Mairi MacInnes

Reviews for Clearances: A Memoir

‘… The lives of most educated women have changed, but one wishes that their memoirs were more like this: so intelligent, nuanced, and torn.’ ‘Briefly Noted’,
The New Yorker, 2nd Oct 2002

‘… relationship to person and landscape is MacInnes’ key subject, her yardstick, and she has to give it a shape in thought, has to make ‘Life and the memory of it’ turn ‘into each other’. Clearances: A Memoir achieves this literary transformation with such underrated skill, such feeling for the subtleties of the low road taken, that her writing comes to exemplify the only apparently simple understanding that ‘to make things happen, you have to go away.’ Peter Robinson, The Reader

‘Like all the best memoirs, Mairi MacInnes’ is both a personal story and a generation’s history. I liked the person – an intelligent, impatient girl from the North of England determined to be a writer, and I recognized the generation, the one that was young in the Second World War and lived on to inhabit the edgy half-century that followed. I read Clearances with a continual sense of its honest perception – it was like that, in our generation – and with admiration for the strong-willed woman at the center of it.’ Samuel Hynes