"I'll be grand, girl, I've great faith," Noelle McCarthy's mother Carol told her just before she died.
Raised in the Irish city of Cork, the writer and broadcaster “ran away” to New Zealand as a young woman, but things changed when her mother got sick.
Noelle explores "mothers and daughters, drinking, birth and loss, running away and homecoming" in her new memoir Grand: Becoming My Mother's Daughter.
Noelle McCarthy Photo: Supplied
Grand is out on 29 March. You can read an extract here.
Noelle tells Kim Hill she first started writing down memories of her life in 20-minute breaks from parenting her newborn daughter Eve, now four.
She soon discovered the pieces about her mother, who was then still alive, had a "different energy".
"They were more interesting to write. They felt more electric or more dangerous somehow than the other pieces about my life."
As Carol became more ill, Noelle's exploration of her mother's story and her own took the form of a memoir.
A self-described former alcoholic, Noelle gave up drinking aged 30, but her mother — a lifelong heavy drinker — never did.
Growing up, Noelle says she saw Carol's drinking as both a choice and a moral failing.
"I never thought of my mother being powerless over alcohol. I just thought she was doing this on purpose to infuriate me and to make my life incredibly hard."
Photo: Penguin Books New Zealand
Before Noelle stopped drinking herself, she was obsessed with trying to figure out why she'd followed in Carol's footsteps when her mother's drinking had caused her so much pain as a child.
"I was thinking 'if I can understand this then I can control this'."
But no understanding emerged and Noelle was worn out from self-medicating this way: "I was so tired, it was exhausting and it didn't work. The drinking I was doing wasn't accomplishing what it used to."
"I was so ashamed at the idea of putting my hand up and saying I had a drinking problem. And I was also so furious at the irony of being powerless over alcohol. It was just the worst thing I could think of happening, having grown up with my mother. The idea that I'd be the same was just this cosmic joke."
Before Carol died, Noelle says she and her mother had established a fairly good relationship — largely thanks to the birth of Eve.
"My mother and I had this incredibly intense, oppositional relationship but we were kind of obsessed with each other… and introducing something that she had a lot of experience with herself [child-rearing], it just sort of took the pressure off a bit and also it was a connection."
Noelle's own pregnancy and childbirth experience also gave her "a very visceral knowing" of Carol's experience of being forced to give up two babies for adoption before she was born.
Noelle says she wrote Grand because she felt haunted by unanswered questions about her mother's life and choices and what that meant for herself and the family she's creating.
But in writing the book, she discovered shared patterns in her own life and Carol's that she didn't feel the same urgency to question.
"As I've gotten older, I have come to a bit more peace with the aspects of her that are in me because I can live with them.
"I think sometimes if you're trying to solve [the mystery of a relationship] you're sort of tearing the butterfly apart with your fingers."
Noelle McCarthy's story ‘Buck Rabbit' won the Short Memoir section of the Fish Publishing International Writing competition in 2020. Since 2017, she and her husband John Daniell have been making podcasts as Bird of Paradise Productions.
