When Carole O’Malley was 13 years old, her mother got sick, with what her father told her was mononucleosis.
In fact, Betty O’Malley had cancer. But like many families of that time and place—it was the 1950s, in Springfield’s Hungry Hill neighborhood—the O’Malleys shied away from using that word, as if somehow naming the terrible disease would give it more power. In the end, of course, avoiding the word cancer did nothing to avoid its consequences: in 1959, Betty O’Malley died, after asking her young daughter to promise to take care of her two-year-old brother, the baby of the family.
Carole O’Malley did more than that: she became, at the urging of the perhaps well-meaning but misguided adults around her, her family’s substitute mother, caring for her seven brothers and her alcoholic father. While Carole tried to rise to the occasion, it was a burden no 13-year-old should have had to take on. Making it harder was the family’s refusal to acknowledge any difficulties—their mother’s illness, their father’s drinking, and, later, the abusive treatment she and her brothers received from their father’s second wife—which created a powder keg environment in the household, always on the verge of explosion.
Carole (now Carole O’Malley Gaunt) wrote about her tumultuous childhood in a moving 2007 memoir, Hungry Hill (published by the University of Massachusetts Press). Writing the book was an act of courage, requiring O’Malley Gaunt to put aside her family’s (and, in fact, many Irish-Catholic families’) insistence on tamping down their emotions, and hiding their so-called dirty laundry from public view. That sense of secrecy carried with it an unavoidable sense of shame for children like Carole, who was left with a list of expectations that would have been hard for an adult to meet, and no real outlet for her grief and anger over her family’s disintegration.
On Thursday, April 1, O’Malley Gaunt will read from Hungry Hill at the Hampshire Regional YMCA, 286 Prospect St., Northampton. The event is sponsored by The Garden, a support center for grieving children and adults. The free event begins at 7:30 p.m. and will include a question-and-answer period with the author.
