Doireann Ní Ghríofa wrote much of her first book of prose, A Ghost in the Throat, sitting in her car on the top floor of a multistorey car park, having dropped her children off at school in Cork city. Whatever works: her imaginative journey into the life and mind of 18th-century Irish poet Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill was so convincing and original that it captivated readers and won the James Tait Black biography prize and, in Ireland, the An Post book of the year award. Having published several well-regarded collections of poetry, it seemed as if this blend of biography, memoir and meditation had enlarged the way in which she could write about her abiding preoccupation: the ever-present past.
She returned to her car to work on her new book, Said the Dead. But this time, it was parked in front of a vast building high on a hill overlooking the river Lee, one half of it derelict and the other half transformed into apartments. Its history was long: originally referred to simply as the district asylum at the end of the 18th century, a grand gothic-revival building had been constructed during the 1840s, and named, after Ireland’s Lord Lieutenant, the Eglinton Lunatic Asylum; in the 20th century, it became the Cork District Mental Hospital and, in its last incarnation before closing in 1992, Our Lady’s Psychiatric Hospital. Many such institutions existed across Ireland, a patchwork of private and public mental health provision that operated against the backdrop of colonial rule, poverty and famine.
If its current inhabitants are aware of its previous history, they are presumably not consumed by thoughts of the souls that lived, and often died, within its expansive and intricately arranged campus. Not so Ní Ghríofa, who was always drawn to it; when she discovered that the records of its male and female inpatients were held in the city archives, she booked an appointment to read them and was immediately gripped by a sense of urgency, wanting particularly to know everything about the women she encountered. “When I would leave the archive at the end of my time there, and the archivist would say, ‘Please gather your things,’ I really felt as though I was gathering up their names and their lives and carrying them with me and rushing out of there. There was a real sense of running away together, almost.”
She repeatedly sneaked into the derelict building as it was being renovated, dodging down stairwells and tramping across empty scrubland, supplementing hours of archival research with immersion into the environment whose past she was intent on recreating.
“The shadow would be falling on the car,” she tells me as we sit drinking coffee in the sleek foyer of a local hotel. “I’d be looking towards particular windows, and I would know where different women from the casebooks had been, because the doctors would note which ward they were being held in at particular times. And I’d be able to walk up and look in the window, and it really felt that close.”
Her sense of proximity to the women she encountered in the numerous casebooks kept by the doctors charged with their care was not a matter of simple curiosity or intellectual inquiry; it was, instead, a matter of intense and urgent identification. In the book, Ní Ghríofa refers to herself in the third person, as “she” or “the Reader”, and early on makes clear her connection to the material that came to grip her: “She counted herself among the many who flinched as they passed that old institution. Had her birth occurred in another decade, she – whose distress had twice sent her clambering river railings seeking her ending – might have lived within those walls.”
Ní Ghríofa grew up in County Clare, just south of the Burren, the huge, otherworldly limestone landscape that sits just to the east of the Atlantic coast, and she feels a deep affinity with its clints and grikes, the slabs and fissures that can easily disorient the walker, its shifting light and evaporating and reappearing lakes. At 17, she left Clare for university in Cork, and became severely depressed. On two occasions, she attempted to drown herself in the river, and was pulled back – just as, she points out, many of the women admitted to the asylum would have been. What struck her, she explains, was finding other women, distant in time, who shared the experience of “having to find your feet again and having to keep going day by day in a life that you would have preferred had just ended”.
She is now 45, and married with four children. How does she feel about that period of her life? Almost every day, she replies, she crosses “over and back that river on bridges several times, bringing my children back and forth to school. And when I go for my walk, I walk by the river through the forest: I look at the water, and I am so grateful for my life. I’m so grateful that I got to live these years and to live these days, day by day, with all the ordinary joys and vexations and frustrations. And that I have become a writer, and that has given me a way to explore, even to think, about histories like this, and to have the experience of entering the city archive and opening the casebooks and just feeling like: there they are. They’re my people.”
None of these feelings of empathy and recognition made researching or writing the book straightforward; in the event, Ní Ghríofa frequently found herself wrongfooted, her assumptions and expectations upturned. She imagined there would necessarily be cruelty and unkindness, that patients would find themselves incarcerated – perhaps as a result of a family dispute – with no prospect of an improvement in their mental health, or of release to their previous lives.
“One of the stories that I had really internalised in my generation, when people would be talking about these particular hospitals, was that people were put in there so that their relations could get the land, so that they could inherit the farm. And in fact, what I encountered a lot was women really pushed beyond breaking point, really, really trying. And then in severe mental distress, being brought here, oftentimes by spouses who would inquire after them often and write letters. And that there were some women who were fortunate, recovered quickly and left again and never came back to the institution, who went home to their families.”
Not all were so lucky to have their casebooks marked with the words Discharged Recovered, and in the grainy photographs that appear throughout Said the Dead, often with ghostly text overlaying them, many harrowing stories emerge. A 35-year-old woman who may be suffering from “lactational insanity” is “emaciated, exhausted”, and continually “rambles to herself about her home and children, particularly her eldest daughter”; another woman, in the grip of homicidal mania, has threatened those about her with a revolver and, once admitted, gathers up bundles of paper and spends hours attempting to make herself vomit (“The Reader longed to interrupt”, writes Ní Ghríofa, “but Anna Martha was stuck in her own times.” And there she stayed, until shortly afterwards, she died of the tuberculosis that was rife among the wards).
But the narrative of institutional neglect, edging towards malpractice, does not hold, particularly as Ní Ghríofa develops the story of Dr Lucia Strangman, who with her sister Mary was an early medical student, qualifying in the 1890s, and beginning her working life proper at the asylum. On her first day, she finds Dr Scanlan, her superior, speaking gently to an elderly woman; she subsequently discovers his practice of organising musical evenings and entertainments to cheer and stimulate the patients. When Strangman later married another doctor at the hospital, John FitzGerald, the couple developed a groundbreaking psychiatric clinic for outpatients, thought to be the first of its kind in Ireland; all of their three children followed them into the field. Both of them, says Ní Ghríofa, “spent so many years of their professional careers in service of a large institution, and when they have an opportunity to develop a small, what I really still feel is a very radical clinic, their aim is to eradicate the asylum in some way. That seems very forward-thinking.”
Before that, though, the inpatients had to be cared for – not least by nourishing them with food, milk and, occasionally, glasses of wine. “Oftentimes the women that were walking through the doors were deeply impoverished, having had many, many children, very close together. Their bodies and minds were exhausted by the incredible pressures and difficulties of just surviving in Ireland at that time, of just eking a living, of trying to keep your children alive. That was so incredibly difficult in very particular, precise ways that they would often articulate. I was born in 1981, and it’s easy for people of my generation to almost gloss over the past, and forget how difficult it was to put a dinner on the table for your child, let alone have anything left over for yourself. And that when you have the interaction of several layers of societal pressures like that, a human being can crumble under that pressure.”
As Ní Ghríofa worked her way through the casebooks in the city archive, she was aware that they were only there because a group of psychiatric nurses had made the decision to preserve them when the institution closed down. “They saved something invaluable, and the human labour of going up and down from cellars under an old building with armfuls of books, hundreds of books – the physicality of that, even. It had to be done. It had to be loaded into car boots. It had to be carried into the archive. And there are many areas around Ireland where there were similar vast institutions where that impulse didn’t occur.”
As invaluable as those records are, Ní Ghríofa is also aware of the limitations of what they contain; as she points out, these are the words of the assessing doctors, and consequently partial, coloured by factors – a lack of time, a failure of understanding, a personal dynamic – that we can’t know. “The casebooks themselves are not a dependable window into the life of what’s happening. They’re told at such a slant, and sometimes as a reader, I would grow so used to them that I was almost reading them at the same slant myself. I was taking the doctor’s writings as fact, whereas it’s not necessarily fact. It’s a person’s perception of the other human being that they’re seeing in front of them.”
One of the phrases that recurs in the records, and to which Ní Ghríofa returns repeatedly in the book, is “No Change” – a summary of a patient’s progress, or lack of it, that seems desperately inadequate. And yet even in the gaps, she felt her imagination working on the women she was encountering, as she walked about the city and inhabited the places they had been, or conjured up mental images of them in the absence of photography. Often, she would find her hands shaking as she turned the pages, unsure whether she would be met by news of a full recovery, a slow decline or an eventual death.
She also became increasingly concerned about the ethical implications of the project, which can be seen as part of numerous attempts to reckon with the past, from attempts to gather oral histories to the work of a historian such as Catherine Corless, which exposed the unrecorded deaths of hundreds of children at the Tuam mother and baby home. For Ní Ghríofa, there was a fundamental question of her right as a contemporary woman to delve into the archives. “These women didn’t consent to their records being read by someone hundreds of years in the future who would then think about and dream about their lives and want to carry them onwards. So there’s a sense of protectiveness that I also feel, and the protectiveness, bizarrely, is often against myself as a writer. I want to shield them from myself.”
Yet it’s also true that where lives are not memorialised, when individuals become part of a collective and undetailed mass, abuses of power flourish more easily; in Ireland, among many other places, much of the significant historical work done to counteract such abuses centres on bringing hidden lives into the light. She agrees, but she also firmly believes that Said the Dead treads a fine line between “rescue and theft”.
It’s a line that many historians of the relatively recent past have to navigate, perhaps most notably in Ireland in the still emerging trauma of the Magdalene laundries. “I feel like there’s a bruised element to living in the immediate aftermath and in the ongoingness of such institutions,” says Ní Ghríofa. “Generations have lived with that kind of institution and immediately afterwards have that sense of carrying it as a bruise. And sometimes there’s a sense of shame, I think, with institutions in Ireland that I sense with Irish people when you speak about it.” That shame relates to questions of complicity – to the tension of knowing about wrongdoing and feeling constrained, whether by power structure or personal precarity, from speaking out.
She returns to the physical reality of the building on the hill gradually morphing from institution to dwelling place, its derelict half symbolising, in her mind, “the sense of this vast, splintered history that is just there. It is impossible to ignore. It’s right in front of us.” Is this the kind of project that she will always want to work on? “So much of being a writer, to me, is extremely mysterious,” she replies. “When I try to picture it in my head, I just get a load of question marks. I don’t know why I’m so drawn to questions of time and interrogating our sense of history,” she adds. “I always come back to this: what do we want from the past, and what does the past want from us? Every generation that comes to Ireland’s past will have a different way of telling that history. And one element that I’m really drawn to as a writer is the sense of the telling: how do we choose to perform the telling?”
Said the Dead by Doireann Ní Ghríofa is published by Faber on 21 May. To support the Guardian order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply. In the UK, Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123 or email jo@samaritans.org. You can contact the mental health charity Mind by calling 0300 123 3393 or visiting mind.org.uk