When I was a child, my mother was certain that she and I shared a mind and so access to universes far beyond ordinary perception. Though I knew that wasn’t true, I had little choice: her psychosis was the place I encountered her, and the medium she used to express her love for me. 

“Lessons from the Sacred Heart” revisits this story through the lens of my mother’s tragic entanglement with ideas about Ireland and Irish diasporic identities during the early 1980s, the symbol that burned brightest for her as the darkness fell.  

Carolyn Dever is professor of English and creative writing at Dartmouth College. She is a 2025 Guggenheim Fellow for her memoir in progress, “Pretty Words Like Blades”: An Autobiography of My Mother, and author or editor of seven books, including Chains of Love and Beauty: The Diaries of Michael Field (Princeton, 2023).