Crossing Highbridge: A Memoir of Irish America

Maureen Waters began writing about the Bronx in the spirit of dinnseachas, Irish place lore, as a means of recuperating from the accidental death of her son, whose story frames her own. Finding her way through the disorienting 1960s, after a girlhood tutored by nuns and inspired by the Holy Ghost, she set out on a kind of spiritual journey to recover what was valuable and life-sustaining in the Irish Catholic experience left behind. Writing her memoir meant coming to terms with the powerful...