and to piece the interconnectivity of so many people's lives past, present and future into this text. Science has proven and is now able to show how stress and trauma can be passed on biologically from one generation to the next.
We know that now. Vehicles of transportation include, according to the scholar of memory studies Marianne Hirsch, "narratives, actions and symptoms." The stories we tell and don't tell, the actions we take and don't take, the symptoms expressed by a mother holding the trauma tightly to herself, because she refused to burden her children with it.
Listening to the podcast On Being, she hears Dr. Rachel Yehuda remind us that:
...we are not in biological prison: experiences and events in our environment can also make positive changes to our programming. We can consciously move towards healing.
These intertwined fragments thus reveal the events, experiences, the slow realisation of all that is working on her, the understanding and the aspects that will aid the healing.
There are the endless jobs she tries to hold down, while numbing herself nightly; the visits back home precipitated by a tragedy, the road trip across American, an escape that only brings her closer to understanding loss and aloneness.
The industrial ghost towns, the late spring rain, the wide, low skies. The old sadness rising. An excess of black bile, they used to say, made the melancholic personality. Freud said that mourning and melancholia are akin in that they are both responses to loss. Mourning is a conscious and healthy response to the loss of a love object. Melancholia is more complicated. It operates on a subconscious level. All the feelings of loss are present, but for what? The melancholic cannot say. This, Freud says, is a pathology.
McMahon reads and shares anecdotes and reflections on the lives of other women who immigrated before her, the young Irish immigrant Maeve Brennan who was a staff writer at the New Yorker before the disease of alcoholism colonized her life; Mary Smith, one of many Irish women used for gynecological experiments in New York hospitals in the mid nineteenth century, Grace Farrell.
She reflects on the famine, on the role of church and state, on the complicit silences and forgetting, on the advances that were made at the expense of the vulnerable, the now removed statues, the little known memorials of the unnamed - acknowledging the collective impact of a nation's traumas on individuals and families, with brief insights into a way forward, towards speaking up, sharing stories, creating meaning, allowing a space for healing, for moving towards the light, to enable the passing on of a lighter legacy to our future generations.
Sharing her story is part of that, not just for the writer, but for those who might find resonance in her journey, towards their own and to remember the forgotten, the ordinary women like Mary Smith.
Highly Recommended.
November 20, 2025
i enjoyed this! maybe expected a little more from it but loved how mc mahon weaved so much of irish history with her own family history and trauma, expertly done!
December 28, 2025
I first heard of In Ordinary Time by Carmel McMahon when it was recommended by Oisín McKenna as one of his #FoylesFour. He also recommended it over on @underthecover.books as one of five books to get you into Irish Literature.
In Ordinary Time is a memoir, but also covers a vast array of topics ranging from the Irish Famine, St. Brigid, the Irish diaspora in New York, mother and baby homes, Marion J. Sims and the gynaecological experiments he performed on both enslaved and Irish women, and psychiatric illness, among other subjects. McMahon weaves these topics into the story of her own life: her childhood, her emigration to New York in the 90s, various jobs she held down while also suffering from alcoholism, witnessing 9/11, going on a road trip across America with a friend, and the struggles of her own mentally ill brother.
McMahon explores the idea of generational trauma and how the sufferings of a mother can affect the genes of her unborn baby, highlighting how trauma can be transmitted biologically across generations. The book uses this idea to connect various aspects of Irish history to how they influence Irish identity today, particularly in her own life.
In Ordinary Time is a book that sounds like it shouldn’t make sense at all but absolutely does. Nor is it specifically for Irish readers. McMahon’s writing is beautiful, warm, and poetic, and the entire book is immensely readable and interesting. While reading it, I found myself going down several internet rabbit holes to delve deeper into some of the subjects she writes about.
While this memoir speaks to a lot of things that I’m already interested in, I particularly loved how McMahon probes how Irish history can seep into the consciousness of a country and its culture. It’s a book that really made me think and reflect and is definitely one of the best books I’ve read this year.
For more reviews, follow @podsticles on Instagram.
In Ordinary Time is a memoir, but also covers a vast array of topics ranging from the Irish Famine, St. Brigid, the Irish diaspora in New York, mother and baby homes, Marion J. Sims and the gynaecological experiments he performed on both enslaved and Irish women, and psychiatric illness, among other subjects. McMahon weaves these topics into the story of her own life: her childhood, her emigration to New York in the 90s, various jobs she held down while also suffering from alcoholism, witnessing 9/11, going on a road trip across America with a friend, and the struggles of her own mentally ill brother.
McMahon explores the idea of generational trauma and how the sufferings of a mother can affect the genes of her unborn baby, highlighting how trauma can be transmitted biologically across generations. The book uses this idea to connect various aspects of Irish history to how they influence Irish identity today, particularly in her own life.
In Ordinary Time is a book that sounds like it shouldn’t make sense at all but absolutely does. Nor is it specifically for Irish readers. McMahon’s writing is beautiful, warm, and poetic, and the entire book is immensely readable and interesting. While reading it, I found myself going down several internet rabbit holes to delve deeper into some of the subjects she writes about.
While this memoir speaks to a lot of things that I’m already interested in, I particularly loved how McMahon probes how Irish history can seep into the consciousness of a country and its culture. It’s a book that really made me think and reflect and is definitely one of the best books I’ve read this year.
For more reviews, follow @podsticles on Instagram.
January 30, 2024
Gorgeous book. Beautifully written. Heartbreaking, searingly honest, informative and insightful. As an Irish woman who also migrated to the US I can relate to much of what Carmel writes here, although our experiences are completely different. Themes include grief, illness, alcoholism, emigration and Catholicism and the hold it had on Irish people, in particular women. I highly recommend this excellent book and will come back to it time and again.
January 3, 2026
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Fragment: noun., a part broken off or detached
My first read of 2026 and the first off my gifted Christmas book stack, and a decent start to my reading year.
The fragments - Magdalene Laundries, the Irish Famine, the Irish in New York, witnessing 9/11, road trips and alcoholism, family tragedy, mental illness and loss, generational trauma (explored better in The Myth of normal by Gabor Mate, a book I read last year), leaving and coming home, and immoral gynaecological experimental surgeries - this was a massive rabbit hole that I dived into, and the most interesting fragment, learning of James Marion Sims, an American doctor who performed surgery on vulnerable patients (enslaved black women and impoverished Irish women) without their consent or anaesthetic in the development of a new surgical technique for post traumatic childbirth repair of vesicovaginal fistula; I love unexpectedly finding such gems of knowledge in my reading.
I mostly enjoyed turning the pages of Carmel’s memories but like all fragments, parts broken off, I felt a wee bit detached from some of them.
I read in paperback
A good read.
3.5 stars
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March 1, 2023
An honest look into the struggle of being a woman, who is Irish Catholic.
MC Mahon gives an honest glimpse into the history of the people of Ireland, why so many Irish emigrated, the stronghold Catholicism had on the society, and the trauma of so many women. Her family endured tremendous loss, and the wisdom to do things differently than what is considered normal.
s horrific loss, and tremendous love.
MC Mahon gives an honest glimpse into the history of the people of Ireland, why so many Irish emigrated, the stronghold Catholicism had on the society, and the trauma of so many women. Her family endured tremendous loss, and the wisdom to do things differently than what is considered normal.
s horrific loss, and tremendous love.
March 20, 2024
In Ordinary Time by Carmel Mc Mahon
The political is very, very personal! It feels impossible to do justice to Carmel Mc Mahon’s extraordinary narrative nonfiction/memoir, In Ordinary Time. This is a book everyone should read. I felt so grateful that Mc Mahon let me into her world (the personal) while at the same time giving me a history lesson. Not just a run-of-the mill history lesson but little-known facts buried beneath the “accomplishments” of prominent figures in a patriarchal society. For example, the gynecological experiments done to poor Irish women in NYC without anesthesia (by the same men who perfected their torture on female slaves in the south before going to New York). In Mc Mahon’s deft hands, we can imagine the suffering these poor women endured, believing in the promise of America after their arduous journey to escape starvation and disease from The Great Famine-Genocide only to be physically tortured in the name of science. History and the personal intersect at every turn and feel so immediate and pertinent to our lives now.
At first I thought, this is a love letter to her mother, then I thought, this is a love letter to the women of Ireland, then to women everywhere, all of Ireland, all those who have suffered, the Ancient Celts, immigrants everywhere, the mentally ill, people in all stages of alcoholism, anyone who is human especially those whose stories have been lost in a society steeped in racism, sexism, and classism. As Mc Mahon writes, there is a connection between us and between all women, and all people in the margins of patriarchal societies, in the historic struggle for bodily autonomy.
Loss is everywhere and clarity. Mc Mahon lives in those liminal spaces (and pays the price) where our ancestors’ suffering becomes our own in the one way “trickle down” might actually be true. As she says, nothing happens in isolation, and we are all connected in ways we do not understand, and she proves it. Nor does she idealize. There is nothing more painful than the betrayal felt when the oppressors are those in whom you’ve put your trust as anyone who has heard of or experienced the trauma perpetuated by the Catholic Church in Ireland. Or, as she notes, one of the doctors performing gynecological experiments on poor Irish immigrant women was the son of an Irish immigrant.
Landscape and how it inhabits us is prominent throughout especially for those who had to leave their land whether during the Great Famine-Genocide (in an interesting coincidence, while I was reading In Ordinary Time my cousins have been posting on FB how our great-great grandparents left Ireland during the Famine) or for the many more recently exiled from their beloved soil only to be unwelcomed and mistreated in strange lands. I was reminded of Kathleen Norris’s Dakota in the way Mc Mahon was able to move backward into history and myth of the land she cherished to forward in rediscovery of what it still has to teach her. As she writes, it seems that we might do well to remember that we carry these people inside us, and we might, in our moment, benefit from some acquaintance with their wisdom and ways.
Again, I cannot do this book justice. It’s impossible to summarize the richness and depth of Mc Mahon’s personal journey and its intersection with history as she brings us full circle to stand, as she says, exactly where we are meant to be. In it, she notes how she and Joan Didion both suffered from migraines. I contend that Mc Mahon has earned her place alongside Didion and Norris as a remarkable narrative non-fiction writer.
The political is very, very personal! It feels impossible to do justice to Carmel Mc Mahon’s extraordinary narrative nonfiction/memoir, In Ordinary Time. This is a book everyone should read. I felt so grateful that Mc Mahon let me into her world (the personal) while at the same time giving me a history lesson. Not just a run-of-the mill history lesson but little-known facts buried beneath the “accomplishments” of prominent figures in a patriarchal society. For example, the gynecological experiments done to poor Irish women in NYC without anesthesia (by the same men who perfected their torture on female slaves in the south before going to New York). In Mc Mahon’s deft hands, we can imagine the suffering these poor women endured, believing in the promise of America after their arduous journey to escape starvation and disease from The Great Famine-Genocide only to be physically tortured in the name of science. History and the personal intersect at every turn and feel so immediate and pertinent to our lives now.
At first I thought, this is a love letter to her mother, then I thought, this is a love letter to the women of Ireland, then to women everywhere, all of Ireland, all those who have suffered, the Ancient Celts, immigrants everywhere, the mentally ill, people in all stages of alcoholism, anyone who is human especially those whose stories have been lost in a society steeped in racism, sexism, and classism. As Mc Mahon writes, there is a connection between us and between all women, and all people in the margins of patriarchal societies, in the historic struggle for bodily autonomy.
Loss is everywhere and clarity. Mc Mahon lives in those liminal spaces (and pays the price) where our ancestors’ suffering becomes our own in the one way “trickle down” might actually be true. As she says, nothing happens in isolation, and we are all connected in ways we do not understand, and she proves it. Nor does she idealize. There is nothing more painful than the betrayal felt when the oppressors are those in whom you’ve put your trust as anyone who has heard of or experienced the trauma perpetuated by the Catholic Church in Ireland. Or, as she notes, one of the doctors performing gynecological experiments on poor Irish immigrant women was the son of an Irish immigrant.
Landscape and how it inhabits us is prominent throughout especially for those who had to leave their land whether during the Great Famine-Genocide (in an interesting coincidence, while I was reading In Ordinary Time my cousins have been posting on FB how our great-great grandparents left Ireland during the Famine) or for the many more recently exiled from their beloved soil only to be unwelcomed and mistreated in strange lands. I was reminded of Kathleen Norris’s Dakota in the way Mc Mahon was able to move backward into history and myth of the land she cherished to forward in rediscovery of what it still has to teach her. As she writes, it seems that we might do well to remember that we carry these people inside us, and we might, in our moment, benefit from some acquaintance with their wisdom and ways.
Again, I cannot do this book justice. It’s impossible to summarize the richness and depth of Mc Mahon’s personal journey and its intersection with history as she brings us full circle to stand, as she says, exactly where we are meant to be. In it, she notes how she and Joan Didion both suffered from migraines. I contend that Mc Mahon has earned her place alongside Didion and Norris as a remarkable narrative non-fiction writer.
June 8, 2023
In Ordinary Time is a hybrid memoir. The memoir part of the book is Carmel’s life from 1973 to the present, which covers her alcoholism, sibling loss and immigration. Other themes that run through the book are Irish history and older pre-Christian times and the mythological.
Carmel’s years spent in New York weren’t altogether easy. She flitted from home to home, battled alcoholism, never seemed to fit in, and found it difficult to let go of grief. She eventually turned a corner in her life and sought help.
In 2011, after the death of an Irish immigrant outside St Brigid’s Church in Manhattan’s East Village, Carmel questioned why a young Irish woman died an alcoholic death outside a church named after an Irish saint, built by Irish famine refugees in the 19th century. The young woman was born outside of marriage in 1970’s Ireland, a circumstance that Carmel believed had to have played a part in shaping this woman’s life and death.
Carmel unravelled the enigma of her emotional suffering as she delved into an exploration of historical traumas from past lifetimes. She took a close look at the impact of ancestral emotional wounds that we carry. Wounds that heal for some but never for others. She raises many issues and questions in her book.
I’m seldom drawn to memoirs and autobiographies. I have to say, I did enjoy this book very much and probably wouldn’t have picked up if it hadn't been chosen as our book club read of the month. The story is very personal and it takes a brave person to write and publish such a book. Many of us could tell similar stories about our families and ourselves, if we only knew where to begin.
Unlike a lot of my peers and relatives from the 80s, I didn’t emigrate to America or even to England when I’d finished school. I was too much of a home bird. I don’t think I’d have survived if I’d left home at twenty years of age.
That’s how young Carmel McMahon was when she left Ireland for a new life in New York in 1993. The emotional baggage that she carried with her at twenty years of age was heavier than the suitcases full of her belongings.
This story pulled at every part of me—emotionally and physically. I found myself questioning many aspects of myself and my family. I thought a lot about the ‘truth behind the famine’. The lies we’ve been fed after all these years and the importance of truth.
I thought about the grandparents I’ve never known and realise I know so little about them, especially the women.
What exactly do we learn from our family tree and is it enough? Is it enough to even begin our understanding of our tangled emotions, the ones that burden us? Every woman has her own story to tell but not all women dare to tell. Why?
What causes some of us to suffer addictions? To suffer autoimmune diseases? To suffer constant headaches and migraines? Do we inherit all these, not just genetically? So many questions.
Carmel’s years spent in New York weren’t altogether easy. She flitted from home to home, battled alcoholism, never seemed to fit in, and found it difficult to let go of grief. She eventually turned a corner in her life and sought help.
In 2011, after the death of an Irish immigrant outside St Brigid’s Church in Manhattan’s East Village, Carmel questioned why a young Irish woman died an alcoholic death outside a church named after an Irish saint, built by Irish famine refugees in the 19th century. The young woman was born outside of marriage in 1970’s Ireland, a circumstance that Carmel believed had to have played a part in shaping this woman’s life and death.
Carmel unravelled the enigma of her emotional suffering as she delved into an exploration of historical traumas from past lifetimes. She took a close look at the impact of ancestral emotional wounds that we carry. Wounds that heal for some but never for others. She raises many issues and questions in her book.
I’m seldom drawn to memoirs and autobiographies. I have to say, I did enjoy this book very much and probably wouldn’t have picked up if it hadn't been chosen as our book club read of the month. The story is very personal and it takes a brave person to write and publish such a book. Many of us could tell similar stories about our families and ourselves, if we only knew where to begin.
Unlike a lot of my peers and relatives from the 80s, I didn’t emigrate to America or even to England when I’d finished school. I was too much of a home bird. I don’t think I’d have survived if I’d left home at twenty years of age.
That’s how young Carmel McMahon was when she left Ireland for a new life in New York in 1993. The emotional baggage that she carried with her at twenty years of age was heavier than the suitcases full of her belongings.
This story pulled at every part of me—emotionally and physically. I found myself questioning many aspects of myself and my family. I thought a lot about the ‘truth behind the famine’. The lies we’ve been fed after all these years and the importance of truth.
I thought about the grandparents I’ve never known and realise I know so little about them, especially the women.
What exactly do we learn from our family tree and is it enough? Is it enough to even begin our understanding of our tangled emotions, the ones that burden us? Every woman has her own story to tell but not all women dare to tell. Why?
What causes some of us to suffer addictions? To suffer autoimmune diseases? To suffer constant headaches and migraines? Do we inherit all these, not just genetically? So many questions.
March 15, 2023
McMahon explores not only what it means to be an Irish emigrant, but specifically what it means to be a female Irish emigrant. She explores what came before us and makes you think about what will come after. I love reading books like this, McMahon really puts into words feelings I could never articulate.
May 3, 2023
This book leans heavily into Irish history to explore nation, trauma and memory. It reads like what it is, an Irish person deciphering Irishness through a prism of emigration which is not my cup of tea. It's another case of an author being let down by the marketing of their book - this is not the book I thought it was going to be. I was looking forward to reading the latter.
February 18, 2024
This book came recommended by a friend and I loved it. Carmel has such a fresh approach to being able to articulate the Irish experience. I have felt so much of what she has written within me but have been unable to articulate. I feel like this will be a book that I will gift many people and return to throughout my life.
Go raibh maith agat!
Go raibh maith agat!
June 23, 2023
Really excellent book about Irish History (in small chunks so not being lectured) and the gentle tale of a horrendous life. Really recommended, if you can get past the worst cover in the history of book covers.
July 30, 2024
A life changing read for me that brought together many strands of thought covering the theory of inter generational trauma , thoughts about life , death , religion time via the authors very personal and honest story.
May 21, 2023
It reads like an article blown up to become a book. There are very interesting issues in this book. Unfortunately, they are not fully explored due to the brevity of the book.
July 15, 2024
Beautiful book about history + pain
December 24, 2024
A powerful journey through recent and distant family trauma and the lasting effects of colonial cruelty.
May 3, 2025
A wonderful book, to be treasured and re-read; having read it much too quickly as I wanted to know what happened!
September 19, 2025
A great memoir that got me thinking about my Irish roots, learnt a lot about the famine, and the treatment of Irish immigrants during/after that time
December 17, 2025
I will be purchasing this book to return to.
March 22, 2025
Engaging and informative page turner.
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