This hybrid book, which is not quite a memoir and not quite a conceptually linked essay collection, begins with the death of a young Irish woman called Grace Farrell, whose body was discovered outside St Brigid’s Church in Manhattan’s East Village on 20 February 2011. Having arrived in New York from Ireland in 1993 with the dream of becoming an artist, Farrell was 35, homeless, and an alcoholic when she froze to death in an alcove of the church on Avenue B on the coldest night of the year.
Carmel McMahon came to New York a few years after Farrell, part of a wave of young, pre-Celtic Tiger Irish people whose “background music”, as she puts it, was “sectarian violence, mass unemployment and rising emigration”. Like Farrell, she succumbed to alcoholism, her initially exciting but uncertain life of waiting tables, hanging out and partying turning by stages darker and more chaotic. In desperation, she too gravitated to a familiar haven: a mass at another of Manhattan’s many Roman Catholic churches, Old St Patrick’s on Mott Street. Often she would turn up there, she writes, with a “thrift-store trenchcoat thrown over my pyjamas, reeking of cigarettes and booze, yesterday’s makeup sliding down my face”.
