There’s a sense of doom in the vivid child-impression idyll created by Rosita Sweetman’s shining prose in the first part of this short, fast-paced memoir. Sweetman loved being the middle child of nine, amid the fun, varied bustle of a large, happy and wealthy political-legal Dublin family.
But a background of homes on Fitzwilliam Square and along Dublin’s elite southside coast – Connemara ponies in rambling gardens, canters on the beach – wasn’t enough to shield Sweetman from the pain of being female under patriarchal rule and a misogynistic culture.
Born in the mid-1940s, Sweetman came of age under Catholic theocracy in a State that systematically reduced women and girls to third-class citizenship. In response, she joined other Irish feminists in the late 1960s, co-founding the short-lived but pivotal Irish Women’s Liberation Movement. She used her journalistic flair to spread feminist ideas in national newspapers and shared pints and politics with figures like Nell McCafferty.
Sweetman had early success with bestselling non-fiction books, On Our Knees, and On Our Backs: Sexual Attitudes in a Changing Ireland, and her feminist novel, Fathers Come First. But a damaging relationship with an older, already-married man, begun when she was just 17, devastated her literary ambitions. They married (he was British so could divorce) and were together for 20 years. She managed to escape with her two young children, a Herculean feat at a time when there was no divorce in Ireland, and women who left could be framed as “deserters”, risking home and custody, never mind court-ordered child maintenance.
Girl with a Fork captures the painful paradox of how a woman steeped in feminist politics can still get entangled in male supremacist abuse – emotional, sexual, physical, and financial. Sweetman lays it bare: the gaslighting, the erosion of confidence, the exhaustion of broke single-handed parenting, while her husband serially cheated, including with relatives, repeatedly abandoning and returning.
What’s redemptive about this harrowing tale is Sweetman’s subtle casting back – through therapy – to trace how family trauma, especially her younger sister’s childhood death, and a harsh convent education played into her entrapment. With brave honesty, Sweetman admits how, in her damaged state, she was passing on to her children the emotional abuse she’d suffered – until healing enabled her to break the chain.
