‘Consider me bitten’: Stakes by Noelle McCarthy, reviewed

Claire Mabey finds herself smitten with Stakes, the follow up to Noelle McCarthy’s award-winning first memoir Grand.

You can see the ruins of Whitby Abbey from miles away. The first time I spied it, out the window of a bus that lurched around Yorkshire’s narrow coastal roads, I got chills. It’s so big. A monumental, undeniable fact of the past watching over us from its many eyes. You can see why Bram Stoker imagined horrors doing mischief in its shadows. The second time I saw the Abbey, a day later and on foot this time, I took Noelle McCarthy’s Stakes with me. I carried the book in my backpack up the famous 199 steps, past St Mary’s church, into the arms of the Abbey and laid Noelle inside one of the rectangular depressions carved into its massive stony side. I took a photo, sent it to the author. I know what it’s like to have a book get under your skin, and through a book an author, and through an author a place. Bram Stoker’s Dracula pulses through Stakes. The story of a vampire, of fear of death, of bearing witness, of a writer trying to understand the impossible. In Stakes Noelle McCarthy writes her heart out to the thrum of Dracula in her veins and I am obsessed.

As McCarthy says, some books explain us to ourselves. Or at least their shadows, their complexities, put a mirror up to our own. Stakes is, like Dracula, essentially about death: the horror of it, the layers of it, the unlikeliness of it – what it does to the living. McCarthy opens her memoir with a small death – a hell of a hangover. She’s in bed, the Morning Report theme starts playing, “bright trumpets, tearing through the bat-wing membrane between sleeping and waking  … And me, half-dead from the banging in my head, fighting consciousness. Every dirty part of me hurts.”

There are those sharp brushstrokes – the sentences that made Grand , McCarthy’s first book, so explosively good. There’s a force to McCarthy’s writing – not beautiful, but blazing, fang sharp, a restless layering and looping in service of memory. And what a fucking memory! At the 2025 Auckland Writers I saw her interview the great memoirist Leslie Jamison and in that conversation Jamison emphasised that it’s specificity that makes great writing. Every page of Stakes is an assemblage of specific detail – visceral, visual, so idiosyncratic and vivid I often forgot I was reading words, the images flying so fast I was there, with her, through it all.

“It all” is the long tail of trauma, to put it simply. In Grand we met McCarthy’s brilliant, hard, funny, kind, mean, wonderful, alcoholic Mammy Carol, and god I couldn’t get enough of her. In Stakes we get to go back and visit her again. Are two books even enough for such a person? When you read Carol you can see, hear, why McCarthy must write her, pour two books out in relatively quick succession. Memoir is an opportunity to raise the dead: resurrect them on the page and let them speak. It’s also a chance to turn those voices up, strain to listen to what they never quite said, or said when you weren’t in a position to listen. Assembling memories alongside the determined, conscious immediacy of putting one word in front of another is the privilege of being left behind bearing the wounds your ghosts have handed to you. The mission of Stakes, where the urgency comes from, is the confronting of those wounds – peering in, analysing the shape of them, the precise nature of their pain and opportunity.

Stakes at Whitby Abbey; and a signed copy of Dracula in the Abbey’s museum.

Published at almost exactly the same time as Stakes is Said The Dead, by Irish writer Doireann Ní Ghríofa. Said The Dead is a shapeshifter that blends fiction, research and memoir to tell the story of the patients of Cork Mental Asylum, known as Our Lady’s, the same asylum where Carol worked as a nurse. As the Abbey towers over Whitby, so Our Lady’s looms over McCarthy’s family, her Cork: “the power that place has always had, to mix up time and space … Grey stone walls and Gothic arches like witches’ hats, a tangle of stairs and floors and corridors. Like an Escher painting, Mammy in the centre.”

We visit and revisit Our Lady’s throughout Stakes at different times – a storied, scary place, an institution, then a ruin, then flash new apartments with a spa. It’s a site of violence against patients and against Carol. The violence reverberates out of Carol and down through McCarthy following her to New Zealand and back to Cork and into motherhood and onto the pages we’re reading and beyond.

Both Stakes and Ní Ghríofa’s Said The Dead are part of a growing collection of literary work by Irish writers reckoning with a trauma both collective and individual: Claire Keegan, Audrey Magee, Michael Magee, Anna Burns, Elaine Feeney, many more. McCarthy’s approach is through the lens of herself, the quickness of her mind, the close reader, the astonishing kaleidoscope of her memory, her rage, her grief. Ní Ghríofa’s way is to haunt backwards, slipping herself as “the Rea…