Memoir:This is ostensibly the story of a small scandal that happened to a young woman nearly 50 years ago in Rannafast in the Donegal Gaeltacht when, to quote Heaney, "the future was a verb in hibernation", writes Polly Devlin.
It was to do with boys and that was anathema to the uncannily sensitive culture both there and in Belfast, where she lived, so all hell broke loose. She was condemned on all sides, save by her own family, and expelled from her convent school, St Dominic's in Belfast.
From and around this trivial misdemeanour, in retrospect almost laughable but far-reaching in its consequences, like the initial nanoseconds of a big bang, Patricia Craig has inscribed a detailed map of a time, precise geographies of a place and a society so scrupulously signposted that many of us could track our own pasts by it.
Asking for Trouble contains a complex freight - it's a kind of notebook, a diary, a thriller, a what-happened rather than a whodunnit (though who did exactly what to whom is a theme in the book), and it goes to the heart of a personal and a public reality. She never mentions depression but it stalks some pages of this book as it stalked Belfast.
It took her decades to set out on her quest to find her truth, in a rerun of the truth; the facts have lain simmering under her life and only now can she decipher why such a small, such an innocent event had such an epic convulsive effect. What is remarkable is her lack of anger at the meanness behind it all.
Her search takes her down many a fascinating path - we read diverse, informed riffs on family genealogies; on the establishment of the Gaeltacht in west Belfast (I had no inkling that in the 1960s in Clonard a Gaelic colony was set up with Irish as the common language in the community, in its schools, its newspapers); on Irish literature and Ulster poetry; we read biographies, descriptions of towns and places, including a snapshot tour of Antrim and its history.
MUCH IS WRENCHINGLY sad - the wastage inherent in much Irish life with its dismal puritanism, its lack of joy, is revealed, but innocence and happiness are in there too. Her love of the Gaelic colours the book and its quick shorthand flashes up history - the name of the Falls Road, for example, comes from Bóthar na bhFál - the road of the hedges and McTaggart (Mac an tSagairt) means the priest's son.
The memoir is also a love story to her remarkable mother, who refused to countenance the sordid little disaster, and a paean to the tight, dour, idiosyncratic city that was Belfast before the Troubles, now changed out of recognition - though St Dominic's remains as implacably there as ever. Her prose is deliberate, as though she is matching blunt words to the place and the people, and there are sometimes infelicities of language, as in her use of the vernacular idiom - phrases such as "what-have-you" and "so on and so forth" sometimes stop her otherwise eloquent narrative abruptly.
She refuses nostalgia and takes a startling wry pleasure in perversity - a kind of characteristic northern refusal of softness and decadence.
I was in Belfast at the time of which she writes and I recognise everything about it, but I can only admire her staunchness - "I couldn't get enough of rain, back streets, waste ground, the back ends of laundries and cinemas, bleak playgrounds with bonneted toddlers going round and round on wooden carrousels". But after The Event she had had enough and left for London as soon as she was able.
THE BEAUTIFUL GIRL who stares out of the cover as if frozen in shock had, if nothing else, two rare props to help her through her time of crisis, caught as she was - and as we all were then - between nuns, priests and modes and mores long outdated elsewhere. She had the love of a wonderful mother and - the two are dittoed together - a profound sense of self-worth.
She was, and is, in every sense, cool. It is this coolness and irony and a kind of chic that underwrites the narrative and must be a revelation to many similarly educated convent girls who came away from their education imbued with a feeling of worthlessness because of their treatment at the hands of nuns. (Germaine Greer once remarked that one of the reasons she was never properly domesticated was because she was socialised by a gang of mad women in flapping black habits.)
Our education via nuns was an education into obedience and fear as a way of life; obedience as a form of integrity. Patricia Craig fiercely resisted such an induction of fear and concomitant unfairness and laughed at injustice - something rare in a 16-year-old in the mid-1950s anywhere, never mind rebarbative Ulster.
So what might seem at first glance to be a contrivance to make a book, a flight of fancy, a storm in a teacup, is rather a memorable, dense account of a vanished way of life, a social history, a bid for restoration, and a brilliant memoir.
Polly Devlin is a professor of English at Barnard College, Columbia in Manhattan. Her latest book, A Year in the Life of an English Meadow, was published by Frances Lincoln earlier this year
Asking for Trouble By Patricia Craig Blackstaff Press, 231pp. £8.99