Memoir: Tell Me Why You Fled: True Stories of Seeking Refuge
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Kirkus Reviews review of Tell Me Why You Fled
Praise for Tell Me Why You Fled:
“This is a poignant, heartbreakingly-honest book. Karen O’Reilly has sat behind the desk in muggy African offices where desperate refugees, their lives ripped apart by war, famine and ethnic hatred, interact with a lumbering, misogynistic UN bureaucracy theoretically dedicated to offering them new hope. Her beautifully-written account is unflinching, and mercilessly self-critical concerning what it is to be a privileged expatriate working in the developing world, while brimming with compassion, empathy and insight.” (Michela Wrong, author of Borderlines.)
“Tell Me Why You Fledis disturbing and entertaining, thought-provoking and funny; at times it’s hard to read but almost impossible to put down. I loved it.” (Roddy Doyle, Booker prize winner, and author of The Deportees.)
“A book about vulnerable people in ravaged places and the efforts to provide help. Karen is wise to the nuances of aid work and honest about the personal distress that can run alongside it. An important read about refugees and human frailty.” (Stuart Bailie, BBC broadcaster and author of Trouble Songs.)
“Karen O'Reilly writes of her work resettling African refugees with striking empathy, and a sense of perspective that makes this book at once a compelling account of her experience, a critique of an inefficient resettlement system, and a brave and humane chronicle of the people involved. From the bureaucrats to the workers to the refugees, this is the story of people living between worlds, and, as she puts it, “trying to piece together the puzzle of how to survive.” Tell Me Why You Fledis the best memoir I've read in a long, long time.” — Justin St. Germain, author of Son of a Gun
“An unflinchingly honest and important exploration of the hypocrisies of the aid industry, told with both sensitivity and a healthy dose of self-deprecation. The insider’s view of the broken asylum system, where some of the world’s most destitute people are stripped of their humanity and reduced to statistics and soundbites, it is a vital contribution to the debate, while also being enormously readable. Tell Me Why You Fled explores this important issue without ever losing sight of the human beings at the heart of it all.” — Charlotte McDonald Gibson, author of Cast Away: True Stories of Survival from Europe’s Refugee Crisis
Tell Me Why You Have Fledis a riveting work of witness, unflinching and deeply sympathetic in its true stories of people for whom so much more than home has been taken, ravaged, destroyed. With bracing candor, Karen O’Reilly illuminates the often absurd world of humanitarian aid and resettlement in which she asks herself, Why do I do this work? Who can hold such terrible stories? Who am I trying to save? How can I do good, remain sane, when so much seems hopeless, forever wrong, when there is no escaping my own complicity?”— Gregory Martin, author of Stories for Boys
“Honest, haunting and hilarious, Tell me Why You Fled beautifully and unblinkingly lays out the extremes of the humanitarian aid industry. Through O'Reilly we peer into the intertwining lives of refugees and the people working to assist them. A touching story of human connection and self-insight.” — Jessica Alexander, author of Chasing Chaos: My Decade In and Out of Humanitarian Aid
“In Tell Me Why You Fled, Karen O’Reilly puts a human face on some of the world’s most vulnerable citizens. Imagine being the aid worker responsible for assembling the narrative that will – or won’t – bring a safer future to a person who’s never known safety. We’re right there with her as she gently pulls their stories out, rooting for each of them. And at the end, we’re right there with Karen again, questioning the multi-billion dollar humanitarian aid industry that leaves most behind.” — Heidi Postlewait, author of Emergency Sex (and Other Desperate Measures): True Stories from a War Zone
“There are books, and there are bracing acts of whistleblowing.Tell Me Why You Fled suckers you in as the personal story of a young Irish woman who sets out for a new life in equatorial Africa, unfolds as travelogue, and gradually reveals itself as something different. O’Reilly tells the dirty secrets the United Nations don’t put in their ads. Poverty is a nice little earner. This is a book that took real guts. Ironic, given that the author’s running theme is her own depression at feeling useless. If just one of the monsters in this book faces questions as a result of these pages, she can rest easy she has been less extremely useful indeed.” —Jane Bussman, author ofThe Worst Date Ever: or How it Took a Comedy Writer to Expose Joseph Kony and Africa's Secret
“There’s a huge, global organization – the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees – whose job is to look after millions of people who’ve lost their homes to war, famine and oppression. UNHCR... is bullshit sometimes. Peel back the titles and money and false gravitas and you'll find corrupt profiteers, sexual predators, religious bigots. But listen to me. Scatter the cynics and what remains are people who, believe it or not, really, truly want to help. Their reasons are messy. Their own needs don’t always make for acceptable conversation at dinner parties. But they’re good people, and desperately sympathetic. UNHCR is just the uniform they wear.
UNHCR-veteran Karen O'Reilly’s lovely little book is about these good people. It’s funny. It’s gross. And beneath its gentle prose about young mothers and Ugandan gin, it’s white-hot angry. Angry at the evil men who start the wars. At the supposed pious who reject people for their skin, their nationality, their sexuality, at the bosses who groped her. At her fellow first-worlders who just don't understand. At herself for failing, time and again, to save everyone.
Two-thirds of the way through the book, I couldn't see through my own tears. “I didn’t want to die while there were still books, or places, or people out there that I loved, or could still love,” Karen wrote. I know good people, millions of them, share this sentiment. Thank God. (David Axe, author of War is Boring.)
About Tell Me Why You Fled:
When Karen O’Reilly’s 28-year-old friend and roommate dies by suicide on a bright New Year’s Day, Karen, also suffering from severe depression, decides that she needs to do something drastic to avoid following a similar path. Six months later she leaves her comfortable western existence behind to work with refugees in Uganda.
In this candid and irreverent memoir, Karen tells the story of working with people seeking refuge — from war, and torture, and genocide — as a young woman seeking refuge from herself. She describes the unexpected connections she makes with the refugees with whom she works: the Somali woman who, pitying her, prays for her to find a husband; the suspected Rwandan génocidairewho argues with her about soccer and makes her undrinkable coffee; the transgender Burundian woman who commissions a matching rooster-print blouse and skirt for her, as a thank you gift.Outside of work, she tries to forget the corruption and sexual abuse she is shocked to encounter in the humanitarian world. She drinks gin, dances at illicit gay bars, sees local psychiatrists with unorthodox ideas, and tries to make sense of the refugees’ stories and her own.
A sample of essays:
Why They Fled
From The Dublin Review, No. 70
Dr Jing, I Presume?
From The Dublin Review, No. 59
Redemption
From The Dublin Review, No. 37
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