Patrick Macdonald’s book All Souls memoir paints a vivid picture of life in South Boston, known colloquially as Southie, in the 1970’s and 1980’s. The memoir offers a raw and unfiltered window into a neighborhood rampant with crime, violence, drugs, and death. What is shown is not just a narrative of survival but also a deep exploration of the neighborhood's collective denial, a coping mechanism that, while offering temporary comfort, ultimately continues a cycle of harm and prevents meaningful long-term change. We know Southie has a tendency for denial from the very beginning of the novel, “We didn’t want to own the problems that took the lives of my brothers and of so many others like them: poverty, crime, drugs— those were black things that …show more content…
One final instance where the community is in denial is when Southie finds out that Whitey was actually an informant working for the FBI, “And the whole neighborhood tried to shield itself from the ugly truth. Which one among us wanted to believe that the man who’d epitomized the Southie code, who’d mouthed the familiar words about loyalty that we desperately wanted to be true, would turn out to be the biggest snitch of all? Kevin Cullen at the Globe had been working on stories since 1988 suggesting that Whitey Bulger was one of the FBI’s “most prized informants”(222). Having these other examples of denial in Southie allows the reader to truly understand why the community was easily able to slip into denial surrounding Whitey’s role in the violence and death that took so many young lives in Southie. It was second nature, a coping mechanism, if they didn’t believe it it must not be