This is a book about a woman who hunts through archives for snippets of another woman’s life. She spends 10 years in loving, addictive, servitude to her children. Not against her will but as her life’s pulse. 
She leaks milk and tears, breathing within the ticks of her to do lists. Her days are not her own but she loves them, she loves the toil, the simplicity of it. She fiercely loves her children and her husband. But someone else has gripped her. A woman whose voice reached forward and caught the heart of her teenaged self. With a poem that spoke with the urgency of the love her young heart felt. 

I flinched, in general, at my teenage self. She made me uncomfortable, that girl, how she displayed her wants so brashly.

What follows is a search for the pieces of Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill’s life, the task of which can be summed up by looking at her Wikipedia page. Which would not pass the Bechdel test. After two short paragraphs about her life (the first of which is about her first marriage at 15), everything else that is written of her is about her second husband Art. 

This book is a keen. It is the pain of knowing that the worth of women throughout history is linked only to the men that they are around. It is a keen for the lack of letters written by female hands saved. It is for the reduction of a woman’s work to nothing more than homely. It is a keen for the hours that Doireann Ní Ghríofa spent searching for the life of a woman whose poem is taught in Irish schools but whose life was not thought important enough to document beyond that of the men around her. 

This book was so beautifully, painfully written. It broke my heart with the beauty of its prose and the shared agony of women. We peer through the keyhole to another woman who is lost to time. Distorted by dust and kept alive through ties made of the men she knew.