A wholly original and unique approach to memoir writing, A Ghost in the Throat maps a search for a lost woman to the author’s desires, obsessions, and vulnerabilities. Award-winning poet Doireann Ní Ghríofa weaves her process of learning about an epic Irish poem’s female writer into her own life as a mom to four kids. She writes about cleaning up dried oatmeal, filling lunchboxes, and pumping breast milk, when all the while a poem that she learned at age 11 occupies and haunts her. As you read, you watch two women poets, Ní Ghríofa and the epic’s author, Eiblín Dubh, meet across a gap of over 300 years.
You can meet Ní Ghríofa and learn (or try to learn) how to pronounce her name in this charming video.
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Why Writers Should Read A Ghost in the Throat
The prose finds a balletic tension between rigor and grace. The author’s discipline in word choice inspires and awes. As Ní Ghríofa follows every lead to discover her subject, she speaks of her own struggles and passions. Read her to learn about the courage to be naked and proud in front of your readers.
A Ghost in the Throat In-depth
Writing is not, of course, just a mechanical act of transferring words from the ether into an articulated form. It can take place, does take place amid all manner of activities: taking walks, cleaning, weeding a garden. In the case of Doireann Ní Ghríofa, writing happens while she fold clothes for her family, washes diapers, and waits in her car before heading to her next child-oriented destination.
Ní Ghríofa has won multiple awards for her poetry; certainly A Ghost in the Throat is lyric and gorgeous. But it’s no poem, although it was mothered by one: “Caoineadh Airt Ui Laoghaire,” which from what I can tell is pronounced sort of like “queen Art O’Leary,” but spoken with a great deal more breath and beauty than English allows for. The first word means “keen” as in lament (not as in peachy), and the rest is the name of a man who was murdered, the husband of the writer. The Keen—the Irish word is too hard to spell— was written by a woman in the 18th century, Eiblín (pronounced like Eileen) Dubh Ní Chonaill, and is considered Ireland’s greatest epic poem.
Ní Ghríofa has long lingered on Eiblín’s verses, discovering her as a schoolgirl, “terrible at sums and sports….a girl whose only real gift lies in daydreaming.” She decides to translate the poem, despite having no experience or credentials to do so, apparently understanding and speaking Irish well enough to undertake it. Her approach is unique: “In every translated line of this verse, I feel that I am mimicking the homemaking actions of centuries before, stuffing quilts with duck-feathers….kneading dough.”
Nothing appears to be taken for granted by the author. She delights in an early home with her husband, in the city with “all our bins lined up side by side.” Hanging laundry, “the gesture of pinching clothes to the line requires my arms to reach skywards, to where clouds gush by, a flood suspended in layers of silvers and greys.” Exactly the right verbs, repeated words, alliteration in spot-on doses appear on every page. She speaks of “each autumn, when leaves begin to dream of gold”, how “this vase, so blue, matches the iridescent tide.” She strings together “the gush and squash and crush” when talking about a glacier’s path. A room is “obliterated thud by violent thud.”
Most thrilling is her exploration of her own body, and by extension of female bodies, “living repositories of poetry and song.” Either nursing or pregnant for much of the book, “I was ruled by milk now, an ocean that surged and ripped to the laws of its own tides.” She talks herself and us through crises, one with a child, one farther away in her youth; by the time she begins to deep dive into the character of Eiblín, or at any rate, what she gleans of it from fragments of texts written by and generally about the men in Eiblín’s life, I trusted her as a guide. While reading, I felt a strong sense of a person who simply knows how to be there, who doesn’t offer false condolence but instead is a calm, loving hand on your shoulder.
“Perhaps the past is always trembling inside the present, whether or not we sense it,” says Ní Ghríofa toward the end of A Ghost in the Throat. In her search for a woman all but lost to history, Ní Ghríofa shows that the woman trembles inside her, and, after reading her account, in all of us as well.
Interested in an unorthodox travel memoir? Check out the review of The Women I Think About at Night by Finnish writer Mia Kankamäki.
