Michael: Beckett's Children: A Literary Memoir - Live Episode from Kansas City 9.7.24

Born at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Greenwich Village on Nov. 11, 1954,  Michael was adopted five weeks later by John and Eleanor Coffey, a corrections officer and an RN,  respectively.  The adoption was handled by the New York Foundling Hospital. John and Eleanor had been unable to have children.

He was raised as an only child in a small town in the Adirondacks. By the time his parents told him overtly that he was adopted, at age 8, he already knew. Following the Foundling’s recommendation, they had told him from the beginning that they had “chosen” him in a nursery with many other babies.

Although they were loving parents, it seems they were also a bit distant—“hands-off.” Sadly, one of the few things they knew about Michael’s birth parents was that they were college-educated, and it seemed to make them feel that he was of different and maybe better stock. Michael feels they tried to stay out of his way. Although Michael had what he calls a perfectly happy childhood, there was something missing. After much soul-searching and research, he believes there might be an element of containment missing, a term used by Melanie Klein and, later, Wilfred Bion, two prominent psychotherapists--containment being the provision of a safe space at a critical part of childhood development. 

Michael went off to college at Notre Dame, and spent his junior year in Dublin. College took care of him to a degree (the Notre Dame motto is in loco parentis—in place of parents). Leaving college, though, was a terrifying prospect, and two months after graduating he married a woman he had known for only four months. 

Michael studied Anglo-Irish literature at the University of Leeds in England; his wife and he had a son, Joshua.  He earned his Master’s degree.  In 1978, the little family moved to New York City. Michael got a job in publishing and, settled, he wrote to the New York Founding, which was just 15 blocks from their walk-up apartment. A Sister Phelps provided him with “background information but not identifying information.” His search for his parents began. He went down many dead-ends.

At the age of 50, with the help of a private investigator, he discovered that both his birth parents were deceased; his father was a Gallagher, whose own father was from Donegal, Ireland; and his mother, indeed Virginia, was fourth-generation Irish-American from a Co. Mayo family. She was a one-time Broadway actress and cabaret singer in Manhattan when he was conceived. His father, Robert Michael Gallagher, was driving a cab in New York and writing poetry at the time. They both hailed originally from Philadelphia.

Michael has written a memoir in which he traces these developments, emphasizing that, since he came of age, he has been looking and listening for traces, voices, and ghosts of lost birth parents, lost siblings, or half-siblings. He did find them, ghosts and real, but just as when John and Eleanor told him at age 8 that he was adopted when he already knew it, he says he also seemed to know who he was, and where he was from before the evidence was in. At this point in his life, he welcomes this as a measure of containment, a “safety in knowing.”

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The Girls Who Went Away by Ann Fessler