Stakes by Noelle McCarthy

Stakes follows Noelle McCarthy’s award-winning memoir Grand. It begins like a smart, funny conversation and then it shifts, becoming quietly intense.

Growing up in Catholic Ireland, Noelle was fascinated by Bram Stoker’s Dracula. In Stakes she uses the gothic horror not as escape but as a way to reckon with shame, desire and trauma that echoes across decades and generations.  A vampire cannot cross the threshold unless he is invited in. This idea opens into the book’s bigger questions: what do we let in? What do we accept as normal? What do we learn to live with because family, religion, culture and love have trained us to make room for it?

Noelle repeatedly returns to the hard questions: what is the difference between an inheritance and a curse? What do we do with our parents’ pain? How do we love people and still tell the truth about the worlds that shaped them?

Written with the force of the last decade behind it, Stakes carries the shadow of #MeToo and Ireland’s exposure of institutional violence. Split between Ireland and New Zealand, Noelle writes with an outsider’s clarity. She’s close enough to feel the past, but distant enough to name it. She shows, too, what follows you even after you leave, build a new life and become a mother yourself. Noelle’s writing is in a class of its own. She is genuinely funny, sharply observed and never uses humour to dodge what hurts. She doesn’t turn the story into a neat life lesson, leaving room for contradiction. Ultimately, Stakes is an honest, bracing account of how darkness gets invited in and what it takes to see it clearly. 

Noelle McCarthy is an Irish writer and broadcaster. She lives in Featherston with John and their daughter.

Reviewer: Andrea Molloy

Penguin