In Claire Keegan’s “long short story” Foster (2008), the unnamed child protagonist-narrator is temporarily displaced to the home of distant relatives to ease the burden of her feckless father and pregnant mother who are overrun with other children to care for.1 In an early scene, the narrator’s new foster mother, Mrs. Kinsella, gives the child a bath. The child thinks, “Her hands are like my mother’s hands, but there is something else in them, too, something I have never felt before and have no name for. I feel at such a loss for words but this is a new place and new words are needed” (Keegan 2008: 18). Though Keegan’s text is not mentioned in The Child Sex Scandal and Modern Irish Literature: Writing the Unspeakable (2020), the child protagonist’s “loss for words” in this intimate scene recalls the experiences of so many of the child...

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