Moira Toomey Putnam

The Girl from Ballyneety Moira Toomey Putnam

In her moving memoir, Moira Toomey Putnam describes her rough-and-tumble childhood at the crossroads in Ballyneety, Ireland. The loss of her mother when she was four, followed by her departure for America with her grief-stricken father, two younger brothers, and her emotionally distant grandmother set the tone for a girlhood marked by a longing for escape. Several decades later, in a pension in the Austrian Alps, Moira, now a grandmother and the wife of a foreign service officer, sat down to reflect on the spiritual and psychological influences that shaped her early years. Full of passion and insight, the stories, articles, and interviews in this extraordinary memoir trace the natural rhythms and inner workings of places and people encountered over the course of a lifetime.