An author writes with her ‘raw and generous’ Philadelphia persona
'I definitely think I might not be writing about Philadelphia ... if I didn’t have that sense of being exiled and displaced from home,' said author Una Mannion, who grew up in Valley Forge.
Una Mannion, the novelist and poet, grew up outside Philadelphia in Valley Forge, but it wasn’t until she’d lived in Ireland for decades, that she started writing about the city she knew in her youth.
In 2021, she published A Crooked Tree, about a family living in a woodsy pocket of Valley Forge, with scenes of teens sneaking around the Nike site and working at the King of Prussia mall. (Una herself worked there in her teen years.)
In her just-released novel, Tell Me What I Am, Una writes about a young girl, ripped from her mother’s side of the family in Philadelphia and moved by a controlling father to Vermont, trying to recover her memory by recalling the city. (Water ice is a key sense memory).
She talked to The Inquirer about the unique language of Philadelphia families and how, in even a fast-changing environment, a city’s history can never quite disappear.
You write about ‘how people in Philly spoke … fast, blurted out, unconscious.’ Tell me about capturing voices that are really specific to place in your novels.
My family obviously was loud because there were eight of us. I was in so many houses where there is that rush of warmth, you go in and there’s the clatter of cooking and there’s all the voices.
I always say this: When I take New Jersey Transit from New York, everyone is reading their papers. Then I switch onto SEPTA in Trenton, and people are talking and people are voicing opinions, even when it’s not invited. I always think, Oh, I’m home. I feel like something’s quite raw and generous in the Philadelphia persona.
Tell me about how you started writing about Philadelphia, after living away for so long?
It’s hard for me not to write about the Philadelphia area. I had such formative years there.
For my writing, that sense of displacement and looking back is crucial. I definitely think I might not be writing about Philadelphia if I was living in Philadelphia and didn’t have that sense of being exiled and displaced from home.
There’s this way in which we’re always always trying to write back to that first place that we’re disconnected from, both geographically and emotionally and culturally.
When I was writing A Crooked Tree, I did think about making it like a non-place and scrubbing the references. And then when you look at the names of places in the Philadelphia area, like Conshohocken or King of Prussia, the names are so ripe.
With the history of the Revolutionary War, the Lenape before that, these places carry all that freight of meaning. I think when you start looking at a place, it begins to give things back to you.
Your new novel, ‘Tell Me What I Am,’ is about reconstituting lost personal history, partially through remembering a place. And one character orchestrates a citywide art installation called ‘Palimpsest,’ which expressly shows how traces of the past come through. Do you think Philadelphia is a particularly good model for this theory?
Yes — the last few times I’ve just taken the 69th Street subway into the city and looked at all the graffiti, some that’s sponsored by the city. It’s an amazing mark of a place or an identity of a place.
In A Crooked Tree, there is a bit about how the roads are ancient trails, because people long before us knew the best ways to navigate around places that wouldn’t get flooded. Even though we build over these things, there are still traces. I think that’s why the ruin is so powerful as an image. But I think it’s not just about the built environment.
I really wanted to suggest that the erasure of memory is impossible; traces are held in other bodies by other people. They’re held in all kinds of documents, not just in a written text or an artistic test but in architectural text.