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Nan: The Life of an Irish Travelling Woman
Nan Donohoe was an Irish Travelling woman, one of Ireland's indigenous gypsies or "tinkers." Traditionally, they traveled the countryside making and repairing tinware, sweeping chimneys, selling small household wares, and doing odd-job work. Today, they live on the roadside in trailers and in government-built camps. Told largely in her own voice, Nan's saga begins in 1919 with her birth in a tent in the Irish Midlands; it follows her life in Ireland and England, in countryside and city slums, through adversity and adventure. Gmelch brings to her task not only the resources of anthropology, but the skill of a sensitive writer and a warmth that allows her to see Nan as a person, not a subject. What emerges is a human story, filled with cruelty and compassion, sorrow and humor, bad luck and good. Titles of related interest from Waveland Arensberg, The Irish An Anthropological Study (ISBN 9780881334012); Sutherland, The Hidden Americans (ISBN 9780881332353); and Yoors, The Gypsies (ISBN 9780881333053).
239 pages, Paperback
First published October 22, 1986
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
May 6, 2018
I have been reluctant to write a review of this book, mainly because it is a book about my grandmother i am Kevin son the one she speaks about to the back of the book who sleeps too much and only goes begging when he wants money so he can go to the movies. So writing a review and being honest can be tough because of how my Nan was treated, its a sensitive topic around the home.
Now to review it as a novel or even a short story is wrong because it is neither. The author only rewrites the story told by Nan. We get maybe 15 chapters and each tells a different story or apart of Nan life, some of which i was told about growing up by my father. But to hear it in her own words is hard. it somehow makes the story more heartbreaking.
The story of Nan is tragic, she was treated so badly. but the issue i had with it was Nan somehow was unable to say no to Mick (my grandfather) or stand up for herself. Her story is a common one with travelling women, no matter how bad they are treated they stay with the man they marry. it is something i don't understand but in some ways can relate too i believe in one wife one life, but in this story, it is an unhappy one.
The stories of her kids are horrific, again stories I was told about but it hit me harder reading it. The story of tiny the dog was horrible it got me somehow over the overall heartbreaking stories told by Nan.
My opinion of Mick (my grandfather) is less than dog shit, he was an abuser and woman beater and it seems he did it because he liked to do it. But when faced with a man he changed his ways. his fear of the Garda (Police) is a sign of his cowardly ways.
The one thing which stood out for me in this book was the author, to me she only wanted a story and in many of the chapters, she goes out of her way to get Nan talking. She even mentions it in one chapter how she walked from site to site trying to find people to tell her stories. To me, this gives the overall book a low rating and it left me with a less than impressed feeling towards the people who wrote it. I even think some of it was made up by the Author, the dates are wrong in somethings and i noticed it right away.
I never knew Nan she died years before i was born, so this book tells me about her. To listen to the words of a son talking about his mother to me he will be biased, and he will only tell you the good things, so this book gives me more of an insight into Nan and her life. It seriously pissed me off that my surname was spelled wrong, Donohue is wrong, it is Donoghue. it's a little thing but so annoying.
I would recommend reading it, but I do feel you will come away with the same opinion I have of the book.
Now to review it as a novel or even a short story is wrong because it is neither. The author only rewrites the story told by Nan. We get maybe 15 chapters and each tells a different story or apart of Nan life, some of which i was told about growing up by my father. But to hear it in her own words is hard. it somehow makes the story more heartbreaking.
The story of Nan is tragic, she was treated so badly. but the issue i had with it was Nan somehow was unable to say no to Mick (my grandfather) or stand up for herself. Her story is a common one with travelling women, no matter how bad they are treated they stay with the man they marry. it is something i don't understand but in some ways can relate too i believe in one wife one life, but in this story, it is an unhappy one.
The stories of her kids are horrific, again stories I was told about but it hit me harder reading it. The story of tiny the dog was horrible it got me somehow over the overall heartbreaking stories told by Nan.
My opinion of Mick (my grandfather) is less than dog shit, he was an abuser and woman beater and it seems he did it because he liked to do it. But when faced with a man he changed his ways. his fear of the Garda (Police) is a sign of his cowardly ways.
The one thing which stood out for me in this book was the author, to me she only wanted a story and in many of the chapters, she goes out of her way to get Nan talking. She even mentions it in one chapter how she walked from site to site trying to find people to tell her stories. To me, this gives the overall book a low rating and it left me with a less than impressed feeling towards the people who wrote it. I even think some of it was made up by the Author, the dates are wrong in somethings and i noticed it right away.
I never knew Nan she died years before i was born, so this book tells me about her. To listen to the words of a son talking about his mother to me he will be biased, and he will only tell you the good things, so this book gives me more of an insight into Nan and her life. It seriously pissed me off that my surname was spelled wrong, Donohue is wrong, it is Donoghue. it's a little thing but so annoying.
I would recommend reading it, but I do feel you will come away with the same opinion I have of the book.
October 19, 2012
Even though I really loved this book, and it is a favorite the writing could have been much better. Being that this is a human study on Irish Travellers you would think the author would have been better skilled. I'm not talking about the way she wrote in Nan's voice, but the way she made mistakes in the telling of her own encounters with Nan, and her personal thoughts on things. Some of the information stated in this book is presented as fact, such as the author stating how the Irish travellers came to be. No one knows how far back they go, and certainly neither does this author. She would have you believe that they were all a bunch or drunkards that couldn't fit into society so they took to the roads, or that they were just poor folks unable to sustain housing, and work. I enjoyed hearing Nan's story enough to overlook this ignorance.
Nan herself doesn't really come from a traditional traveller family, and neither did her second husband Mick. They were born to travellers yes, but they didn't live by the customs. Mick's father fell into the travelling lifestyle by choice. Nan's parents were born into the travelling life. I keep reading these books about travellers hoping for a story about one who lives by the rules, and follows age old traditions, but so far no luck. I was hoping this would be it, but the minute I learned that education was important to Nan's parents I knew this wouldn't be the one (for the time period this was not the norm).To top it off, Nan has a drinking problem.
All of this aside this is still an incredibly interesting tale. The more I read the more attached I became to these people. As I got near the end of the book I had tears in my eyes. The life this woman lived is definitely one worth reading about.
Nan herself doesn't really come from a traditional traveller family, and neither did her second husband Mick. They were born to travellers yes, but they didn't live by the customs. Mick's father fell into the travelling lifestyle by choice. Nan's parents were born into the travelling life. I keep reading these books about travellers hoping for a story about one who lives by the rules, and follows age old traditions, but so far no luck. I was hoping this would be it, but the minute I learned that education was important to Nan's parents I knew this wouldn't be the one (for the time period this was not the norm).To top it off, Nan has a drinking problem.
All of this aside this is still an incredibly interesting tale. The more I read the more attached I became to these people. As I got near the end of the book I had tears in my eyes. The life this woman lived is definitely one worth reading about.
November 24, 2015
Intriguing and awful in the awed sense of the word. Nan endured so much.
January 13, 2026
LUCK OF THE IRISH
Introduction
In Sharon Bohn Gmelch’s ethnography, “Nan: The Life of an Irish Travelling Woman,” Gmelch aids Nan in sharing pieces of her life with outsiders – that is, non-Travellers. Nan’s life began in Granard in the Midland and ended in Finglas in Dublin; like many Travellers, Nan saw a glorious amount of the vast island. Nan’s story begins in the aftermath of the second World War and continues in documentation until her death in 1983; the influence and impact of her story on anthropology has not died with her. Separating Nan’s life into eleven chapters, Gmelch helps to construct many aspects of Irish national and cultural identity into a homogenous, yet distinctive to Nan herself, Traveller ideology. Gmelch takes care to raise the inefficacy of her own intellectual and empathetic ability in fully understanding Nan’s story: “Perhaps I needed to experience a few more traumas in my own life in order to understand at an emotional level as well as an intellectual level, a life that involved so much hardship” (20). To combat this roadblock, she uses many transcriptions of Nan’s own storytelling so that the reader can hear and imagine the story as Nan herself.
As it was and is with many twentieth century Irish people, Nan’s life was significantly intertwined with relationships of religion – Catholicism and Protestantism – and ideas of fateful luck that trace back to ancient Celtic polytheism. The only force that Nan emphasizes more frequently than God is luck, good and bad. Fate and luck are accepted as entities in Nan’s life, and Gmelch demonstrates in the book that this was not the case with a lot of other Irish people – mostly settled people in urban and rural settings. Simple “dumb” luck is, and always has been, an exerting force on lives of itinerate Irish peoples, and luck is particularly Irish in modern social contexts. Using Gmelch’s ethnography about Nan, this report intends to explore the value of religion and luck to the construction of Irish Travelling cultural identity.
Catholicism and Culture
In Gmelch’s ethnography, it is illustrated that the intertwined relationship of individual luckiness and Catholic faith that one’s life is in God’s hands are aids in the construction of Irish Traveller identity. Although Nan wished she had been granted a happier life, she acknowledged that there was nothing she could have done about it: “Our Lord travelled before we ever travelled and he wasn’t ashamed of his mother... Whatever was before me in life I got. And now it’s up to you to make the best of your life. And I hope you will never be on the road” (7). Knowing that Christ faced difficulties in life as he travelled can fill one with a sense of comfort and kinship with him, and this feeling is galvanized by how much significance Nan placed in the lack of shame surrounding Christ. If he was an itinerate individual and he was also good, a Traveller like Nan cannot be as bad as her experiences have made her seem and feel. Gmelch stresses that Nan agrees that Travelling life is full of hardships, but also that Nan accepted her life as it was given to her by God. Faith whilst enduring hardship – faith because of hardship, for that matter – is a general Irish sentiment, and it is this characterizing faith that Nan demonstrated that helps build the Traveller identity. Most Travellers remained Catholic whilst many settle people converted to Protestantism and this distinct separation is intertwined with Traveller faith and culture itself. Throughout the ethnography, the worth that Nan placed in the power is God was stressed to be integral to a Roman Catholic life, and it is implied that it was mostly due to the weighty hardships she experienced that she stayed so faithfully close to him.
Although Nan’s faith was an immensely powerful force in her life and is emblematic of greater Traveller culture, it remains doubtful as to whether or not she was completely comfortable but the ethical concerns of her itineracy: “But be God, there was nothing at all good in me, not one thing good. I was always saying after, "That priest made a big mistake with me." I never was lucky. Even from the time I was small, I never was lucky” (35). Nan’s perception of luck overruled her comfort found in faith. She could acknowledge that life is controlled by God and that He sets us on our individual paths; she could also acknowledge that many of her experiences were poorly timed coincidences and cases of extremely bad luck – a dichotomy concerned with multifaceted Irish culture that combats itself.
Luck
God’s plan and luck do not seem to coincide very simply, but they are more integrated into Irish Travelling culture than they seem. Luck is a much more ancient force than a monolithic Godhead and this means that good and bad luck often takes precedence as the causation of an experience over God. Nan is no different from many Travellers in this theology. “Life histories also provide an insider’s interpretation of culture and portray, perhaps better than any other form... “luck” out of which an individual life is composed” (23). Nan’s insistence of luck as the controlling force of her life is tied into the Traveller cultural identity that preserved knowledge about ancient Celtic entities. She was so emphatic on this point that Gmelch outlines luck as a main theme in the preface of the ethnography before Nan’s story even started. Luck would not be a focus in a book where it was not incredibly important to the culture being studied because it is such a specific idea. Nan’s adamancy on luck being the primary controlling force in her life (even over God) shows how much value Nan placed in the qualities of luck – both good and bad; a lot of bad in her case, as she acknowledges (16, 20, 225, 229).
Summary
Laying down the framework for arguing religion and luck are intertwined pieces that build a cultural identity, this paper used Sharon Gmelch’s ethnography “Nan” to highlight distinctly Irish Traveller views. Nan’s hardships are worse than one would wish on anybody, but her guile spirit does not deteriorate because of them; her faith is tied directly into her characteristic difficulties as a Traveller, and her acceptance of some good luck and mostly bad luck is resilient and mature. Nan’s identity as a Traveller was challenged many times but she knew herself and her cultural identity well enough and welcomed her fate just the same – a trait of peaceful (if not angry) compliance that resonates with many Irish peoples in the 20th century. Gmelch relied on Nan’s narrative – one with significant emphasis on faith and luck – to prove that itinerate Irish people have aspects of strong cultural identity rooted in traditional Irish Catholic faith and Celtic theologies of luckiness. Nan’s storytelling is entrenched in Travellers’ narratives and lifeways, and she puts so much passion into attributing the ills of those Traveller lifeways to God’s power and to luck itself; the narrative and the causation are so connected that Nan’s luck is as connected to her identity as her language or her political views. Gmelch notes in 1980 that “Travellers have begun to take fate into their own hands. But the road ahead is rough. As Nan’s story shows, it always has been” (16), demonstrating that even if you are less accepting of your bad luck as Nan was, Travelling life will always be filled with bad luck and reasons to pray to God.
To further inform myself on Travelling identity before reading Gmelch’s ethnography, I wrote a letter to my great-uncle and his family, who live in Ballymoney in Northern Ireland. His parents, my grandmaternal great-grandparents, married in 1919 in Randalstown and were on the road for sixteen years after. Whilst reading Nan’s story, many stories and characteristics of the two women overlapped; much of the bad luck that Nan faced were horror stories to me as a child. I drafted this paper with the knowledge that Travelling identity is extremely convoluted with Roman Catholicism and ancient Celtic Lugh (personified luck). That identity has formed strong bonds for centuries and it is retained today, even as more and more Travellers settle in urban centers. Travelling life was and is hard, as Gmelch aided Nan in telling us, and it always will be. And I hope you will never be on the road.
Introduction
In Sharon Bohn Gmelch’s ethnography, “Nan: The Life of an Irish Travelling Woman,” Gmelch aids Nan in sharing pieces of her life with outsiders – that is, non-Travellers. Nan’s life began in Granard in the Midland and ended in Finglas in Dublin; like many Travellers, Nan saw a glorious amount of the vast island. Nan’s story begins in the aftermath of the second World War and continues in documentation until her death in 1983; the influence and impact of her story on anthropology has not died with her. Separating Nan’s life into eleven chapters, Gmelch helps to construct many aspects of Irish national and cultural identity into a homogenous, yet distinctive to Nan herself, Traveller ideology. Gmelch takes care to raise the inefficacy of her own intellectual and empathetic ability in fully understanding Nan’s story: “Perhaps I needed to experience a few more traumas in my own life in order to understand at an emotional level as well as an intellectual level, a life that involved so much hardship” (20). To combat this roadblock, she uses many transcriptions of Nan’s own storytelling so that the reader can hear and imagine the story as Nan herself.
As it was and is with many twentieth century Irish people, Nan’s life was significantly intertwined with relationships of religion – Catholicism and Protestantism – and ideas of fateful luck that trace back to ancient Celtic polytheism. The only force that Nan emphasizes more frequently than God is luck, good and bad. Fate and luck are accepted as entities in Nan’s life, and Gmelch demonstrates in the book that this was not the case with a lot of other Irish people – mostly settled people in urban and rural settings. Simple “dumb” luck is, and always has been, an exerting force on lives of itinerate Irish peoples, and luck is particularly Irish in modern social contexts. Using Gmelch’s ethnography about Nan, this report intends to explore the value of religion and luck to the construction of Irish Travelling cultural identity.
Catholicism and Culture
In Gmelch’s ethnography, it is illustrated that the intertwined relationship of individual luckiness and Catholic faith that one’s life is in God’s hands are aids in the construction of Irish Traveller identity. Although Nan wished she had been granted a happier life, she acknowledged that there was nothing she could have done about it: “Our Lord travelled before we ever travelled and he wasn’t ashamed of his mother... Whatever was before me in life I got. And now it’s up to you to make the best of your life. And I hope you will never be on the road” (7). Knowing that Christ faced difficulties in life as he travelled can fill one with a sense of comfort and kinship with him, and this feeling is galvanized by how much significance Nan placed in the lack of shame surrounding Christ. If he was an itinerate individual and he was also good, a Traveller like Nan cannot be as bad as her experiences have made her seem and feel. Gmelch stresses that Nan agrees that Travelling life is full of hardships, but also that Nan accepted her life as it was given to her by God. Faith whilst enduring hardship – faith because of hardship, for that matter – is a general Irish sentiment, and it is this characterizing faith that Nan demonstrated that helps build the Traveller identity. Most Travellers remained Catholic whilst many settle people converted to Protestantism and this distinct separation is intertwined with Traveller faith and culture itself. Throughout the ethnography, the worth that Nan placed in the power is God was stressed to be integral to a Roman Catholic life, and it is implied that it was mostly due to the weighty hardships she experienced that she stayed so faithfully close to him.
Although Nan’s faith was an immensely powerful force in her life and is emblematic of greater Traveller culture, it remains doubtful as to whether or not she was completely comfortable but the ethical concerns of her itineracy: “But be God, there was nothing at all good in me, not one thing good. I was always saying after, "That priest made a big mistake with me." I never was lucky. Even from the time I was small, I never was lucky” (35). Nan’s perception of luck overruled her comfort found in faith. She could acknowledge that life is controlled by God and that He sets us on our individual paths; she could also acknowledge that many of her experiences were poorly timed coincidences and cases of extremely bad luck – a dichotomy concerned with multifaceted Irish culture that combats itself.
Luck
God’s plan and luck do not seem to coincide very simply, but they are more integrated into Irish Travelling culture than they seem. Luck is a much more ancient force than a monolithic Godhead and this means that good and bad luck often takes precedence as the causation of an experience over God. Nan is no different from many Travellers in this theology. “Life histories also provide an insider’s interpretation of culture and portray, perhaps better than any other form... “luck” out of which an individual life is composed” (23). Nan’s insistence of luck as the controlling force of her life is tied into the Traveller cultural identity that preserved knowledge about ancient Celtic entities. She was so emphatic on this point that Gmelch outlines luck as a main theme in the preface of the ethnography before Nan’s story even started. Luck would not be a focus in a book where it was not incredibly important to the culture being studied because it is such a specific idea. Nan’s adamancy on luck being the primary controlling force in her life (even over God) shows how much value Nan placed in the qualities of luck – both good and bad; a lot of bad in her case, as she acknowledges (16, 20, 225, 229).
Summary
Laying down the framework for arguing religion and luck are intertwined pieces that build a cultural identity, this paper used Sharon Gmelch’s ethnography “Nan” to highlight distinctly Irish Traveller views. Nan’s hardships are worse than one would wish on anybody, but her guile spirit does not deteriorate because of them; her faith is tied directly into her characteristic difficulties as a Traveller, and her acceptance of some good luck and mostly bad luck is resilient and mature. Nan’s identity as a Traveller was challenged many times but she knew herself and her cultural identity well enough and welcomed her fate just the same – a trait of peaceful (if not angry) compliance that resonates with many Irish peoples in the 20th century. Gmelch relied on Nan’s narrative – one with significant emphasis on faith and luck – to prove that itinerate Irish people have aspects of strong cultural identity rooted in traditional Irish Catholic faith and Celtic theologies of luckiness. Nan’s storytelling is entrenched in Travellers’ narratives and lifeways, and she puts so much passion into attributing the ills of those Traveller lifeways to God’s power and to luck itself; the narrative and the causation are so connected that Nan’s luck is as connected to her identity as her language or her political views. Gmelch notes in 1980 that “Travellers have begun to take fate into their own hands. But the road ahead is rough. As Nan’s story shows, it always has been” (16), demonstrating that even if you are less accepting of your bad luck as Nan was, Travelling life will always be filled with bad luck and reasons to pray to God.
To further inform myself on Travelling identity before reading Gmelch’s ethnography, I wrote a letter to my great-uncle and his family, who live in Ballymoney in Northern Ireland. His parents, my grandmaternal great-grandparents, married in 1919 in Randalstown and were on the road for sixteen years after. Whilst reading Nan’s story, many stories and characteristics of the two women overlapped; much of the bad luck that Nan faced were horror stories to me as a child. I drafted this paper with the knowledge that Travelling identity is extremely convoluted with Roman Catholicism and ancient Celtic Lugh (personified luck). That identity has formed strong bonds for centuries and it is retained today, even as more and more Travellers settle in urban centers. Travelling life was and is hard, as Gmelch aided Nan in telling us, and it always will be. And I hope you will never be on the road.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
April 26, 2026
Interesting. Sad. I saw some Tinkers on my previous visits to Ireland, but had little interaction with them. Nan's case study was insightful. I was struck by how that lifestyle aged her so profoundly, and also by the cruelty of some of the violence committed on her and her children.
January 26, 2021
An sometimes shocking example of the suffering inflicted upon those who choose to live as outsiders in society, handled in a sympathetic and realistic way by Sharon Gmelch and her husband.
April 11, 2026
I would rate this book 3.5.
August 19, 2016
"You're never free in a house, you're in prison. You're always trying to keep everyone happy. When you go out your door, you don't know whether your neighbour will be civil or not."
I went back and forth on whether to rate this or two or three stars. While the story was very interesting it was also super depressing everything that happened to Nan so I can't say I enjoyed the book. But to rate a non-fiction book on whether the subject was upsetting seems unfair. (Hence why I usually don't read nonfiction.) Still I really hated the style this was written in. Gmelch kept inserting herself, explaining what was happening or summing up things for the reader. It was wildly unnecessary, it honestly felt like she was trying to show off and it came off pretentious.
For example, Gmelch writes: "Regrettably for Nan, her days at Gretton House were coming to an end. She was forewarned of this late one night when she heard something outside the small dormer window of her attic bedroom." Like shit dude, we didn't need you to tell us that-- in about two paragraphs Nan says that herself like we can figure it out we don't need you. It just bugged me because she kept interrupting the story to add needless crap like this. Your readers are a lot smarter than you seem to think.
I sort of wished I could have found something more contemporary on Irish Travellers. This book was published in 1986 and Nan told her story to Gmelch in the 70s so I kinda of wish I could read something like this on Irish Travellers from now. Because one of the points in this book is how drastically life was changing for them, so how has it progressed?
God every time Nan had her children taken from her my heart broke, she really had no choice in a lot of her life. Her abusive husband Mick was terrible and she knew she shouldn't go back to him every time but she did because what else was she supposed to do? I lost count of how many children she had at fourteen, like it was insane-- I can't even imagine what that does to your body to have child after child like that.
So much tragedy happened to Nan and several times I just had to put the book down and walk away. It was just too much. Like when her son Martin dies, that really messed me up because the doctors sent him home to her KNOWING he was about to die and they didn't say anything. In fact the nurse kept trying to convince Nan how healthy he was. How fucked up is that? It's one thing to lose a child but for the doctors to withhold information like that is just downright cruel.
I think it was an interesting window into Irish Traveller life. How they basically had to know how to do anything and everything to make money to survive. If something didn't work out they could always pack up, go somewhere else and start a totally different line of work. Gmelch kept pointing out that Nan's life was different than the average Traveller but didn't offer many reasons as to how. Although like I said before, I wish Gmelch would have just shut up and given us Nan's story without interrupting.
I eventually had to just power through and finish the book in one sitting otherwise I was never going to finish. The combination of Gmelch and her obnoxious writing and the tragedy that was Nan's life made it a hard book for me.
I went back and forth on whether to rate this or two or three stars. While the story was very interesting it was also super depressing everything that happened to Nan so I can't say I enjoyed the book. But to rate a non-fiction book on whether the subject was upsetting seems unfair. (Hence why I usually don't read nonfiction.) Still I really hated the style this was written in. Gmelch kept inserting herself, explaining what was happening or summing up things for the reader. It was wildly unnecessary, it honestly felt like she was trying to show off and it came off pretentious.
For example, Gmelch writes: "Regrettably for Nan, her days at Gretton House were coming to an end. She was forewarned of this late one night when she heard something outside the small dormer window of her attic bedroom." Like shit dude, we didn't need you to tell us that-- in about two paragraphs Nan says that herself like we can figure it out we don't need you. It just bugged me because she kept interrupting the story to add needless crap like this. Your readers are a lot smarter than you seem to think.
I sort of wished I could have found something more contemporary on Irish Travellers. This book was published in 1986 and Nan told her story to Gmelch in the 70s so I kinda of wish I could read something like this on Irish Travellers from now. Because one of the points in this book is how drastically life was changing for them, so how has it progressed?
God every time Nan had her children taken from her my heart broke, she really had no choice in a lot of her life. Her abusive husband Mick was terrible and she knew she shouldn't go back to him every time but she did because what else was she supposed to do? I lost count of how many children she had at fourteen, like it was insane-- I can't even imagine what that does to your body to have child after child like that.
So much tragedy happened to Nan and several times I just had to put the book down and walk away. It was just too much. Like when her son Martin dies, that really messed me up because the doctors sent him home to her KNOWING he was about to die and they didn't say anything. In fact the nurse kept trying to convince Nan how healthy he was. How fucked up is that? It's one thing to lose a child but for the doctors to withhold information like that is just downright cruel.
I think it was an interesting window into Irish Traveller life. How they basically had to know how to do anything and everything to make money to survive. If something didn't work out they could always pack up, go somewhere else and start a totally different line of work. Gmelch kept pointing out that Nan's life was different than the average Traveller but didn't offer many reasons as to how. Although like I said before, I wish Gmelch would have just shut up and given us Nan's story without interrupting.
I eventually had to just power through and finish the book in one sitting otherwise I was never going to finish. The combination of Gmelch and her obnoxious writing and the tragedy that was Nan's life made it a hard book for me.
May 4, 2013
I enjoyed reading this book, good insight into a new culture. Not a happy story, but very interesting
November 25, 2015
Tough life as a traveler, and as most travelers Nan's life was filled with ups and downs, this was an amazing book to read, hard at times but well written
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews