In her captivating book, I Hate You, Mary Sullivan: A Memoir of Inherited Trauma, author Barbara J. Williams offers a vivid depiction of her evolving relationship with her grandmother, Mary Sullivan, and explores the process by which inherited trauma can be passed down from one generation to another.  

Williams was 22 when Sullivan died in a New Jersey nursing home, far from her family and the town she’d settled in as an immigrant. Williams felt one emotion: relief. She’d never liked the mean, critical woman she called Nana.

More than 50 years later, that death suddenly and inexplicably began to haunt Williams, who felt compelled to heal their relationship and learn more about the stoic, tight-lipped Nana who never discussed her past. Who was she? What was her life like in Ireland and then in a strange new country? Why did she make the choices she made?

In I Hate You, Mary Sullivan, Williams begins by retracing Nana’s footsteps in Oldcastle, County Meath, Ireland, and learns that her ancestors, the Kenny family, were farm laborers. For the first time, Williams imagines the poverty and hardship her grandmother likely endured as a child and young woman. When the second famine of 1879 struck, Nana was only 2 years old. Williams wonders how hunger may have affected her grandmother. She also visualizes how the threats of forceful evictions and violent uprisings might have traumatized the young Mary Sullivan.

As Williams walks the land Nana walked and learns the cold hard historical facts, she feels compassion for the woman she once hated.

But that’s not all. Williams, a retired psychiatric nurse and researcher, infuses her narrative with scientific insight. Using her story, she shows how unearthing and understanding the denied stories of the past, Irish or not, can resolve painful inherited emotional patterns. In Nana’s narrative, for example, Williams finds keys to her own otherwise inexplicable adolescent anxiety and intense fear of home invasion and death by enemy bombing. When she learns that trauma may be transmitted epigenetically, she thinks, “That fits!”

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