There is more than a little of Baudelaire’s l’horreur du domicile in Gavin McCrea’s eviscerating new memoir Cells. After living abroad for much of his adult life, never settling in one place that might become a home, McCrea moves back to Dublin in his 40s to look after his 80-year-old mother, a joyously active woman who is showing early signs of dementia.
The pair share a small flat in south Dublin. They are respectful of each other, keen to get along. Both of them leave the place for long stretches of the day, B to her morning swims or walks or therapeutic work with MS patients, McCrea to lecture at a nearby university, where he plans to research his next novel. The routine seems like it will work well, but a few months in, the pandemic lands and life is upended.
Being in such close proximity to his mother plunges McCrea into the past. When he tries to write the novel, all he can write about is her. The result is a riveting, deeply considered memoir, an ode to his mother that is also an exploration of his upbringing and the traumas he endured. As he puts it himself in his stylish, unsentimental way: “The problem was that I did not feel at home in my own home.”
McCrea has experienced more trauma in his life than most, which is to say, this book is full of dramatic moments and events, enough to fill multiple memoirs
The prologue to Cells engages like a literary thriller. The question McCrea wants answered – if his mother will say sorry for the sins of the past – could seem prosaic but the ensuing chapters, or cells, are anything but. The reasons for this are twofold: McCrea has experienced more trauma in his life than most, which is to say, this book is full of dramatic moments and events, enough to fill multiple memoirs. The second is the quality of the writing. Past and present timelines are related with flair and precision, recalling the personal essays of contemporaries such as Rob Doyle and Kevin Power, though without the self-deprecating humour.
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The tone of Cells is sombre, scathing, at times vengeful, recollections written with the kind of anger that brings a startling clarity of expression to subject matter that includes homophobia, class issues, mental health, parental neglect and illness. McCrea is superb on the repercussions of homophobic bullying, not just the physical violence he endured throughout school (“the long decade – ages ten to twenty-two – in which I suffered relentless, daily homophobic abuse”) but the arguably more damaging psychological impact: “Caught in the deep, and drowning, I found it difficult, eventually impossible, to hear my gay for what it actually was – gentle and quiet and harmless and exciting and fabulous and beautiful and really nothing to be surprised by – and to prevent its transmutation into the gay that was pressing in from all sides: vociferous, ugly, shocking, shameful.”
As with the best memoirs (Nuala O’Faolain’s Are You Somebody? is one touchstone), McCrea uses his own life as a springboard to discuss wider Irish society, mixing public and private histories. When it comes to his family, particularly his siblings, McCrea can be ruthless about his grievances, with the sense of settling scores, but this is part of the same impulse that runs throughout the book, to go deep, to say the things that don’t get said, which seems linked ultimately to an urge to reconcile old hurts before it’s too late.
McCrea himself emerges as a man who doesn’t suffer fools, to the extent that he can sometimes appear to lack compassion, especially if he feels he’s been wronged
The most pressing of these is his relationship with his mother. Through his steadfast delineation – McCrea goes everywhere, even describing in graphic detail a childhood fascination with his mother’s genitals – she emerges as a brilliant, complex woman. Crucially for the narrative, she acts as a foil to McCrea’s earnestness, adding brightness and levity to the author’s analytical style. The scenes where she features bring great life to the text, as with this poignant moment in a London bookshop where McCrea recommends that she read Elena Ferrante’s Days of Abandonment: “‘You’re going to like that book,’ I said to her when we had left the shop, ‘but it might not be easy for you,’ and she gave me a look that said, When have I ever been interested in easy?”
McCrea himself emerges as a man who doesn’t suffer fools, to the extent that he can sometimes appear to lack compassion, especially if he feels he’s been wronged. There is a pleasing honesty in this, an unwillingness to compromise on his hard-won outlook, no concessions or pandering. It’s also worth noting that he frequently casts his relentless gaze inward. The author of two critically acclaimed novels, Mrs Engels (2015) and The Sisters Mao (2021), McCrea puts his skills as a fiction writer to good use in his memoir. From the wonderful prologue that will instantly hook readers, to the many surprising twists introduced without fanfare throughout the book, Cells is an excavation of the past by a writer who knows exactly what he’s doing.
