Grand: Becoming my mother’s daughter by Noelle McCarthy

Grand: Becoming my mother’s daughter by Noelle McCarthy

The astonishing debut memoir about mothers and daughters, drinking, birth and loss, running away and homecoming from prize-winning writer and broadcaster Noelle McCarthy.

"I’ll be grand, girl, I’ve great faith." – Mammy, just before she died

Funny, charismatic and generous; angry, vicious and hurt; in pub lounges all over Cork City, Noelle McCarthy’s mother Carol rages against her life and everything she’s lost.

As soon as she can, Noelle runs away. All the way to New Zealand, to make a new, different kind of life. But then Mammy gets sick, and it’s time to face everything that’s waiting back home.

From Catholic Ireland in the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s to sparkling Auckland in the first years of the new millennium, Grand is a story of the invisible ties that bind us, of bitter legacies handed down through the generations, and of the leap of faith it takes to change them.

Paperback, 272 pages, published March 2022.