Manhattan to West Cork

As a young girl Alice Carey came to realise that ‘home’ can mean different things. The only child of Irish immigrants to New York in search of a better life, her isolated and sometimes violent childhood was transformed when her mother started working as maid to legendary Broadway producer Jean Dalrymple. In Miss D.’s elegant Park Avenue town house, Alice was exposed to a life she had only seen in films.

Her mother worked to save up enough money for them both to go ‘home’ to Ireland, travelling down below on ocean liners. Ireland in the 1960s was radically different from New York in every way, especially in its morality and attitudes to clerical abuse. Yet despite the darkness, many years later Alice and her husband fell in love with an abandoned Georgian farmhouse in west Cork. As they restored its stables, Alice began unearthing buried childhood memories played out in wildly divergent homes in New York City, Fire Island and Killarney. Manhattan to West Cork is the poignant tale of a young girl raised in a difficult environment juxtaposed with the story of a grown woman trying to make sense of her childhood. "A great read … Alice started her first diary aged 10; this love of recording may explain her perceptive eye and ear and why the simplicity of her narration draws us in." – Irish Examiner

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