In Ordinary Time is not an ordinary examination of a life. McMahon could easily focus on her experience as an Irish immigrant in a pre-9/11 New York, struggling with addiction and a complicated family life, and leave it there. That, however, would miss the point. It’s not a story of one life but many. Indeed, the lives that McMahon looks at become a wider community of those affected across time by centuries of colonialism, from the Irish women like Mary Smith who were subject to horrific medical experiments, to Irish-American playwright Eugene O’Neill. Despite her behemoth task of presenting her own lived experience of the trauma that still pervades the Irish consciousness, manifesting in mental illness and lives that never get off the ground, McMahon delivers a surprisingly easy read. Once you pick it up, it’s physically difficult to put down. “A lot of people have said that,” McMahon tells me, with the same clarity of voice found in her work, as though, while she’s pleased, it’s another interesting piece of information.

It’s a tone that holds throughout a book that could so easily get lost in itself. McMahon brings a levity to the work that comes from her empathy for the people on the page. Mary Smith died homeless, hit by a tram, outside the very medical institution that promised to heal her. And yet, McMahon’s work reframes a life that could so easily be a one line tragedy. In Ordinary Time is effective in its transformation of unknown lives, and these brief tales of woe, into valued, real people who are not abandoned to the annals of time but given care in the present. Two stories informed this approach. The first was the unbelievable pain felt by her family at the loss of their first daughter that couldn’t be put into words, and so wasn’t. The second was the news story, McMahon read in 2011 about the death of Irish immigrant Grace Farrell in front of St Brigid’s Church in New York. Farrell came to America at 17, in 1993, hoping to pursue an artistic career and find her mother, who had given her up for adoption in a time when Irish women were simply not afforded basic liberties of choice and parenthood.

This story opens up the memoir, as it inspired the long and transformative process of putting In Ordinary Time to paper. “I think it’s a very colonial concept that people’s parents are the ones responsible for how they turn out.” She says, explaining that the inherited trauma experienced by one’s elders cannot be written off. Her mother never had the support network or vocabulary to explain her grief, she could talk about it. Similarly, Grace Farrell’s mother was unable to make the best decisions for her child in a society that responded to centuries of powerlessness with religious fundamentalism. These two lives left a great deal unspoken which McMahon longed to put right, causing the sense of relief that these people are not ignored felt by the reader in her depiction of these difficult stories.

St Brigid’s was founded by Irish immigrants in the 1840’s, a demographic whose fortunes in America changed rapidly in the post-war era and whose complex racialisation in the US McMahon does not shy away from. St Brigid herself becomes a central character in the memoir, taking on a Jungian shadow concept of the feminine in Irish history, as a real woman, a saint and a much more ancient god who became secondary to the male St Patrick. Irish mythology, pagan religion and language are all tools for McMahon’s decolonised approach. “No one wants to ask about it but it’s so important for the book,” she says, explaining her surprise that I do. It’s not a sign of my character but the enthusiasm of Gen Z for a more honest examination of history that still carries with it so much discomfort.

While this need is being met in academia and London’s galleries, McMahon compares the current British Government’s combination of denial and outrage to the final stages of an alcoholic’s suffering, which causes either a moment of personal salvation and a way out or incredible damage to themselves and those around them. In other words, we need stories like In Ordinary Time, and Fire Rush (which follows McMahon’s interview in San Clemente’s podcast series), to bring healing for a nation that likes to ignore the continued self-destruction brought by glorification of a relatively recent colonial past. McMahon’s memoir is a testament to the power of empathetic storytelling in response to such atrocities. An interesting point of comparison she looks at is the lack of information she got at school in Ireland about the Famines. She attributes it to the sheer pain and anger students would feel that people must have felt needed more time and distance.

McMahon doesn’t shy away from her own anger but uses it as motivation for reflection on what her life might have been like had the British not significantly sabotaged the use of the Irish language. When I ask her how she processed generational and personal traumas in her writing process, McMahon says, “I read that you should write from your scars not your wounds, so I gave myself a lot of time and care.” This approach feeds her memoir well. She now lives in an Atlantic facing cottage, which she saved from its abandoned state with her Swiss painter partner. As I talk to her over Zoom, while they’re holidaying in a sleepy French town, she says she’s like to be a writer who takes this kind of time for herself, to present her lived experience and grow in the process. Considering this is only the start of her writing career, following her training at CUNY, In Ordinary Time is a remarkable work that signals a great deal still to come. 

Carmel’s full interview will feature in the upcoming second series of the San Clemente podcast.

Cover photo: Lauren Carroll