The missing parents
This memoirist is made into a martyr of irony because the full weight of what she did not know plagued her childhood imagination with terror that would cripple even the most competent adult. For her, missing parents was a full-scale religious terror akin to abandonment phobia. She realizes in their absence that perhaps they lied to the children. Perhaps her parents lied about coming back for them. The emotional consequence of this irony is that the daughter has to emotionally prepare to eventually give up hope and accept her greatest fear.
The ironic return
When the parents do come back, they do so in an ironic way, merely sending for the children instead of fulfilling their promise. They do fulfill their intentions, but ironically, they still find a way to have lied to their children. The promise was clear, and even though it seems technically meaningless, it is not meaningless at all to the children. The children were waiting for their parents' return with the religious hope of salvation, and instead, they get an opportunity to help themselves. The irony is disappointment.
The separation from parents
When the children are reunited with the parents, there is an irony that prevents the development of communion in the family. The children share feelings of deep betrayal and resentment that they cannot process in the waking chaos of their new life. In other words, the irony is this: Although the children are technically reunited with their parents, they are not reunited with the innocence they left behind. Paradise has been officially lost on them, and they realize that existentially, they are essentially separated from their parents. They are ironically mature children who already know their parents are imperfect.
The life's work of forgiveness
As a child, the course of life is ironic. As the children know from their all-too-difficult struggle for survival, the basic plot of life is to survive the ever-looming threat of starvation and death. This is ironic for them to understand so clearly, but it is not nearly as ironic as the memoirists discovery that the quality of adult mental health is basically to forgive one's parents and come to peace with human nature and death. This means that instead of just "forgiving" their parents, these children are forced to wrestle with fate for decades, trying to find peace in a chaotic life defined by suffering.
Shame and death
Something about the death of an important family member, in this case the memoirist's own father, compels the author to share deeply intimate opinions and frustrations that are clearly repressed from normal consciousness by shame. Another clear picture of this irony can be found in Franzen's "My Father's Brain," an essay which has tonal similarities to this memoir. Shame is only powerful enough to make discussions of intimate family pain taboo, but in light of her father's death, the memoirist decides it is worth the emotional humiliation of confessing her real pain. She shows what her life was really like back then, which is emotionally exposing. In other words, death makes her comfortable with emotional nakedness. A philosophical reader will notice an essential connection between memoir and death, because only death makes memoir inherently meaningful. If no one ever died, we could just tell each other our stories infinitely, but death makes for a time crunch which makes writing expedient.
