Summary

At the outset of A Ghost in the Throat, in “a female text”, the narrator, Doireann Ní Ghríofa is living in a rented flat with her husband and children. She spends her days making lists and steadily checking off the items of housework but “no matter how much [she] give[s] of [herself] to household chores, each of the rooms under [her] control swiftly unravels itself again” (7). Each morning, Doireann devotes time to breast pumping. While she waits for the machine to fill the bottles, the narrator reads from the Caoineadh written by Eibhlín Dugn Ní Chonaill, one of “the last noblewomen of the old Irish order” (10). When she read the poem as a teenager, she empathized with the poet’s love story and swooned at her descriptions of her dead lover, Art. When Doireann...