Peig McManus was born in 1939 on the eve of the second World War, and spent her earliest years in a tenement on Dublin’s North King Street. In her memoir, McManus recreates the poverty of tenement life in the north inner city, when there were no toilets, just a slop bucket in the corner; where her grandmother and aunt ran a “huckster’s shop” selling everything “on tick”; and where families often had to resort to eating a “blind stew”, one with no meat. Her family’s luck changed, however, when they moved to a house in the newly created suburb of Cabra West, with the luxury of two bedrooms and running water.
Two events scarred the author for life. As a child, she was sexually abused at the hands of a lodger. At 21, she became pregnant with the child of her Scottish fiance, who subsequently left her to give birth alone in a Glaswegian mother and baby home, persuading her to give their daughter up for adoption.
What begins as another “misery memoir”, like Angela’s Ashes with Dublin accents, morphs into something far more interesting when the author reaches middle-age. In the late 1970s, McManus became involved in her local community, initially via the parents association at Mount Temple school, which provided “a glimpse into another way of seeing the world, another way of living”.
Through friends from Mount Temple, McManus became a pioneer of “re-evaluation counselling”, based on experiential learning and peer assessment. She subsequently began a new life as a broadcaster, discussing personal development and assertiveness on TV and radio, “slowly lifting the veil of secrecy that had covered every aspect of Irish life”.
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McManus railed against the unmerciful hold of the Catholic Church on a country where birth control was banned – a local priest refused her absolution when she confessed to using contraception – and women were “churched… to cleanse the mother’s body of the impurities of childbirth”. She recalls living with a “constant fear of pregnancy”, and it is only towards the end of this insightful memoir that she has the courage to revisit her own traumatic first pregnancy.
I Will Be Good is the story of a strong-willed, independent woman, who refused to be held down by church or State, who wrested control of her destiny and dragged her skeletons out of the closet and into the light.
