A Missed Chance to Illuminate Complex Ties Between Family Life, Faith

Unhappy families have a private language, a conspiracy among members to keep from the world the secret of their unhappiness. How does faith affect this drama? Does it become a part of the unhappiness? Or does it try to break it open?

These questions struggle just beneath the surface in “Things You Get for Free,” Michael McGirr’s memoir about travels with his mother.

McGirr is an Australian Jesuit priest who takes his mother to Europe for six weeks, a honeymoon she once planned with her husband but never got to take.

They travel a well-worn map in high summer: Italy, France, England, Germany and Scotland, a prepackaged bus tour that visits four countries in seven days, but the main attractions for them are Catholic shrines: the church of St. Alphonsus and the Sistine Chapel in Rome, Sacre Coeur in Paris.

Their traveling companions provide a little color: the couple who call themselves Max and Min and drink early and often; the hypochondriac wife who borrows everyone’s sweaters and gobbles pills at breakfast; the couple who announce that they are breaking up at the beginning of the trip.

McGirr tries to write funny, but the material he leaks between jokes pulls us toward something far more serious. Vignettes about his father are interspersed among the chapters: Often depressed, a gambler, he was addicted to an over-the-counter drug and died of renal failure after a six-year struggle, leaving his wife and two young sons, one of whom, Michael, joined the Jesuits a year later, when he was 17.

It was a decision with mixed motives, one of which was an attempt to suppress his grief. And the person who knew this from the beginning was his mother.

Maureen McGirr, known throughout the book as Mum, stands center stage, a devout Roman Catholic of the old school. She finds solace in Catholic shrines, devotion to Mary, “miraculous” medals, prayers for personal intervention. Mother and son differ in their Catholicism: “Her faith leaps over detail in its eagerness to get to the safe harbor of ‘trust God’ or ‘let Gold’ or ‘let God work it out,’” McGirr writes. “My faith depends on life becoming more dense, chaotic, inexplicable.” She has never accepted his vocation, but what becomes clear, as the book wears on, is that he may not have accepted his vocation either. She knows this. He does not.

In one of the good scenes in the book, McGirr’s version of his mother’s faith is turned on its head: Mum and Michael visit St. Peter’s Basilica, “for 70 years, the physical center of Mum’s religion,” on the feast day of St. Peter and St. Paul. He rushes forward with other tourists to see the statue of St. Peter, which on his feast day wears “a triple tiara.” She hesitates, taking in the extravagance of gold leaf, bronze and marble, and forms half a sentence: “When you think .... “

Her son, irritated to be held up by her musings, asks, “What?”

“When you think that Jesus had nothing,” she replies. And he falls silent, realizing that his Mum’s quiet devotion is a little more complex than a simple glide to the first safe harbor.

By the end of the book, he seems to have a greater respect for her faith and an understanding of its origins, while she meets his excitement, for instance, in Paris in the chapel where Ignatius’ first vows were honored, with a more chilly reverence. When he ends up in conversation with a young woman on the tour, she recognizes a flirtation.

“Did you make any friends [on the tour]?” he asks her.

“I know you did,” she replies.

Though we don’t hear the end of that story in this book, the jacket copy says that McGirr is now a former Jesuit priest.

McGirr is best when describing things--the Pieta, the papers in Cardinal Newman’s study, the corridor leading to the rooms where Ignatius lived for the last years of his life. He’s less gifted with people.

The parent who is most alive on the page is the one who is dead, his dad, the one who cannot retaliate for truths told. Given Michael’s father’s depression, addiction and death, family life was hard, yet mother and son do not speak of it. How their separate faiths (under the tent of the same church) penetrate or alleviate the family’s pain is never examined. How religious faith enters into the hidden world of families is often neglected--in memoir (and in church)--and so we have very little information about how these two huge spheres, so influential in our lives, coincide.

“Tell the truth,” McGirr quotes Emily Dickinson, “but tell it slant.” If only he had taken longer to dive beneath the material of his life and come up with a bolder book. This tale is told too much at slant, and at the promising crossroads of faith and family life, this is a deep regret.

Nora Gallagher is the author of the memoir “Things Seen and Unseen: A Year Lived in Faith” and the forthcoming “Practicing Resurrection: A Memoir of Discernment.”