Her Story Hits Home: The Avalon Shoobie Who Grew Up to Write the ‘Best Crime Novel of the Year’
A woman gets up in the dark to go to work. She’s living with her sister and her 4-year-old daughter. She is estranged from her partner, and as she gets ready for work that morning, her daughter is on a weekend visitation with the child’s father. The woman leaves for work but never arrives.
What happened to Deena Garvey? Her sister Nessa will not rest until she finds out. And years later, Deena’s daughter, Ruby, who is taken by her father, Lucas, to live in rural Vermont, will struggle to reclaim her memories of her mother and unravel the mystery as well.
The stories of all three women are laid bare in “Tell Me What I Am,” a taut novel by Una Mannion that was selected by the Crime Writers’ Association as 2024’s Gold Dagger award winner for Best Crime Novel of the Year.
Mannion emphasizes that beyond the gripping mystery of Deena’s disappearance, the novel is essentially about the crime of erasing memory.
“Ruby’s memories of Deena have been effaced by Lucas, who has separated her from anyone who knew her mother,” says Mannion, “and the arc of the novel focuses on whether aunt and niece will find each other and what they will find out about their missing sister and mother.”
English lit majors will recognize the book’s title as a line from Shakespeare’s “The Tempest,” where Miranda says to Prospero, “You have often begun to tell me what I am, but stopped.” And they will detect echoes of Prospero in Lucas’s attempt to isolate Ruby and control her.
And if you live or ever have lived in the Philadelphia area, you will encounter familiar places and images as you follow the journeys of the Garvey sisters: the city’s Fairmount neighborhood, suburban Havertown, the Paoli Local, the Willows in Radnor, the angel statue looking down on 30th Street Station, the Jersey Shore.
Mannion has set the novel in the places she recalls from her youth: “I grew up on Valley Forge Mountain, I’m number six of eight children and I went to high school at Notre Dame Academy in Villanova, and before that had gone to Sacred Heart at Overbrook. I did my master’s degree at Temple and have lived and worked all over Philadelphia, from the Irish Pub to the White Dog Café.”
“A lot of the places in Philadelphia and things mentioned in the book are quite iconic for anyone who’s from the city,” observes Mannion. “I was, in a way, trying to get back to my own childhood memories because things like the lights of Boathouse Row — well, anyone who grew up in Philadelphia knows the magic of seeing that when you come into the city.”
Much of the novel’s action takes place in Philadelphia and Havertown.
“My sister lives in Havertown, my father lived for a time in Havertown,” explains Mannion. “When I was young, we would go to the St. Denis fair, and it was a place I felt like I knew because there was a large Irish-American community there. It felt like a natural place to have the Garvey family live. They were people I was familiar with, and the landscape was something I could imagine.”
Today Mannion, an assistant professor of literary practice at Trinity College Dublin, lives in County Sligo, Ireland, the birthplace of her father, an Irish immigrant.
“I feel like my father never quite settled in America,” she says. “I think he never got over the heartbreak of leaving home. I remember when I was young, I thought I would never want to be like that, to be between places, never quite a part of one place. And then, paradoxically, I go and do something quite similar.”
Mannion was fortunate to spend summers visiting family in Sligo and she fondly recalls picking periwinkles with her father and driving cows on the family’s dairy farm.
“On my 40th birthday, my mother sent me a letter I had written when I was 12 or 13 telling her how I was going to live in Ireland,” she says.
She remembers writing the letter after falling under the spell of Sligo’s Bonfire Night — the Eve of St. John on June 23: “Everyone lit bonfires and stayed up late, there was a guitar player, and I just thought this is magic. I loved it.”
And so, all through college and her graduate studies she continued to return to Sligo, where she met her husband, Michael, and ultimately settled to raise a family and teach at a local university.
Mannion’s first novel, “A Crooked Tree,” was also set in her childhood home.
“Both books I’ve written have been set in the Philadelphia area and a lot of that has to do with that yearning for home; that when you’re displaced from somewhere or away from somewhere, there’s that ache for the place, your first place,” she says. “And both books have the preoccupation of writing yourself back home or writing yourself back to a place.”
And the places from Mannion’s past — and present — include Avalon. One of her earliest memories is looking at photos of her older brothers and sisters at The Whitebrier with her grandparents. She was too young then to go along, but she soon got her chance: “Both my mother and father took us to Avalon for day trips; we were shoobies!”
Mannion goes on to paint the kind of evocative picture that you would expect from an author:
“I have a memory of my mother holding my hand and jumping waves with me. I remember when we would get up on that little boardwalk area near the Skee-Ball arcade there was a small luncheonette, Charlie’s, where we would get grilled cheeses — I can still smell it! And I remember collecting Skee-Ball tickets and I would keep them; I’d have these pink Skee-Ball tickets saved all winter for when we went back down again.”
As a teenager, Mannion would spend a week in Avalon every summer with her best friend’s family. As an adult, she and her seven brothers and sisters vacationed in Stone Harbor and Avalon, renting houses near each other, which gave her the opportunity to share Avalon memories with her own three children: “My kids also played Skee-Ball in Avalon, they’ve been to Springer’s, they’ve played miniature golf, they know that stretch of the island and it’s part of their childhood as well.”
Clearly, neither time nor distance has erased Mannion’s memories of summer vacations in Avalon. “I can still remember the tagline ‘Avalon: Cooler by a Mile,’” she says with a smile, “and the freedom I felt down at the beach.”