I'll Know It When I See It:
A Daughter's Search for Home in Ireland
By Alice Carey
Clarkson Potter, $22
ISBN 060960984X

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There's no place like home

Yearning for the "Old Country," whether it's Italy or China, has surely been a familiar feeling to many in the melting pot of America. This longing fuels Alice Carey's quirky memoir I'll Know It When I See It, an account of her life and the steps that led her and her husband Geoffrey toward the almost unaccountable decision, after 20 good years among fine friends on Fire Island, to purchase a house in Ireland and make it their permanent home.

As she recounts in the book, young Alice's family life in Queens, New York, was a complicated one. Her father plays a detached, frequently abusive role; her mother, Big Alice, an Irish immigrant, is the heart and soul of her daughter's life, especially after she lands a job in Manhattan as housekeeper for Broadway producer Jean Dalrymple. Encounters with some of the big stars of the time give young Alice the experiences that fuel her love and knowledge of theater and show business. At 12, a trip back to Ireland with her mother adds more enigmatic and troubling experiences -- swatches of memory she seamlessly patches into the story of her later move.

Years later, her return to Ireland to live amounts to more than a simple homecoming. For one thing, there's a lot of work to be done on the house. "There are gaping holes for the windows and door. The house is girdled by bog grass and is sinking into the mud. All is terrible. All is pretty," Carey writes. She and Geoffrey buy the place anyway -- a three-acre spread with a big house, decrepit stables and tenant cottages.

Packaging a sophisticated story in unsophisticated prose, Carey opens up important questions about life during the course of the narrative. On that early trip from America to visit relatives in Ireland, she discovers pictures of herself and her mother in the family parlor among the pictures of the family dead. You probably wouldn't want to say that the point of this book is that you can only be alive in Ireland, but readers may get a definite impression that only in Ireland can the Irish feel alive.

Maude McDaniel writes from Cumberland, Maryland.