Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland

by Patrick Radden Keefe

“We are now reinforced by the fact that we no longer desire or crave food,” she wrote to a friend. She began to see her own organism in the most clinical, mechanical terms. “I am now my own tool,” she mused. “I am also the craftsman wielding the tool. I am carving away at myself.”

One night, someone smeared the house of one of his neighbors with excrement—wrong address, apparently—a gesture whose combination of vindictiveness and clumsiness had all the hallmarks of the IRA.