Among Communists - Sinéad Morrissey

Sinéad Morrissey’s memoir certainly presents an upbringing that is very unusual and uncommon in Northern Ireland, growing up in a family with middle-class parents who are diehard North Belfast Communists, but it reflects a more universal experience that I'm sure many have had. On the one hand there's the embarrassment of being different and wishing that you belonged to a 'normal' family who did normal family activities like holidays (and even meals) rather than being taken to the Fête de l’Humanité event where a prominent Soviet official is making a guest appearance. On the other hand there's nonetheless a recognition that there is something special about being part of a close-knit family who have real values and believe in something meaningful, something that they truly believe is about making the world a better place.

Having read Anna Burns’s Milkman (not memoir but as close to lived (un)reality here as it gets) and having grown up in Belfast myself in the periods covered in the different generations in both those books, you can recognise however that there was no such thing as ‘normal’ in Belfast during those decades of the Troubles, or at least what we might have thought of as normality was more of a skewed reality. The upbringing experienced by Sinéad Morrissey is indeed far from normal; her mother born in England, her father from Turf Lodge in West Belfast, a lecturer at the Ulster Polytechnic, living an early childhood in Lurgan and Craigavon, later on the campus of the polytechnic, West Belfast and then in a relatively quiet corner of North Belfast. Coming from a generation coming out of her teenage years in the 90s Morrisey has little first-hand experience of the Troubles. Sure, shooting and explosions are all part of the everyday background noise in Belfast for anyone growing up in the 70s and 80s, but she is too young and detached from it all to grasp what the Troubles are about. Being part of a family more interested in the universal oppression of the working people by the class system, the conflict of the religious divisions in Northern Ireland rarely comes up, except when you are a young person trying to fit into one of the religiously segregated schools. As a child in a family of Communists she is unable to even comprehend the idea of religion, or even Santa come to that.

It's a very different childhood to the experience of most, but of course Among Communists is about more than just the differences, but the common experience of growing up, absorbing and figuring out the strangeness of the world and finding your own place in it. Morrissey knows how to balance the writing without boring you with too much detail or over-explaining. That’s not to say that that the writing is light or frivolous, but rather that she maintains a perspective on what is of interest and what isn’t. There is less Marxist-Leninist theorising or application and more of how the belief in the fundamental principles of Communism were unavoidably the foundation of her family childhood and her outlook on life.

This strand remains consistent even as she describes her formative teenage experiences, studies, being thunderstruck by the poetry of Sylvia Plath, her education, family trips abroad and working holidays. All are wonderfully related, each having value for their own unique personal experience filtered through her unconventional upbringing. Likewise the fractures that appear in the family, in her relationships, in her finding an accommodation with the rest of the world all seem to mirror or be reflected in the decline of the great Soviet Communist experiment. Again, despite being wholeheartedly a 'believer' at the time, Morrissey just highlights the significant events and figures that we are all familiar with them from the period in question (Thatcher, Regan, the Berlin Wall, Gorbachev), without getting too geopolitical about it all.

It's a personal memoir obviously, but of course it has resonance for anyone growing up in these times of great social change, the memories including other popular culture references that many will be familiar with (particularly the Northern Ireland peculiarities). Among Communists will undoubtedly lead you to reflect on how your own experience has been shaped by the people and events around you, and how much it has been shaped by family, which for many would be the most important determining factor in forming and informing the direction our lives and attitudes take. And when you look at it that way, you might begin to question what exactly is a 'normal' family anyway, and would you really want to be part of one?

Reading notes: Among Communists by Sinéad Morrissey was published by Carcanet in March 2026. I read a signed first edition limited hardcover that I picked up at the 2026 Belfast Book Festival, but sadly missed the event where Sinéad Morrissey presented the book. A poet, this memoir is I believe the author's first published prose.