Cells: Memories for My Mother

In this exceptional memoir, McCrea (Mrs. Engels) unflinchingly untangles his family’s history and its effects on his adult self. Returning to his native Dublin after years abroad, McCrea became his mother’s caretaker as she succumbed to dementia during Covid lockdowns. From their shared apartment, he reflected on his years spent closeted and bullied in school, his family’s legacy of mental illness, and his own HIV diagnosis, preparing at first to spin the material into a novel. Instead, he felt compelled to unpack his and his mother’s once beautiful, now tenuous relationship. Dividing the text into “cells”—a nod to Louise Bourgeois’s sculpture series—McCrea reconstructs rooms where he remembers key episodes from his life with sometimes-uncomfortable intimacy. He spares no one the microscope, including himself, writing with wide-open vulnerability about how his upbringing planted a scorching desire for acceptance that parlayed into bad relationships in adulthood. “I seek out and thrive in the sort of closeness in which the bathroom door is left open,” he writes early on, as a sort of mission statement, hoping to renounce the passive attitudes he learned from his family, a “belief that expressing things gets you nowhere.” He succeeds in spades, delivering a powerful and complicated reckoning with the ghosts of family dysfunction. This one isn’t easy to shake. (June)