16 Books Like Philomena

I haven’t recovered yet from the way Hartman recovers the lives of young Black women through historical photographs. The images were made to rob these women of their individuality, make them fit “types,” letting them say Nothing about themselves.

But Hartman writes like she’s talking to them, and they’re wonderful. She messes with categories used by authorities who thought they “knew” these women by their transgressions. I was utterly transfixed by how she imagined these women’s lives and loves in the ordinary stairways and back alleys they called home.

The photos are gorgeous. You could talk about them for days and still have more to think about—like how when it comes to women being framed for doing something wrong, maybe Nothing has changed.

This isn’t directly about Magdalene laundries but about the hidden abuse suffered by children in religious institutions. When Paddy Doyle’s parents died in rural Ireland in 1955, he was sentenced in a district court – aged four – to eleven years’ detention in an industrial school for not possessing a legal guardian.

Despite ending up wheelchair bound, he became a passionate advocate for survivor’s rights. His memoir, The God Squad, broke so many taboos that mainstream Irish publishers wouldn’t publish it. It opened the door for other memoirs.

My tiny publishing house released it in 1988. My late wife and I spent our honeymoon putting covers on it. We risked losing our home if sued. But the book became an international bestseller. A deeply warm and courageous man, Paddy died in 2020.

This explosive exposé of an illegal trade that was hidden in plain sight was the first account of the lucrative practice of baby trafficking in Irish Magdalene laundries. It was run for profit by Irish nuns, administered by civil servants who doctored documents, and approved by bishops and politicians who kept it secret.

Mike Milotte’s exposé caused a sensation that was published in 1997. But, just like I felt about my book, he regarded the book as unfinished business. Therefore, in recent years he has published a revised edition incorporating many previously untold personal uncovered in the intervening period, as the full extent of his secretive child trade became known, with rich Americans visiting orphanages to pick babies to bring home with falsified documents, in exchange for generous donations to the nuns.

After my struggles to find a printer for The God Squad in 1988, it is refreshing to see how receptive readers are to this brave memoir by Maureen Sullivan, subtitled “My Story of Love and Loss as a Survivor of the Magdalene Laundries”.

When twelve years old, Sullivan told a teacher she was being sexually abused by her stepfather. A day later she was incarcerated in a Magdalene Laundry. The nuns promised to educated her. Instead she became their indentured slave, washing and scrubbing, with little food or water and subjected to beatings.

The title comes from how the nuns kept her hidden in a tunnel when government inspectors came. Novelists can try to imagine these worlds, but only a survivor (and campaigner for other survivors) like Sullivan can really capture that purgatory.

I used my wages as an 18-year-old factory hand to establish the small press that published The God Squad. Forty-six years later, I’m still involved in publishing. In all that time, Suffer the Little Children (subtitled “The Inside Story of Ireland's Industrial Schools”) is the most important book I played any part in publishing.

It is the definitive history of all religious-run institutions. The forensic use of official documents and the diligent investigative work by the authors left no room for dispute about the cruel systems of control which religious orders exercised over women and children trapped in their care with the acquiescence of the state. It shows the world that my character, Sean Blake, is saved from by being adopted by loving parents and told nothing about his identity.

I have admired Wideman for many years. As a writer, he is a virtuoso in multiple forms, making room to confront violence and racism without offering readers trite or false resolutions.

I appreciate how he keeps calling back to the themes and subjects of earlier work. His essay, “Looking at Emmett Till” (originally published in Issue 19 of Creative Nonfiction), grappled with his recollections of 1955 as a 14-year-old teenager, the same age as Emmett Till when he was lynched and murdered.

Writing to Save a Life builds upon this work, tracing a parallel history of Till’s father, Louis, and Wideman’s journey to confront official documents of Louis’s prosecution and hanging during his service in World War II. Here as in so much of his writing, Wideman chooses a unique structure for the book, braiding his own reflections on injustice into the documentary material. 

I was late to discover this book, but I devoured it instantly. Una’s is a hybrid work, a mixture of memoir and criminal history in stunning graphic novel form.

She tells her account of growing up in West Yorkshire, UK, in 1977 when the serial murderer Peter Sutcliffe (dubbed “the Yorkshire Ripper”—ick) was still at large. Her book connects her own traumatic history with local newspaper and media accounts as well as broader statistics of sexual violence and the failures of formal investigations.

By the conclusion, Una builds to her own recovery and survival process and creates one of the most beautiful endings—drawings only—I have ever experienced in a book delving into such heart-wrenching subject matter. 

OK, so Marcel Marceau was totally famous as a French mime artist, and his history has not been exactly “lost.” But I was intrigued by the idea of a biography that focuses on someone who was known for performing through silence, mastering silence itself as an art of communication.

Every page in Wen’s book is a surprise! First, she creates an impressionistic rather than traditional biography. There are source notes at the end, like a usual work of nonfiction, but her book fits easily in the palm of your hand and resembles a collection of poems more than the usual biographical tome.

Each segment invites a re-reading, a back and forth, that evokes the ever-kinetic and elusive interplay of Marceau’s living art. “Videos and photographs remind you how transient the stage is,” Wen writes, taking on Marceau’s persona at one point. “So you replay the dancing ghost in your head… show more.

The Good Companions by J.B. Priestley is a long novel from 1929—and it’s one of the few long novels I have eagerly returned to more than once. Three Britons (a young man, young woman, and older man) are dissatisfied with their lives, and they take to the open road. Along the way they create a travelling musical-comedy troupe, The Good Companions, and we travel along with them for the tryouts, the opening nights, the standing ovations, the missed opportunities, the lucky breaks: and the glories of friendship. The novel offers readers the delicious chance to live entirely in a world now completely vanished.

This is a classic satire on middle-class aspirations–it is timelessly funny and kind of gripping in a mundane bourgeois way. But most importantly it offers a fascinating glimpse of ordinary London life in Victorian times.

I must admit it was really brought to life for me when I saw the stage version with Dame Judy Dench and her husband Michael Williams playing the lead roles: don’t hate me.