Book review: Tara Maclean’s memoir is a hymn to childhood

MacLean writes without the urge to flatten the people in her past into heroes and villains, and that generosity gives her memoir its unusual emotional texture

Irish-Canadian, singer-songwriter Tara MacLean has every reason to write a book steeped in darkness. Picture: Jared Doyle

• Song of the Sparrow: A Memoir
• Tara MacLean
• HarperAvenue, €24.09

There is a moment early in Song of the Sparrow when you realise this is not going to be the memoir you expect.

Irish-Canadian, singer-songwriter Tara MacLean has every reason to write a book steeped in darkness. 

Her childhood was marked by family breakdown, constant upheaval, changing homes and geographies, religious extremes, and sexual abuse.

People arrived and disappeared. Safety was uncertain. Later came broken marriages, heartbreak, and the devastating death of her beloved younger sister Shaye.

Yet Song of the Sparrow does not feel like a catalogue of wounds. Somehow, remarkably, it reads almost as a hymn to childhood.

That is not because MacLean diminishes what happened to her. She does not. Nor does she offer the easy retrospective assurance that suffering was somehow necessary.

Instead, she seems able to hold two truths at once: terrible things happened, and there was beauty there too.

There were guitars. There were songs. There were parents who were chaotic but also artistic, passionate, and capable of love. There were sisters, landscapes, journeys, and moments of wonder. 

MacLean writes without the urge to flatten the people in her past into heroes and villains, and that generosity gives the memoir its unusual emotional texture.

There is also a sense of inheritance running beneath the story. MacLean writes as daughter, sister, and mother, conscious that family stories travel through generations.

Irish heritage adds another strand

Her Irish heritage adds another strand: displacement, memory, resilience, and the instinct to keep singing.

Music is the thread that holds everything together. MacLean’s career has spanned three decades, and she says she sang before she spoke. 

Her mother called her a little bird, giving the memoir its title. As a child, songs became a place to put what she could not otherwise understand.

She describes song-writing as her “life raft”, but an even more revealing description is that a song could be a prayer. 

In a world that frequently made little sense, music became both sanctuary and safekeeping: a way of taking pain, giving it form and placing it somewhere outside herself.

That continued into adulthood. Evidence, her breakthrough single, grew from childhood sexual abuse and eventually showed MacLean that a private wound could become something useful to another person. 

Listeners told her the song had helped them articulate their own experiences. She realised, as she puts it, that she could “make medicine” from songs.

The same instinct shapes the memoir.

MacLean does not pretend forgiveness is effortless or grief painless. 

After Shaye’s death, she describes being reduced by grief before gradually finding another way to carry her sister: not as an absence, but as a continuing presence within her.

Her marriages ended too, yet she and her former husbands held to the belief that marriages can end while families do not.

This could all sound unbearably worthy but it doesn’t.

MacLean is too candid about her own mistakes, too aware of her imperfections, and too alive to life’s absurdities for that.

What remains after reading Song of the Sparrow is therefore surprisingly difficult to name. It isn’t sorrow, although there is plenty to grieve. It isn’t triumph either; the book is gentler than that.

Perhaps it is thankfulness. MacLean has written about a life in which much was taken away, yet her gaze settles repeatedly on what remained: love, daughters, music, family, creativity, forgiveness, and the possibility of beginning again.

MacLean has also written about her amazing musical career playing with cultural heroes from Willie Nelson to Dido.

Song of the Sparrow is not a memoir about escaping the past. It is about learning how to carry it without allowing its weight to obscure everything else.

MacLean now teaches memoir at university level and it’s not surprising.

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