Book Review: Tell Me What I Am is a compelling portrait of an Irish-American family fractured by domestic abuse
Una Mannion.
- Tell me what I am
- Una Mannion
- Faber, €11.99
Una Mannion’s second novel, , is a compelling portrait of an Irish American family fractured by domestic abuse. Deena Garvey, from Philadelphia, disappears in 2004 leaving behind a daughter Ruby and a sister Nessa. Deena’s partner, and Ruby’s father Lucas does everything in his power to separate aunt and niece. Over 14 years the story charts how Ruby and Nessa try to reconnect.
From the beginning, there is a sense of slow-burning menace. When Deena meets Lucas on a night out, she moves in with him after three weeks. He waits for her each night outside her work. Deena is both flattered and manipulated. Later, she says, “I always felt safer with him than with anybody. The person who was most dangerous to me was the only person I believed could keep me safe. It’s so fucked-up.”
Ruby learns from a young age not to displease her father, and most of all not to ask about her mother. Fragments of her previous life in Philadelphia begin to resurface in her mind. Gradually, she realises that something is off with her father’s behaviour.
In a scene where Lucas angrily remonstrates with Ruby’s teacher: “She saw his lips say Have I made myself clear? The same way he spoke to her sometimes. His arms were straight down at his sides, but she wanted to shout to Miss Bukowski, Get out, run.” Mannion deploys great skill in drawing the character of the abusive Lucas who teaches his daughter how to hunt and fish. Manipulation, possessive behaviour, cruelty, and control are disguised as love. This brings a sense of deep unease and foreboding to the novel as we watch him ‘care’ for his daughter.
“In the cab, they drank thermoses of chowder and ate ham sandwiches they’d made while it was still dark. They talked about the day, how they’d charged the flock, how it had scattered, the calls, wondered if they should have done anything differently.”
Mannion shows a particularly impressive understanding of the intricacies of psychological violence, intergenerational trauma, and the playbook of abusive men who insinuate themselves into the lives of women. She denudes how a patriarchal judicial system can be used by abusers to retraumatise a woman through the medium of her child and to gain custody.
Nessa asks an important question, “How is violence against the mother not violence against the child? It’s so messed up.” Deena’s lawyer advises her in advance of a custody case in the family courts that the restraining orders Deena has already secured against Lucas will cut no ice. “I know this is almost impossible to believe but allegations of domestic violence have no demonstrated effect on the rate at which fathers are awarded custody of their children”.
Ruby and Lucas live on the Islands in Vermont, and beautiful descriptions of nature permeate the book. “There were several names for a group of cormorants: a sunning, a swim, a gulp….Sometimes there was a gulp of cormorants on the rocky outcrop along their shoreline, wings stretched wide to dry.” It is obvious that Mannion is also a poet.
Mannion was born in Philadelphia and now lives in Sligo. Unsurprisingly, Irish migration to the USA is a backdrop to the book. John Garvey, Deena and Nessa’s father and a builder in Philadelphia left Galway and never went back wanting to keep his memories intact. “There were always Irish workers around. They’d been there since Nessa could remember. Over on J-1 visas, students from villages in Galway near where her father had grown up. Names like Kinvarra, Cahervoneen, Carnamadra, men called John-Joe, Padraig, Micheal, or Oisin. Cousins, friends of cousins.”
The action bounces between Philadelphia, and Vermont and jumps forwards and backwards in temporal terms. Although it is well handled, there are points where it demands a certain effort on the reader’s part to mentally relocate. And yet emotionally the story moves forward building momentum towards its climax.
This psychological family drama can be harrowing. However Mannion writes with a lyrical economy that stands out, and always shows a deep empathy for her well-drawn characters.
