Welcome Home: Author Returns to CG
Volume 49, Issue 9
By Mike Lavers

In the days before her departure from Cherry Grove in 1997, author Alice Carey kept the promise she had made to her friends who had succumbed to AIDS years earlier. She took the ashes of friends, such as Eric, from her home on Greene Walk, affectionately dubbed the Magic Flute, and interred them in a place where she felt their legacy and spirit would live on.

“These were our friends who asked to be buried in our garden—not tossed in the ocean,” Carey recalled.

Nearly eight years later, Carey made her long-anticipated return to the Grove to read excerpts from her book I’ll Know It When I See It—A Daughter’s Search for Home in Ireland at the Barbara Ann Levy Gallery on August 7. The novel chronicles her journey from an isolated childhood spent in Queens to the Grove and finally to County Cork, Ireland, where she and her husband, Geoffrey Knox, bought a ruined Georgian farmhouse.

But in an interview with The News earlier this month, the witty and engaging Carey was quick to point out that the book is about what she described as the “essence of home.” She said the Grove was her home for nearly 20 years while adding that Ireland had also become her home.

“What was charming was to get off the ferry on a Friday afternoon and someone would say, ‘Welcome home,’” Carey said. “At some point in leaving the Grove I realized that I was leaving home. And now I go to Ireland and people say the same thing—I go into the butcher and people say, ‘Welcome home’.”

Carey, who also lives in an apartment near New York’s ultra-chic Meatpacking District, is a trained actress whose mother, an Irish immigrant, worked as a maid at Broadway producer Jean Dalrymple’s townhouse on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. And along with describing the times that she spent in Dalrymple’s home, Carey recalled the numerous Arts Project of Cherry Grove and Fire Island Pines Arts Project productions she appeared in alongside the likes of Bob “Rose” Levine and Jack Lichtenstein.

She further described—with a certain sense of fondness—the various parties, such as the Veil Party, that she and Knox threw at the Magic Flute.

“There is something about being on someone’s back deck dressed up in outrageous costumes at a party not sponsored by Absolut vodka,” Carey said. “People loved it [the Grove] passionately when I was there.”

This joyous, seemingly carefree era, did not last forever and the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and early 1990s had an indelible impact on Carey and her husband. She described the seemingly endless cycle of death and memorial services as unbearable and added that she and her husband decided to leave the Grove after they walked along the boardwalks and saw homes that were “once filled with laughter” occupied by a deceased person’s relatives.

“There we were—life as we knew it was over,” Carey said. “People in their 50s and 60s became very bitter. They began getting angry at everything and began hating the Grove.”

Despite this extended tragedy that unfolded over the better part of a decade, Carey told The News that even though she and Knox decided to leave the Grove, they still loved the community for what it was during the years in which they were a part of it.

“We left with a great love in our hearts for the Grove,” she said.