Journalist and BC alumna Caitríona Palmer was born in Dublin in 1972 to an unwed mother. Raised by loving adoptive parents, she still was eager to track down her birth mother. When she was in her late 20s, she connected with her birth mother and they developed a strong attachment. But her birth mother had one painful condition, she wished to keep Caitríona secret from her family, from her friends, from everyone. In her new memoir, An Affair with My Mother: A Story of Adoption, Secrecy and Love (Penguin Random House, 2016), Palmer writes of the social and familial forces that left her birth mother–and so many other unwed Irish mothers of her generation– frightened, traumatized and bereft.The author calls out the false shame of her origins and describes how it feels to be – in the interests of Catholic “respectability” – excluded from the facts of your own life. Palmer writes for the Irish Independent and, previously, for the Irish Times. Read more in the Irish Times | Daily Mail.
Alumnus R.T. Rybak, who served three terms as mayor of Minneapolis, has published a memoir about his life and time as mayor of his hometown. 
At First Year Academic Convocation tomorrow, the Class of 2020 will hear from alumnus 
My Journey to the Heights: A Memoir of Boston College (1951-2015) is a new book that captures the story of James P. McIntyre ’57, M.Ed.’61, D.Ed.’67, H’11, from his humble beginnings in Malden to a student in BC’s Evening College in the 1950s through his unprecedented 56-year career as a beloved and respected Boston College administrator. The memoir also, in turn, tells the story of the evolution of Boston College from a commuter school for local Catholics to one of the nation’s preeminent national universities. During a professional career that ran from 1959 until his death in 2015, McIntyre served under four Boston College presidents and there were few major University issues in which he was not personally involved. McIntyre had a hand in establishing BC’s financial aid program, creating its centralized student affairs office as BC’s first lay vice president, directing its first capital campaign as its newly appointed vice president for University Affairs, and hosting international finance conferences and other events as senior vice president. In addition, the Newton Campus, Flynn Recreation Complex, Thomas P. O’Neill, Jr. Library, Silvio O. Conte Forum, Robsham Theater Arts Center, renovated Alumni Stadium, and Merkert Chemistry Center were all the fruits of McIntyre’s efforts, as were many of the University’s largest contributions that he procured from his unique ability to cultivate deep, personal relationships with BC alumni. Undertaken at the request of University President William P. Leahy, S.J., My Journey to the Heights was produced by Executive Director of Marketing Communications and Boston College Magazine Editor Ben Birnbaum and edited by Senior Writer William Bole, and is available for purchase from the Boston College Bookstore. 
A prominent cartoonist who joined The New Yorker in 1978, 
Leaving Russia: A Jewish Story, a memoir by Professor of Russian, English, and Jewish Studies Maxim D. Shrayer has been released in a paperback edition. The first English-language, autobiographical and nonfictional account of growing up Jewish in the former USSR, Leaving Russia poignantly conveys the triumphs and humiliations of a Soviet childhood and expresses the dreams and fears of Shrayer’s family, who left the Soviet Union in 1987. The Shrayer family was among the veteran Jewish refuseniks who, during the dawn of Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost, were granted exit visas to emigrate from the country. Narrated in the tradition of Tolstoy’s confessional trilogy and Nabokov’s autobiography, Leaving Russia offers a searing account of growing up a Jewish refusenik, of a young poet’s rebellion against totalitarian culture, and Soviet fantasies of the West during the Cold War. “It was important to tell this story because the Jewish experience in Russia—and especially during the Soviet period—is not fully understood in America,” Shrayer said, “this despite the fact that it’s now difficult to imagine the fabric of our communities without ex-Soviet Jews.” 
The 2017 Irish Writers Series at Boston College presents journalist 
