Later On, Later on, and in Another Country

This article discusses Evelyn Conlon’s Later On (2004), an edited collection of writings commissioned as a memorial for the town thirty years after the bombing of 17 May 1972. It explores how notions of trauma, collective and individual memory and in particular healing through telling and writing are relevant, not only to the collection but to subsequent responses. As the chapter reveals, in the process of preparing the volume, attention is drawn to the balming and recuperative function of memory, which functions to exorcise the negative emotions of horror and fear in a book which was for Conlon an act of restitution, a duty of commitment to be part of the trauma which affected her community of origin.