A evacative tale of a woman in the disorienting 1960s who has suffered unimageable loss and attempts to makes sense of that loss by re-imaging her past and her own Irish-American heritage.
"In her moving memoir, Waters recounts her parents’ divergent memories of growing up in Ireland and their emigration to the Bronx in the early twentieth century; she investigates how these versions of the
past helped shape her own identity as an Irish American."—American Literary History
"A touching meditation on her Irish immigrant family and her own life."—Commonweal
Maureen Waters began writing about the Bronx in the spirit of dinnseachas, Irish place lore, as a means of recuperating from the accidental death of her son, whose story frames her own. Finding her way through the disorienting 1960s, after a girlhood tutored by nuns and inspired by the Holy Ghost, she set out on a kind of spiritual journey to recover what was valuable and life-sustaining in the Irish Catholic experience left behind. Writing her memoir meant coming to terms with the powerful matriarchal voices that inspired both affection and immobilizing guilt. Ultimately, Crossing Highbridge is a tribute to her father, for whom storytelling was an art of healing.
Maureen Waters is professor of English and acting director of Irish Studies at Queen's College, New York. She is the author of The Comic Irishman and the coeditor of Lady Gregory: Selected Writings.
