Matrilineal Descent and Ascent; Thoughts on Red Anemones by Paula Dáil
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Growing up or living in the USA, you can be deeply influenced by the prevailing values of the surrounding society, namely, often being individualistic, libertarian, and pragmatic. You can live your whole life with your value system not being challenged. Family dynamics can heavily influence it. For example, what do you do if you have a loving, caring, and smart father and a mother who is not just distant and emotionally closed, but also seemingly incapable of loving you as a parent? You become self-reliant and a capable, strong adult, while maintaining a balanced bond with your father and not keeping up with your mother, who was rarely even present in your life. But what happens is that after the mother’s death, you have to take care of the deceased’s physical possessions, and you encounter tangible proof of family secrets. This is the strong premise and the starting point of the beautifully constructed rabbit hole our heroine reluctantly chases herself down.
How and do our foremothers’ choices, traumas, lives, and personalities influence or define our own actions? That is the question Dáil’s book gives one set of examples and answers. It is a multi-layered exploration of maternal inheritance, generational trauma, and the archaeology of family secrets. While based on the author’s discovery of her own maternal lineage, it is not a dry documentary. It is a brilliantly braided narrative that is hard to put down. The threads woven into a coherent, intertwining novel include
- A father-daughter relationship based on mutual respect, love, and personal history,
- A budding romantic relationship burdened with not just religious differences but also the questinoning the nature of these religious observances themselves on both sides,
- A girl-aunt relationship, where the aunt has been acting as a loving substitute mother, and hard decisions need to be made that can ruin this lifelong bond,
- Unraveling a series of family secrets: what did the foremothers do, when and where, and in the first half of the 20th century.
I will not spoil the last item for you as it is an exciting story, with many unexpected turns. It reinforced my belief that ultimately nothing else matters, just stories, their meanings and transmission, and finally their reactions/receptions. Families live through their stories. The book’s protagonist (and the author too) grew up in a small family, but through discovering documents of her ancestors, her family and sense of it grew in size and depth. They, the author and the book’s heroine, both worked hard to fill in the gaps in what they discovered in the official papers and personal letters. This is a powerful, moving story that was worth reading and exciting to follow.
It also made me ponder the deeper meanings. One takeaway revolves around the inevitability of confronting inherited wounds. Each of the three generations of women had a complex relationship with their mothers. The two mothers were struggling with ambivalence about the role and expectations of motherhood and their own ambitions outside traditional family expectations. These inner struggles manifested in behaviours that clearly did not align with their family and society. These were the wounds they carried throughout their lives that caused trauma not just for themselves, but also for the people who loved them. And they transpired as intergenerational trauma to the main character, who did not know anything about her ancestors’ lives and inner conflicts.
Neveretheless she inherited them and, because of her own integrity and intellectual curiosity, ended up confronting and dealing with them. The book gently suggests that it was inevitable. I am not sure, because a less integral person might have swept all these deep issues under the rug. But I agree that facing down the past is a brave and necessary act to live an honest and full life. Excavating what is hidden in one’s identity is a transformative experience. The depiction of choosing between willful ignorance and painful enlightenment is what I treasured most in the Dáil’s prose. The way she poses questions and unfolds layers of psyche through storytelling is exceptional.
The eldest of the three women in the book embodies protective silence. She believed that burying painful truths shields subsequent generations from harm. To some extent, this pattern of behaviour appeared in the second generation. Modern psychology disproved this notion, but at the time, they acted in good faith and without this knowledge. If we don’t talk about it, it can protect the children and the descendants, right? As a third-generation Holocaust survivor, I am vaguely familiar with this concept, as my grandmother, an Auschwitz survivor, did not talk about her experiences to her children. One of her many feelings must have been along the same lines as above.
The middle generation in the book represents unconscious transmission, passing along unprocessed trauma through behavior, choices, and emotional patterns without explicit awareness. This probably fits my grandmother even better. I know that my mother has been working hard through the nonverbal transmission she received. The youngest generation, the protagonist, symbolizes the breaking point, the individual who can no longer carry forward unexamined wounds and must choose between perpetual unconsciousness and transformative awareness. This is the true culminating point of the book for me. The cathartic, conscious decision-making and the buildup to it are the liberation we all need to read about.
If you’re seeking a novel that braids memory, resilience, war stories, history, and family secrets into something illuminating, this is the book to pick up. Let its three generations of strong, searching women guide you toward a deeper understanding of what it means to carry and finally choose healing. I enthusiastically recommend it to readers who crave thoughtful, character-driven storytelling that you not just enjoy, but keep thinking about long after you finish it.
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Year first published: 2025
