"The Shared Text of Our Days": Witnessing and Repair as Rejection of Neoliberal Feminism in Doireann Ní Ghríofa's A Ghost in the Throat

In her 2020 memoir A Ghost in the Throat , Doireann Ní Ghríofa seeks to conjure a maternal community based on witnessing through her unique polyvocal prose. Mingling her own life narrative with the biography of eighteenth-century poet Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill, Ní Ghríofa engages in a dialogic narrative process wherein the two women's shared experiences as Irish mothers and writers allows Ní Ghríofa to form vital community connections between herself and the long-dead poet despite the centuries between them. In this essay, I address the reparative culmination of this community-building process, as Ní Ghríofa's memoir challenges neoliberal feminist constructions of motherhood.