Clair Wills & Alice Spawls: Missing Persons

When Clair Wills was in her twenties, she discovered she had a cousin she had never met. Missing Persons, or My Grandmother’s Secrets is a detective story, memoir and cultural history of Ireland’s Mother and Baby homes. ‘Attending to the ways that the past ruptures and grows through the present’, writes Seán Hewitt, ‘this is a history shaken by intimacy – a brave and rigorously humane book.’ Wills was joined in conversation with Alice Spawls, editor of the LRB and co-editor of After Sex (Silver Press).