In the last 20 years of her life, the artist Louise Bourgeois created a series of small architectural spaces that she named Cells. Each of them contained objects arranged to evoke rooms from her past, along with the trauma that occurred inside them. Encountering them at an exhibition, Gavin McCrea, who is the author of two novels, Mrs Engels (2015) and The Sisters Mao (2021), found himself overwhelmed with sadness and grief. While the contents of Bourgeois’s Cells were specific to the artist, McCrea recognised “in their pattern and their ordering, in their blending and their juxtaposition, in their communicating and their clashing, the episodes and moods of my own childhood”.
Cells, then, is McCrea’s own exhibition piece, a raw and deeply affecting memoir in which he reconstructs and dissects traumatic scenes from his past. The youngest of four siblings born and raised in Dublin, McCrea left home in his early 20s having determined to close the door on his upbringing. “What I have since learned,” he notes, “is that this hatred of my past is really just an acknowledgement of an element of my psyche that will never be eradicated. Within the instinct … to leave behind, there will always remain traces of a contrary instinct: the one which will send me searching for the way back.”
