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Oct 31, 2024 | 
nybooks.com | Clair Wills
The New Zealand novelist Janet Frame had a rather startling story to tell about the relationship between her work as a writer and her existence as a human being. Writing saved her life, she explained, and she meant it literally.
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Jun 21, 2024 | 
inkl.com | Clair Wills |Allen Lane
Bearers of secrets: Clair Wills’s mother Philly and grandmother Molly in the early 1950s. Private collectionClair Wills’s Missing Persons, or My Grandmother’s Secrets is a stealthy, powerful reckoning not just with her own family history but also with modern Ireland and her own authority.
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May 22, 2024 | 
nybooks.com | Fintan O’Toole |Clair Wills
Clair Wills has long been among the most supple and illuminating explorers of the intertwined cultural histories of Ireland and Britain. She works in the intersections between social experience and literary representation, giving as much weight to supposedly ordinary lives as to momentous political events and artistic movements. That Neutral Island: A History of Ireland During the Second World War (2007) captured the moods and tensions of a strange period.
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May 2, 2024 | 
nybooks.com | Clair Wills
If it is true, as Saint Augustine says, that the dead aren’t absent but merely invisible, then somewhere round about, as I write about her and you read about her, Hilary Mantel is present. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that she is present not only if Augustine’s statement is true but if I believe it, or if you do.
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May 2, 2024 | 
apollo-magazine.com | Clair Wills
You are on an escalator, standing behind and slightly below a middle-aged woman who is wearing a sensible black knee-length skirt and flat shoes. Your visual field is filled by two stoutish legs in pale tights that are preparing to step off the top of the moving stairway. You are looking at a photograph by Dolorès Marat: Legs, Paris, 1997.
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Apr 12, 2024 | 
newyorkfolk.com | James White |Clair Wills
When the cultural historian Clair Wills was in graduate school at Oxford in the late 1980s, she became pregnant by accident. She was 25 and single, with little money and no job. Still, she decided to keep the baby. “By then, getting pregnant and keeping the baby was almost a tradition in our family,” she writes in her memoir, Missing Persons. “My eldest sister had done it; so had one of my cousins.
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Apr 3, 2024 | 
newsbreak.com | Clair Wills
Welcome to NewsBreak, an open platform where diverse perspectives converge. Most of our content comes from established publications and journalists, as well as from our extensive network of tens of thousands of creators who contribute to our platform. We empower individuals to share insightful viewpoints through short posts and comments.
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Apr 3, 2024 | 
lithub.com | Clair Wills
Clair Wills Considers the Making of Her Mother’s Family Fables Once upon a time my grandfather got lost on the bog.
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Feb 1, 2024 | 
theadvertiser.ie | Clair Wills
By Clair WillsHow far would you go for the missing? When Clair Wills was in her twenties, she discovered she had a cousin she had never met. Born in a Mother and Baby Home in 1950s Ireland, Mary grew up in an institution not far from the farm where Clair spent happy childhood summers. Yet she was never told of her existence. How could a whole family – a whole country – abandon unmarried mothers and their children, erasing them from history?
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Jan 31, 2024 | 
literaryreview.co.uk | Clair Wills
Clair Wills is King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at the University of Cambridge and the author of a number of monumental books about Irish culture and history, including That Neutral Island: A History of Ireland during the Second World War (2007). Missing Persons, Or My Grandmother’s Secrets is not only her most personal book, but also perhaps the most personal book ever written by a Regius professor at Cambridge.
