Freud famously theorised trauma demands repetition, that our unconscious drives us to reenact or restage pain through our behaviours and relationships. In A Note Upon the Mystic Writing-Pad he also described the psyche as a “set of infinite traces,” where an infinite number of memories undergo reconstruction through the steady arrival of new information. Noelle McCarthy places her new memoir Stakes within this psychoanalytic theory of recurrence. It’s also a self-portrait that demonstrates a book can, in no uncertain terms, save one’s life.
The book that has possessed her emotional life since she was young is Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Its allure has proven unshakable. McCarthy, Irish like Stoker himself, shares his instinct for the theatrical. As a sensitive, fanciful and impassioned teenager growing up in Cork, she leaves her window ajar at night, willing the vampire to breach the boundaries of her room where she longs to escape the limitations and assumptions to which she has been circumscribed. Hollymount, her parent’s home, is “in concrete terms, the most haunted house I’ve ever been in.” At 14 she is “avid, bright, unprotected, wishing for the same thing that makes Mina Harker suicidal,” that is, longing for the erotic experiences that Mina (Dracula’s teenage victim) is so ashamed of desiring; a want that sees her abandoned by the men charged with protecting her, leaving her to be ravished by Dracula, considered unholy as a communion wafer scorches her forehead, assigning her a tarnished woman. McCarthy wants nothing more, but she has a “Christmas tree of hair and I am solid in the body. When I tie a scarf around my neck I look burly, not elegant.”
She admires her friends developing more quickly than she, and McCarthy’s exposition into the mind of a winsome and frighteningly sharp young girl is moving and true. McCarthy is a dreamer, unsure whether she wishes to grow up, down drinks and lose her virginity, or disappear. She does know despite her filial devotion that she wishes to escape her alcoholic mother “dragging her sorrows through the house like the banshee,” sucking on cigarettes and bottlenecks, oscillating between tearing, self-annihilating screaming up the stairs and moments of almost unbearable sweetness as best she can manage through the fog of her dead and lost children, one the product of rape—or “non-consensual” sex, as went the parlance of the time, “as though a technical term is [like] Dettol: you can splash it on a rape and clean it out for everyone.”
Drunk one night in the pub having dragged her young daughter along for company, she asks Noelle, eyeballing her as she does, whether she knows what rape is. “We’ll think of them now, girl,” she says, raising her glass of lager. Her mother’s babies live “up under my ribs in the space between my heart and my diaphragm. The same place Dracula hit me when I read it for the first time.” But as soon as she allows herself this susceptible admission she swiftly turns: “Fuck Mammy, is what I think.” Theirs is a bond brutal as love can withstand. Her nana walks into a freezing river “full of trolleys and mullet,” McCarthy recalls no mention of the word suicide in Catholic Ireland. “There was dirt all along her hairline, the bastards,” her mother says. There is a “silence once she is buried,” McCarthy writes, “that is a complete thing in its own right.”
McCarthy positions her gothic childhood within sinister Ireland, with its repressed ghosts asphyxiated under the damning crucifix of the Catholic Church, within the canonical gothic of Dracula. In Hollymouth, “nobody ever sleeps a full night in their own bed; we wander around full of terror and energy”. Her mother throws holy water onto family photographs atop the replacement television after their prior box is stolen. In her prose, McCarthy employs with her customary dry, brisk witticisms an inviting melodrama across grim scenes otherwise too grievous to endure.
The narrative moves with reflective, discursive asides through McCarthy’s youth and her writing is sometimes extraordinarily arresting. The scene where her mother demands she take a tremendous and entirely inappropriate ham with her to her friend’s caravan on vacation (“from the good place in front of the English Market—’I had to queue for it,’ she says, half pissed, full of righteousness”) sear the heart. Ashamed of her mother she yet loves her dearly; though she enrages her there is a protective fealty between the two, a silent pact, that McCarthy depicts with a precise and painful accuracy recognisable to those who have had to defend their parents’ honour against the outside world. Reading is a process of transference and how these scenes will be met will depend on the reader’s own life. For some, McCarthy’s volcanic familial scenes will be trenchant and stunningly, oftentimes hilariously, observed anecdotes. For others they will strike at the very heart of one’s being and exhume generational wounds scorching to the touch.
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Her book opens on a bleak stage. McCarthy, catatonic under another routine “atomic, white, annihilating” hangover, stirs next to an unnamed man and watches dust particles circle in the morning light as she contemplates where she is. It’s preferable to pretend to be asleep than answer the man’s advances. This is, she determines, “the right amount of shame for me.” A voice rises within, one she relates to Dracula conveying to Mina Harker, that it was he who led himself into the lair from which he cannot escape. Some nameless desire lurking within, it is suggested, incited his will. “You never listen,” McCarthy remonstrates herself. “You don’t know when enough is enough.”
In Women in Dark Times, her treatise on women who faced cruelty, persecution and misunderstanding, Jacqueline Rose writes, “Trauma is often described as an event which consigns itself to silence, but how often do we ask which dimension of the voice has been lost?” Women have, she argues, “a unique capacity to bring the dark side of the unconscious, of history—whatever is bleeding invisibly beneath—to the surface of our lives,” which she sees as “both a gift and a task,” thereby a bequest.
This is precisely what McCarthy achieves in Stakes. It is fundamentally a devastating though transformative book for women whose lives have been trailed by a profound sense of shame and a persistent fog that effaces clarity and truth, makes impossible attempts to understand why one has or has not chosen what they have in life; how they arrived in difficult, dangerous or alien places and the pain of learning to take care of oneself, deserving of mercy at all, let alone speak with unvarnished honesty about one’s life. With forthright defiance Stakes wrestles for truth as spiritual struggle.
McCarthy tells us how she grew up to become beautiful in 90s satin trousers and surprises herself to discover she is both desirable and clever: studying English literature and history and reporting for the college newspaper, writing with biting lucidity about sex and the way it makes her feel as though her “cells are dividing in real time,” the “first time feeling that particular bereftness you get when a dick is taken out of you,” the vagaries and pleasurable performativities of becoming a woman. In absorbing scenes that dissect the historical and political realities of Ireland (eg women locked in asylums for prostitution as they were for unmarried pregnancies) she writes with a dexterous intellect that never, in fine Irish tradition, forgoes the requisite artfulness of storytelling. She roams through scenes with dazzling pace; an extract set in a classroom reels from academic exegesis to bitter and dismissive introspections about her mother. Her relationships with her siblings and her father are likewise thoughtfully rendered; her father, with whom she takes long, intimate walks in the grey surrounds, arrayed in “the big fat tie” her mother insisted he wear, “like a bank manager in the ’70s.”
When McCarthy hits the bottle the prose shifts, the encounter so categoric the pitch tilts. It’s not exclusively the alcohol but what happens to her one night after she knocks back drinks, “the kitchen light dividing into many, smaller lights,” and the chapter closes absent condemnation of any party but herself. It is met and in fact described with a leaden silence. This admission by absence is difficult to reconcile but reflects the social standards of the time, and the episode resurfaces in later chapters where she rages at her husband as to his interpretation of the #MeToo movement. For some years, the alcohol together with her sexual power fashions a carapace inside which her intellectual ambitions wither. The promise of writing is sacrificed for more immediately libidinal experiences, a common enough exchange for writers which tends to produce uncommon insight once writing resurfaces. Lost years are not, after all, irrecoverable and nor are memories.
For McCarthy, writing proves a home, with its “potential for me to be safe and happy like everyone else”. But she is distracted and instead trains her focus on chasing love or its approximation, whipped by ceaseless movement, having encountered the “whirl and rush of humanity” in London, as Dracula describes. Temperamental, impetuous and contradictory, like all bewitching heroines, McCarthy depicts love, and love affairs, with intoxicating rigour.
These compromises will be familiar to many women who were presented two choices, or discouraged from the possibility of both—fulfilling romance and passion, or a career. No woman deserves lasting success in both without some form of punishment meted out to even the scales. An instructive scene that in one image demonstrates one need not forgo one for the other has her history lecturer take her to a department store, where she buys her a thong and tells her she can do anything, now; McCarthy promptly enrolls in post-graduate study and wins an award for her essay on Dracula.
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A subsequent and particularly tender scene exhibits her parents delivering her a card “with two Forever Friends bears holding up a sign that said Congratulations on the front of it,” five 50-pound notes enclosed. This demonstrates just one instance of McCarthy’s facility for depicting pathos with care and fidelity, never mocking, only warm. But she can “never seem to stay long in the library: I’m always late for work, or for meeting someone in town for a drink.” She breaks off a relationship with a man who loves her, she writes luminescent passages about friendship with women; sultry and at times harrowing scenes where her voracious appetites and torrid commitment to drinking results in perilous situations, black-outs and bruises and dead zones in her memory.
Close to the midpoint of Stakes we encounter McCarthy having moved to New Zealand and celebrated in Tāmaki Makaurau as a charming party girl on the make, traipsing about half-cut and radiating, clad in silk dresses and Vivienne Westwood heels. She arrived in 2008 and moved swiftly through the ranks of volunteer student radio due to her wit and brilliance, her photograph splashed about the tabloids that back then lubricated Auckland city’s nightlife. Still possessed by Dracula she has long abandoned her academic career. Though incessantly social she strikes the reader as profoundly lonely. While drinking in her high-rise apartment with its views over the harbour she scrawls desperate, burning observations about the book, incomprehensible by the light of day. Chaotic and unreliable, her mental life unraveling in ruins as she takes a match to her life, she drinks steadily throughout the day while holding down a high-profile job, surreptitiously throwing up in the bathroom, and conducts affairs with moneyed, at times married, men who some may determine inadvisable and who her sister views unsuitable. She does not, she writes, ever ask herself if this is the life she wants.
These men both give and demand little from her, which as someone who believes she is disgraced is what she believes she wants, or deserves, unless briefly interrupted by a rare moment of reflection where she remembers “a river of ambition” inside her. She cannot distinguish whether unpleasant events in her life occur due to drinking “to let it happen, or it happens because I am drinking”. She behaves with rash impulsivity as the enamel peels from her teeth from the vomit. She twitches through the day. Tempted by oblivion she reasons it wouldn’t be so bad, after all, to fall from the balcony of her apartment from which she is subsequently evicted. Either forgetting or disregarding previous sexual encounters she is lucky, she writes, “nobody has been too rough with me. But I know it’s a game of percentages. My luck will run out eventually.”
A woman who lives on her wits has, it is true, those lying in wait for the bill, with interest, to be paid. Many of her furtive dealings are buried. Great swathes of her life are shrouded under a veil of silence, or simply lived as a black hole until she lowers the gavel and terminates her relationship with alcohol, and, somewhat reluctantly, joins a recovery group in meeting rooms that smell of “instant coffee and old cigarettes that feel like a Ken Loach film set.” The 12-step programme instructs one see oneself as both transgressed and transgressor where those coming to terms with their own failings, distortions and addictions of all kinds allow one another the freedom of utterance.
The passages depicting the process of getting clean are deeply affecting, and here the writing is exquisite, written from an indomitable memory that has willed itself never to forget. She finds herself moved to tears by the kindness of strangers. “You think you woke up last week and decided to give up?” a mentor asks. “Maybe you did. But ask yourself: why that morning? Why that Sunday? We get clean on the prayers of others.” McCarthy confesses to her transgressions; “Give it all to your God to carry,” her mentor responds. McCarthy finds no fault with the concept of original sin and rises to her knees to pray each morning, seeking courage, diligence and the prudence to distinguish right from wrong.
Recovery is, however, a savage form of surgery; now abstinent, quiescent memories arrive unbidden: the night her mother tore through the door, tights ripped, knee stained with dirt and blood seeping into her high heel, trembling as she reached for a cigarette, shrieking that she’d been attacked, dragged into a tunnel. McCarthy confesses she didn’t believe her, that it sounded fabricated, “or something she brought about in order to stand in front of me in the front room under the lights, screaming and crying and bleeding.”
At 33, she flees the city to write a book in her childhood bedroom in Cork, decades after the notion first occurred to her. This chapter is outstanding; the glittering Alcoholics Anonymous girls with hoop earrings, hair extensions and River Island dresses who drag her into their circle, the portraits of her family and her rendering of a volatile camping trip; her mother drunk and wrathful “in a cloud of White Linen, the blonde streaks in her hair that make her look like Elton John,” the eruptive rows and the regression to that of a petulant child when with her parents, her perceived developmental delay made all the more pronounced being that she is broke and remaking a life that in any instant threatens to rip at the seams. Why can’t I drive, she wonders aimlessly. The question a substitute for a rather more existential plea. Mother wistful, drunk and given to poetic rumination, eyes glazing over as she stumbles into the basement of her past, the scent of roses that hung thick in the room when her son died. Or charging into the room under “a dangerous number of drinks … I try to stop imagining all the things I would do if I could change Mammy,” McCarthy writes. “Starting with her unholy capacity to rant for what feels like thirty hours straight on the strength of four pisswater-weak cans of drink.”
On the page, the memories ripple and eddy. Structurally, the organising architecture of the book is percipient; in deliberately shunning straightforward chronology it betrays the haunting logic of memory, layer upon layer, digressions and diversions that rise and recede as though turning the pages of a photo album. This is a decision she draws from her education in Gothic literature, writing that “Gothic is the mode that contains the unspeakable. That contains titanic forces: life and death, good and evil. That mixes up time, so it’s never a straight line.” But her deference to Dracula throughout the book sometimes reads as disorderly.
She watches herself as a younger woman, she is afraid of her lineage, in it something unrestrained and shameful, some hereditary force granted by her mother without her consent; her mother who habitually arrives bearing random items at the cottage McCarthy rents. Brutal are the scenes where McCarthy fights to stay sober while her mother drinks and soliloquises as though circling her like a capricious shadow preying her into relapse.
The process of facing the ordinariness of life rather than the fantasy intoxication affords is an excruciating and tedious labour. Cleared from the fog of deception it astonishes her how she lived, what she allowed, what she thought she might get away with. There is nothing, she learns, we can outrun. She sets boundaries of which she has little practice: no men, three AA meetings a week, writing for the local paper, cooking for herself, researching Stoker and the forbidding, chilling histories of Ireland rising from voicelessness and organised denial to the surface of the soil through the mouths of women, standing atop a stone wall with her aunt, looking toward the rocky shoreline where newborns “whose souls were in purgatory” were abandoned to die. She learns, that is, how to withstand the void.
Later, she will attend to a commonplace life. She will accept a conventionality that once repulsed her. It transpires that what is special about her isn’t quotidian at all; the will and courage to change, or reform, and the rectitude to attempt to live in accordance with a chosen set of principles, is rare indeed, as is the embrace of one’s fallibility, possible at any moment. In this, she accepts a grace Simone Weil describes, where the “natural movements of the soul are controlled by laws analogous to those of physical gravity.” Grace, she writes, “is the only exception. Grace fills empty spaces, but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void.” Dracula and the fantasy is, for McCarthy, a benediction.
She will move with her love to the countryside, have a baby. The stories quarried by the #MeToo movement will kindle her own; she will reconcile the indifference and cruelty of prior men in her life and her tacit acceptance of their treatment, she will navigate the death of and grief that consumed her mother. McCarthy has an instinct for shooting straight at the mark with one sharp sentence. Typical of this quality: “Why is it when you get bad news you think your only job is to show how good you can be at taking it?”
She begins to search in earnest for what has been omitted in her familial line, poring through historical records and documents cataloging the horrors of Ireland, including its Mother and Baby Homes, arranged by the Catholic Church, torture chambers in essence, where in one instance the bodies of close to 800 babies were found lodged within a sewage system. The homes derived from the Victorian workhouse system, she writes, “the place of last resort for the destitute.” She considers what Stoker must have witnessed as an inspector for the Irish civil service, “seeing workhouses as part of the everyday: less than a generation away from the Potato Blight that killed millions and forced millions more onto ships that turned into disease-infested coffins for those they were carrying.”
She traces Stoker’s footsteps to the town of Whitby on the desolate Yorkshire coast, where he conjured centuries of terror to summon Dracula. A generationally consequential referendum to repeal the Eighth Amendment to the Irish Constitution has McCarthy travel with her daughter to Ireland, where she walks through a country undergoing rapid political and economic change, “past the Crucifixion statue to the Apple computer factory,” her questions and demands growing urgent, sharper and more deliberate as she resolves to investigate her mother’s buried secrets through her effects, discovering similarities she is now, at last, willing to welcome, divining a story that will, ultimately, convey the plight of scores of Irish women.
Stakes is blistering, incandescent. To read it is to witness a mind operating as though under a trance, as if guided by a spectral presence seeking not revenge nor redemption or even the record set straight but that the story as it is known be told without shame, without repudiation. McCarthy can vanquish her inheritance no more than anyone else can. There is no malediction, only its underside; transfiguration.
Stakes by Noelle McCarthy (Penguin, $40) is available in bookstores nationwide. ReadingRoom has devoted all week to the author’s new memoir. Monday: an excerpt from the book, in which the author argues loudly and in public with her husband while they’re pushing their pram through Western Park in Ponsonby.
