Book review: Martha Long’s “Ma” series shows her genius for storytelling and phenomenal memory for details
There are certain expectations that go with genres. A memoir set in Ireland about a girl growing up in poverty evokes the image of lovable alcoholics, warm but flawed family relations and some kind of uplifting denouement where the child is mentored in a way to see the good in life.
Martha Long’s “Ma” series, best sellers in Ireland and England, explodes those expectations. Starting with the first volume, we get the message: Poverty is neither uplifting nor romantic; having alcoholics for parents puts a child at risk for severe physical and social abuse; and recovery from such a childhood is not easy.
Three of the nine volumes have been recently published in the United States. Each is a stand-alone story with a different tone. The first, “Ma, He Sold Me For a Few Cigarettes,” takes Martha from age 3 to age 11 and is almost unrelentingly grim. At the beginning, little Martha and her baby brother live in rags generally soaked in urine (they still wet the bed). Their mother, Sally, is probably mentally ill or developmentally disabled, though it’s hard to tell from the perspective of a young child. Sally’s partner, Jackser, is controlling and violently abusive. He rapes Martha regularly and, in the title incident, allows another man to rape her in return for cigarettes.
Long’s style of memoir stays insistently in the narrative present, providing little context. She has a genius for storytelling and a phenomenal memory for details. The conclusions readers might draw will depend on their political viewpoints — conservatives would find plenty to support a “culture of poverty” thesis; liberals would point to a systemic failure of institutions and the consequences of letting basic social services be run by the Catholic Church.
Martha has a spirit that resists being broken. She finds ways to protect her mother and siblings; she placates Jackser but resists when she can; she steals to keep the family fed. Her thefts end up being her salvation — despite an apparent policy of returning children to their families, however dysfunctional, she is instead “sentenced” to spend the next five years in a convent boarding school.
In the second volume, “Ma, I’m Gettin Meself a New Mammy,” Long humorously describes her escapades in the school. However, this is no warm-hearted story of nuns and girlfriends forming bonds and friendships. Having grown up believing that the only way to survive is to be tough and retaliate for any wrong, Martha makes no friends among her classmates and frustrates the nuns, whether kindly or abusive, including one that she wishes would become her “new mammy.” Her one real victory is that, given a chance to return to her family, she has the sense to stay in the school, where at least she won’t be sexually and physically abused.
The hilarious and tragic third volume, “Ma, It’s a Cold Aul Night an I’m Lookin for a Bed,” takes place over only a few weeks. Having reached age 16, and never having caught up on the schooling she missed, Martha has to leave the convent school and go to work. The skills she learned in the convent are limited to cleaning floors and toilets and answering the phone. She does all right in a nanny job, but it’s temporary. She lies her way into a waitress job, but her in-your-face style gets her fired. She gets fired from another job when her boss’ son tries to rape her and she beats him up, all of this being told in something close to slapstick. At her final job, with a family of slobs, she shrinks and discolors all the clothes in the washing machine, puts too much salt in the oatmeal and breaks various appliances before she’s fired. That puts her on the street in the middle of winter, homeless and with nowhere to go.
Long’s story is a gripping one, though much of it is so harsh that a reader might finish each volume with a feeling of relief. Grim or humorous, underneath the narrative is the tragedy of a girl who has come to near-adulthood without the resources or the social ties to make a dignified life. As a memoir, it’s sometimes suspect. Can she really remember being 3 years old so well? And are those episodes at age 16 exaggerated for comic relief? But the broad outline of the story has a ring of authenticity.
Of course, because this is a memoir, we know that there’s a reasonably happy ending somewhere. Long is now a successful writer and, according to the book jackets, she has also successfully married and raised a family. Martha’s ability to survive seems to have taken root in her ability to care about her mother and siblings as a young child — and, surprisingly, even in lessons taught to her by the terrible Jackser, who insisted that she should never let anyone (except him, of course) beat up on her. It will be interesting to see, in the volumes to come, how that eventually allowed her to create a decent life.
Reprinted from Street Roots’ sister paper, Real Change News in Seattle.
