Photo by Lukas Eggers on Unsplash

This summer, my love of books, of getting lost in other people’s adventures and lives for days on end was re-kindled. Now a pre-teen, my son no longer demands hours of on-tap attention, and so I found myself with time on my hands to read more than the usual New Yorker article rapidly devoured with coffee. I dove into six books in as many weeks, all of which have touched me in one way or another. It’s been sort of like rediscovering thoughts and feelings where dust mites had taken hold. Therapy of a kind.

Book number one — Say nothing: a true story of murder and memory in Northern Ireland (Random House), by Patrick Radden Keefe (who incidentally also writes for my favorite magazine, The New Yorker).

Say nothing is a tale of the Troubles in Northern Ireland centered around a few hand-picked characters, including the Price Sisters, Gerry Adams, and Brendan Hughes — people who played significant roles in the shaping of events.

Keefe’s storytelling of the fighting, fear, and sensitivities that reigned over the streets of Belfast some forty-odd years ago is gripping. Unlike other books I’ve read about the Troubles, Keefe focuses on his characters, their lives, and emotions. As he recounts their intertwining stories, he makes them feel like your neighbors, people you know and care for. The pages reek with the smell of gunfire and misery. The people in the book are real, as are their testimonies, and the incursions they were involved in. Intertwined with the documentary of his main characters, Keefe unravels a murder-mystery, and provides a discourse on the effects of PSTD, of aging and the human tendency to recall the past in varying versions. The book is a documentary of violence and war, a true crime novel, and a dissertation of human regret. It is the story of the murder of a widowed-mother of ten children and the suffering of generations.

With the benefit of hindsight, Keefe is able to illustrate how people change, how memories alter as we grow older, and how idealism — so bravely fought for by young men and women–takes on a new reality with age. Regrets and remorse set in. I wonder about the radicalization of so many young men and women today, how they will feel decades from now.

Midway through the book, we are transported to London, to the scene of the London car-bombing of 1973. I was seven at the time, living in the heart of the English countryside together with my parents and two older sisters. We lived in a small, tight community. Gossip was rife. Be damned if you stepped out of line — everyone knew your business. Everyone knew who you were. Somewhat like the characters in Keefe’s story, without the violence.

My playground peers regularly asked me
if I had a bomb in my pocket.

Sometimes, in the aftermath of an IRA bombing on mainland Britain, I was completely ostracized, sent to Coventry, as it was called. My friends and classmates would refuse to speak to me or acknowledge my existence. They blamed me for the bombings. I was held accountable for the actions of the IRA. Thankfully, small kids are not capable of maintaining this kind of treatment for more than a couple of hours, but my sisters and I were urged to say nothing — a strong undercurrent and sentiment of the times, which Keefe captures so eloquently.

As I grew up, the playground behavior continued. In the 1990s, I was living in Paris, when another London bombing sparked a similar reaction in a colleague of mine (a woman from a country also torn apart by racial and social discrimination). As an adult, I expected more. A deeper understanding, less immediate judgment. Yet it remained that as an Irishwoman and presumably Roman Catholic these two factors were sufficient to convict me of pro-IRA sentiment. I continued to remain accountable for the actions of the IRA in the eyes of my peers.

Having read Say nothing, I am left wondering about the impressionable teenager version of me who possessed a desperate desire to belong. Had I been born of Belfast parents, would I too have looked to the Price sisters as idols and in some way got caught up in the armed struggle? Would I too have been radicalized? An act that with age, motherhood, and responsibility I know I would have regretted, or perhaps not survived to experience regret.

Thank you, Patrick Radden Keefe, for your storytelling, for writing a book that reminds us of the sadness and human suffering brought on by a war whose pain lingers on. Its arrival is timely because my country hasn’t recovered. Peace is delicate and the prospect of a re-instated border in Ireland is already causing unrest. I do not wish for my son–or any child–to live or witness the hell you describe. Say nothing, okay. But do something, at least read this book.