In Ordinary Time by Carmel Mc Mahon: A provocative yet dazzling map of grief, trauma and love

In Ordinary Time is a brilliantly constructed book. On my first read, I followed the conventional beginning to end route and while this is certainly not wrong, the book is uniquely non-linear and on my second read I hopped and skipped backwards and forwards through the essays on addiction, grief, love and illness and marvelled at Mc Mahon’s ability to create intricate and personal narratives that find connection to the collective through time and space. To read it, is to sit with the past, future and present all at once.

In this collection, Mc Mahon reminds us that our lives are the afterbirth of a collective experience both exquisite and traumatic. Our days, even the most ordinary ones, are formed by all the days that have come before; our bodies formed by the bodies that came before us. This connective tissue is an umbilical cord that cannot be severed, to do so would ignore the fact that we are creatures produced by a complex system, our psyches wrought by the push and tumult of human life with all its injustice, sadness and beauty.

During the time I spent with Mc Mahon’s work, I was reminded of Heaney’s poem The Forge and the profoundly evocative opening salvo: “All I know is a door into the dark.”

Opening In Ordinary Time at any page is to open that door into the dark. Heaney wrote: “The anvil must be somewhere in the centre… Set there immovable: an altar where he expends himself in shape and music.”

I picture Mc Mahon’s process of writing as a similar ballet of precision, labour and instinct. Her essays are full of narritive braiding, drawing rigorous research of the historical and political together with fearless vulnerabilty about her personal story.​
In the opening essay she writes of the Magdalene Laundries — a place her own mother, who found herself unwed and pregnant in 1966, could well have been confined had she not gone to London and “began to love the child inside her, more than she loved herself”.

Mc Mahon was a young woman when the last laundry was closed. “This is not ancient history,” she writes. “And the time that has passed since only serves to move me closer to it, asking me to see it more clearly, to feel more fully the horror of it in my bones.” Many of us turn away from exactly these horrors that Mc Mahon leans into in order to work out her place in the world.

Mc Mahon writes of the need to understand her mother to better understand herself and over the course of the book this investigaion extrapolates out to a committed excavation of the country and wider culture that produced them both.

Mc Mahon describes finding her way into writing poems at school where there was just a single woman writer in the prescribed text who was not even included on the curriculum.

“Now we say, If you can see it, you can be it. We saw the young mothers of the neighbourhood drag themselves, aged and dazed through the supermarket… my own mother stood at the kitchen sink and stared out the window at some lost horizon, while we tore the house down around her.”​
Time and again the bonds of gender and class hindered Mc Mahon as it had her mother and indeed, their ancestors. It was the 1990s. She wanted to go to college but it was a “faraway idea”. She describes working in a clothes shop on Grafton Street where all the women talked about was wanting to get married. In the end she emigrated to New York — an Irish tradition. There followed years of the titular “ordinary time”, she waitressed and modelled, fell in love and wrote, she lost her little brother — describing him in one wrenching sentence as the “baby who convulsed with laughter in his crib”. Her alcoholism started to gain ground in the wake of this devastating loss: “The first sip slid down my throat and on down into my soul”.

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‘Ordinary Time’ is the name given to part of the liturgical calendar but it also calls to mind Joan Didion’s “ordinary instant” in The Year of Magical Thinking. “Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant,” Didion wrote.

Mc Mahon and Didion have much in common. They share a forensic curiosity about our culture and a clean, detached style in their prose. Mc Mahon’s writing is both precise and provocative.

From detailing the freak car accident that killed her older sister Michelle at just five years of age: “A couple of local men were instructed to hold my mother back”; to describing her disturbed brother attacking her parents and going to the pub where “he ordered a pint, sat down with blood-stained hands and drank it” — Mc Mahon arranges events and details in spare and restrained prose, the elegance and simplicity of her language allowing the stark horror to flower on the page.

The malleability of time is a persistent theme throughout In Ordinary Time. “Grief changes time…” Mc Mahon writes of the aftermath of her brother’s death. “You no longer roll along… You stand still and watch as everything else rushes past.”

Meanwhile, time and pain are twinned in the arresting essay On The Dark Side of the Head in which Mc Mahon describes the migraines that started to pursue her once she began her recovery from alcoholism at 36. Mc Mahon finds an interesting perspective on the problem of illness. “In illness, we lay prone. No longer accountable to the strictness of marching time… instead of fighting to remain upright, we might surrender and allow the mysteries that lie beneath the mundanities of our lives to surface and reveal themselves.”

Mc Mahon’s ability to surrender and explore is what gives In Ordinary Time its incredible scope. From the Brehons to the survivors of the famine to the survivors of her own family’s private tragedies, Mc Mahon charts meaning and connection to create a dazzling map of agony, trauma, beauty and love. In Ordinary Time is a mesmerising work threaded with rich veins of history and heart.

Non-fiction: In Ordinary Time by Carmel Mc Mahon

Duckworth, 286 pages, hardcover, €23.80; e-book £8.99