Book Club Guide

The Secret Scripture

by Sebastian Barry · 2008 · Literary Fiction

Key themes

Memory and the Irish institution that shapes it
Women's lives written out of official history — and the violence that erased them
The psychiatric record as a form of suppression

About this book

Roseanne McNulty, a hundred years old in a Roscommon mental hospital, writes her memoirs in secret. Her psychiatrist Dr Grene, compiling her case history, discovers that the truth of her life is nothing like her file says. Barry's Booker-shortlisted novel is a study in Irish institutional memory, the violence done to women, and the stories people tell themselves to survive.

Published in 2008, The Secret Scripture was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Costa Novel Award. It draws on the real history of Irish women incarcerated in psychiatric institutions for 'moral' offences.

Discussion questions

Roseanne's memoir and Dr Grene's case notes tell contradictory stories. How does Barry use these competing accounts to say something about how history is written — and whose version survives?
Roseanne is a hundred years old and her memory may be unreliable. How does Barry handle the unreliable narrator in a novel that is partly a meditation on truth and record?
The Catholic Church and the Irish state's institutional violence against women is the novel's historical context. How does Barry show this without turning the novel into polemic?
Grene discovers something about his own history as he researches Roseanne's. How does this parallel investigation function — is it a coincidence, or is it the novel's structural argument?
The novel is written in beautiful, elevated prose. How does this style relate to the subject matter — does it honour the forgotten, or aestheticise their suffering?