Colm Toibin is one of Ireland's most celebrated literary voices, known for his elegant prose and profound explorations of exile, identity, and longing.

His notable works include Brooklyn, The Master, and The Testament of Mary, each earning widespread critical praise.

Toibin's most recent novel, Long Island, revisits the story of Brooklyn's Eilis Lacey, exploring the complexities of her life 20 years later.

Colm Toibin is joined in conversation with Silas House, an award-winning novelist, playwright, and environmental activist.

His novels include Clay's Quilt, Southernmost, and Lark Ascending.

In recognition of his contributions to literature and advocacy for rural voices, House currently serves as Kentucky's Poet Laureate.

Recorded at the University of Louisville Kentucky Author Forum, this is Great Conversations, Colm Toibin and Silas House.

[Applause] Welcome, welcome.

How are you?

[Applause] Welcome to Louisville.

Thank you very much.

Welcome to Kentucky.

You've never been here before.

No, but I'm here now.

We wanna get you back for a longer spell.

I wanna take you out riding around in the mountains and get you out in the country.

All right.

Yeah.

Right, right.

Well, your writing has been hugely influential to me, Well, your writing has been hugely influential to me, and so I'm so honored to be here with you tonight.

Thank you.

I have so many questions, so let's just dive right into it.

I know that you admire Willa Cather, as do I.

And she once wrote, “Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of 15.” Would you agree with that notion?

Yeah.

My father died in the summer of 1967 when I was 12.

Between then and Christmas, between that July and Christmas, people came to the house every evening, people from the town.

Small town, 6,000 people.

And people would say something to my mother about my father and condolences, and then they would just talk to almost distract, to talk the evening away.

And I heard every story.

They were never scandalous, but not being scandalous was even better because they were careful, and watching people skating over certain things.

So, I got to know a lot about it.

See, the best part was if someone left, and you could talk about them.

Laugh.

And that was always good.

And I got, for example, the story of Brooklyn.

The mother came one night, and I was 12 years old, and she had the letters from her daughter in Brooklyn, not Manhattan, not America, not New York.

And so, I probably could go on forever with stories from that particular time.

Yeah.

So much of your childhood shows up in your work, all the way through it.

It seems like that your childhood is, you're sort of haunted by that place.

What happened next then after that in 1967 was that my mother then had to reconstruct her life.

She had no money.

She was in her 40s, and she was that word, “a widow.” And people loved stopping her to see if they can make her cry, and say, “Oh, it's so sad.

The children, what are you gonna do?” So, I wrote a novel about what happened in the house.

It's a novel called Nora Webster, in which she got a job.

She started to become interested in things, but it was always there, the fact that she was unmoored.

And when she went out, she didn't really know who she was in a room, because up to then she'd been with her husband.

because up to then she'd been with her husband.

And I watched her very carefully.

There's a moment in the novel where Nora Webster acknowledges, “This kid has been watching me,” because I had.

I didn't know I was a novelist.

I knew there was something funny going on the way I was watching, because often I would get put out of rooms just watching too closely.

“That guy,” they say, “Be very careful with him.” But they were never careful enough, because I got a lot of information.

[Laughs] Well, that's what it takes, right?

I was always a glutton for secrets.

I was always eavesdropping and listening.

So, it worked out for me because then I wrote it down and used it.

Do you think that your father dying when you were so young then, is that the roots of you being a writer, or was it before that?

It's somewhere before that, which is an Irish thing, which is that older people, people in older generations, in my mother's generation, my father's, and grandparents', did not get the chance that there were people who wrote.

There was an uncle who wrote poetry, but the chances of publishing anything about publication.

So, there were people I felt who could have become novelists, but I was the first, maybe, to get the full chance.

And that shadow was always there, the ones who didn't.

Yeah.

Yeah, that was it.

I know your mother wrote poetry, but do you think she wanted to be part of the literary world?

Did she want to be published?

See, there was a terrible thing in the town where I'm from, which was a very good public library, and my mother would find anything.

I came back from university one time, and I said, “Oh, now,” she said, “What about Saul Bellow?” She had found a Bellow novel, just going along the stacks.

Well, she loved all those raunchy men and raunchy women.

She was living in Chicago in her mind.

And later on, when I started to publish, my mother said, “Oh, isn't Saul Bellow wonderful?

They're so smart and fast-moving,” meaning I was not smart and fast-moving.

[Laughs] And so, as a sort of just way of suggesting to me that I would just write more modern books, less melancholy books, Saul Bellow became -- [Laughs] but she also discovered Wallace Stevens, and she did it on her own in the library, moving along, just thinking, “I wonder who he is?” And she loved that.

Well, I'm glad that you've stuck with the melancholy and myself, because I certainly love that aspect.

But if you were my mother, I think you would say, “Could you not be so sad?” Right, right.

Well, you've said that you grew up with a great deal of silence.

And one thing I always admire about your work is that it is very quiet, but it's also propulsive.

So, how do you strike that balance?

You see, when I'm talking about that room and people coming to visit, what I'm watching all the time is things that no one is saying.

And it's not just they're not talking scandalously, but they're not also talking about my father very much.

And I think, “How come all these people are in the room that's meant to be about this, and it's not about this?” So, I think the novel form, more than any other form, can show us what someone is thinking and show us the opposite, what they're saying, and the great distance sometimes between how we feel, what we say, or what we're really thinking.

And so, you start working with that and controlling it.

The problem with that sort of silence is that you've got to be very careful not to make it into a dullness.

You say, “Oh, they said nothing that night.

The following night, they said nothing again.

On the third night, even less got said.” [Laughs] You go, “Yeah.

Well, maybe you should think of some other profession."

[Laughs] Yeah.

But you started with poetry, right?

Yeah, that's September.

It's all in the same season almost, 1967.

In our house, see, the big project was, my father had been a teacher.

He'd got a scholarship to university.

My mother had left school at 14.

It was to get the kids not just educated, but as much education as you could possibly take.

It was like fresh air for you.

Education was for them.

So, when you're 12, you go into a room on your own every evening and you study.

Now, the rest of them are really good at this, but I'm dreamy.

I just wasn't interested in biology.

I later, obviously, realized its importance.

So, I started to write poems, and I really did that until I was 20.

And I did it seriously, and I did it every day.

Sometimes it was a secret.

It wasn't something I would go around talking about it, because there was no one else like me.

Yeah.

But in all that time between, were you secretly writing poems, or did you just get back to that more recently?

Oh, the world had 30 years free of me and my poems.

[Laughs] Between the ages of 20 and 50, I went silent.

Now, there's a really good reason for this in Ireland, because there's so many good poets, a sort of middling poet, but even being a bad poet, you'd be despised.

People would run if they saw you.

Say at a party, there were several bad poets at the party, which would be much worse than being a drunk, for example.

[Laughs] Often, the same bad poet would be the same bad drunk.

So, for 30 years, I just thought I'm a failed poet.

I'm an ex-poet.

I'm a non-poet.

I'm a poet without a poem.

And then, it started up again, either miraculously or disastrously.

It started up again.

Was it the pandemic that brought you back to that?

Well, it was before the pandemic had started, but the pandemic gave me an extraordinary impetus, where images from way back of things that were unresolved, of things I had just barely thought about, came into my mind as rhythm, as language, as lines.

And I had all day.

If during the pandemic you can't write a poem, it's not gonna happen again.

[Laughs] True.

True.

Well, you named the poetry collection Vinegar Hill, which takes us back to your childhood.

And Vinegar Hill shows up again and again in your work.

And of course, this is not only a topographical feature, but it's a part of Irish history.

But why is Vinegar Hill so important to you?

Vinegar Hill is, first of all, a hill above the town of Enniscorthy.

Secondly, in all the ballads about the rebellion of 1798, in which the Irish, using the influence of the French and using the influence of the American revolutions in 1798, set about creating a republic, and they were very badly defeated.

And the last battle was on Vinegar Hill.

So, you're living in a house with a view of Vinegar Hill.

But the first thing is, of course, it's an outing.

It's a place you go to picnics.

So, it's not in history sometimes.

It's in topography, it's in geology, and it's in just social life.

But every so often, you realize, that is where the rebels had their last stand.

And so, the poem I wrote, or the book, is all about that idea of living on a battlefield, but sometimes you forget.

And so, that name.

But even the name Vinegar has its own ironies because it comes from the Gaelic Fhiodh na gCaor.

And the English, when they were making maps, wanted to put English words on Irish name places.

And so, they looked at Fhiodh na gCaor, and said, “Fhiodh na gCaor, Fhiodh na gCaor.

Oh, Vinegar.

I had to say Vinegar Hill.” [Laughs] So, it just gets a name.

In the middle of the night, it's Vinegar Hill.

So, you don't think of it as just a metaphor for Ireland in general?

I was trying to take the icon out of the iconic, or the metaphor out of the thing, and say, “It is before anything else a hill.” You can climb it.

It's a rock.

Just to see what I could do with that idea of just, myth is dangerous or myth is cliche under certain conditions.

Well, as I move us through time, so you start out as a poet, but before you get to fiction, you're a journalist for a while.

So, do you feel that your time as a journalist has served you well as a creative writer?

Yeah, it gives you a sense of an audience.

It gives you a sense of a reader.

It gives you a sense of the immediacy of that connection, if you can only get it right.

And I was never a news journalist.

So, I worked on magazines.

There were still good magazines in Ireland at that time, and the big influence was America, in the sense that I don't think it had the same influence on England as the writings of, say, Joan Didion or Norman Mailer, or those figures who were both novelists and brilliant journalists, who would go to the Democratic Convention and find a strange thing happened to the side that would tell them more about American politics in 1968 than, say, if they just listened to the speeches.

And I really got off on that, and I wanted to be Tom Wolfe.

You know I think a lot of my colleagues did it at the same time when we were in our 20s.

And so, I was always getting sent places, go around to every disco in Dublin and write about what's happening in there.

And I would go with notebooks trying to describe couples in the corner what exactly they were doing.

couples in the corner what exactly they were doing.

The first time I ever got that pure excitement over getting into print was when I handed a piece, which was that piece about discos in Dublin, over to an editor and waited outside the door just to see what the editor was gonna say, "We can't use this."

There was a nice Irish girl, had come out of a disco with her nice Irish boyfriend.

The only problem was they were tremendously drunk, the two of them, and were beautifully dressed.

And he was a gormless fellow, and she was vomiting into the shore.

She was vomiting and vomiting, so I described all that.

And then, she just [Laughs] And then, she just turned with her face up as though to the moon and let a roar at him, which I can't repeat in full, but it was the word F-word and then the “you” word, Y-O-U.

“F you.

F you.” So, I wrote all this down, a really minute description of everything.

And the editor started to scream with laughter in the room.

[Laughs] And I went around Dublin for about two weeks after it came out, people pointing at me, "That's the guy that wrote the piece about the disco.” [Laughs] Sounds great to me.

[Laughs] I wonder where that girl is now.

[Laughs] Right.

Yeah.

Here, we would say, bless her heart.

Yeah.

[Laughs] [Applause] And so, after poetry and journalism, you go to fiction.

What led you there?

Between being a poet at 20 and starting to be a journalist, I had gone to Barcelona.

And I went on my own, age 20, claiming I had a job, and someone told me you could get a job really easily teaching English.

And I had a small amount of money in my pocket, and I landed there in September ‘75.

And the dictator dies, Franco, in November ‘75.

I didn't cause his death.

But it was a very interesting time because life changed completely.

You watched this small thing, the ballot paper, and the fact that you could vote, changing the way the streets were, changing life.

And it was a fascinating time.

And when I went back to Dublin, I missed it.

So, the first novel I wrote comes out of that idea of a place I had lost, Barcelona, a thing I missed, Barcelona, and just trying to see if I could reconstruct it in some way using the novel form and creating characters, rather than it being an autobiographical novel, and trying to force characters into the -- give them the emotions that I felt and have them live in the places that I knew.

Yes.

I wanna get back to those, and I especially love your early novels.

I told you earlier, I have now read all of your novels.

And so, I love all of them in different ways, but those early novels, in a way, I think that they are more blatantly political, whereas your more recent work is more subtly political.

Do you think that's just the nature of a younger writer, or what's that about?

I think you're alone in having read all 11 of the novels.

[Laughs] And I really, honestly, wouldn't recommend it to anybody, because there's this sort of cumulative sadness.

I think you're better just to read one, and then go and read something nice.

The South is very much about the Spanish Civil War and its legacy, and the Irish War of Independence and the Civil War, and their legacy, and how those things connect and affected people's personal lives.

When it was done, I became worried that I had written about bohemian life and exile and emigre life, and I thought I should go back to the actual business of where I'm from and the dull business I described, the silences, things not said, the ordinariness of it.

And I wrote a novel called The Heather Blazing, which is really about a judge.

It's a judge in a court on the cusp of change in Ireland, who gets faced with various judgements.

He's a very conservative figure.

I wanted to write about that idea of a judge.

I was in a court and I was looking at the judge as a journalist, taking notes, thinking, “I wonder what that judge was like when he was a little baby.” [Laughs] Because he was being so pompous.

So, I started to work, I did a lot of interviews with judges, and what was really strange for me was, we were all radical then, in the sense that we wanted Ireland to change.

We wanted the power of the Catholic Church to wane, we wanted the power of nationalism to also diminish.

And therefore, there were people in our way, and some of them were judges, who were very conservative, who wanted things as they were.

And I went to see them as a journalist, and I found that they were, of course, so like my father and his brothers, they were so likeable in so many different ways.

I softened a lot in their company.

And they didn't change an inch.

They stuck to their anti-contraception, anti-abortion, anti-women, anti-gay, anti-life, but their manners were good.

Out of that distance between the manners and the actual morals, or the ideology, I got a novel called The Heather Blazing.

Well, in your third novel, we have a main character who's gay.

So, can we talk just a little bit about your coming out experience?

And first of all, were you out when that novel came out or did the novel introduce that to people?

It's that funny Irish phenomenon, which I don't think happens in the United States the same way, where people were out to their friends, to their sister, at work, but not to the boss.

Incrementally.

But don't tell your Aunt Mary, Aunt Mary, she'll die [Laughs] And therefore, you don't tell your Aunt Mary because she'll die.

And so, the distance between, say, you could be out all night on Thursday night in Dublin.

Thursday night in Dublin was good.

And they began to train home on Friday, and you would almost transform as you went south.

So therefore, I remember being in London and reading for the first time from that novel, my third novel, The Story of the Night, and realizing that there were people on the platform with me.

Fellow writers who had no clue.

So, yeah, it was a lovely way of just letting the world know anything about me that I was keeping secret.

I'm from Appalachian, the Appalachian part of Kentucky, and we have a lot of similarities to Irish culture.

One of ours is that coming out incrementally.

It's a form of good manners, almost.

Don't hurt Aunt Mary.

It might be a joke, but there's just a need to be reasonably careful, but I wouldn't overdo that.

Yeah.

Beyond subject matter, how has being gay shaped your writing?

[Laughs] Look In every way, right?

Look, the Irish thing changed so quickly and got out of our control.

Instead of feeling we are a repressed community, there's an injustice, all that stuff, suddenly there was out to be a referendum on full gay marriage, because it would have to be in the Constitution, because marriage is in the Constitution.

So, marriage would have to be redefined in the Constitution.

Now, you could just see the argument.

“You guys are undermining marriage.” I said, "No, no, we're not.

We're the opposite.

We want more marriage.

You're trying to stop marriage.

We're for marriage.

We're for your marriage.

We're for our marriage.” But in the end, we got told by the organizers of this wonderful campaign, “Why don't all gay men in Ireland go quiet?

You're always talking too much.

You make too much noise, all of you.

Go quiet.

Let your mother speak.

Let your Aunt Mary speak.

Let your sister speak.” In other words, a lot of campaigning in Ireland has done door to door.

The idea was you'd go to the door with your mother, or better, your granny.

And your granny would say to a neighbor, “This is George.

He is gay.

We were at his brother's wedding the other week.

We'd love to go to George's wedding.

Would you lend us your vote?” And I wrote a speech for the minister.

I had tremendous fun, a speech saying, “If your daughter is lesbian and she comes to you saying, ‘I see no future.

I can't see no future.'

And she's your gorgeous daughter, and you've never thought of it before.

But you're against all that change in Ireland.

And you go to bed and trying to sleep, and you think, 'Is there something I can say to her in the morning that will comfort her?

And say to her, 'I'm going to vote for gay marriage.

I'm going to change.

'” Because the big thing we needed to change were middle-aged men, to get middle-aged men to change their minds.

And there was no point in arguing with them.

They knew the argument.

But the question was to try and soften them, to try and see it fully emotionally.

But the fun part of the campaign was, just as things were getting going for this campaign, a minister, a government minister, who was really a policy nerd.

The word wonk, a policy wonk it was.

He was on the radio one Sunday morning and in the middle of an interview about wonkery, about health policy or something.

He said, “Well, as a gay man, I -- ” I said, “Hold on.” I said, “What?” I said,"What?

Hold on.

Hold on.” I said, “What?

As a gay man.” So, he was gay.

And then, a minister, a former minister from the other party, who was in his 60s, who had given no indication of anything before, suddenly announced, “I'm gay as well.” This is all in the same week.

And then, a TV journalist said, “Well, I'm lesbian.” And honestly, that week, I was calling people and say, “Well, the whole country, the whole of Ireland, from the Archbishop, the Cardinal -- ” Everybody's coming out. "

-- they're all gonna one by one say, 'You need to -- ' your former teacher, your Aunt Mary herself, the whole of Ireland, [laughs] the old Protestants, Catholics, new immigrants, new Irish people, all of us were going to be a gay nation.” But it didn't end up like that, but of course, the vote was extraordinary.

It was a 65-35 in favor of gay marriage.

People couldn't be happier.

We have nothing to complain about now.

So, you can just get on with being happy because everyone did their best for you.

We were a light to the world.

Catholic Ireland -- [Laughs] That's right.

-- suddenly becoming gay Ireland.

What a turn up for the books.

[Laughs] I love it.

Well, I've noticed in your writing that you use the word homosexual.

and Many people reject that word these days.

Now, you carefully choose your words, so I'm assuming that there's a particular reason that you use that word.

I haven't used it for a long time.

You haven't?

No.

I think it's there in one of the books where somebody talks about, it's in The Story of the Night, where his mother, who's English-speaking, uses it with an English accent.

She says, “He breaks into homosexual.

And he's hemosexual.” But I probably haven't done that for -- you wouldn't call yourself that?

No, no.

Homosexual.

No.

No.

Okay.

No.

When you think about it, it's one of those lovely words, isn't it?

Homo.

You say homo.

It's beautiful to say.

But in Ireland, of course, you could say he's a homo.

But you wouldn't even say that anymore because the word gay is now used as a slur.

If you want to bully someone, you write, “George is gay.” But you wouldn't write George is homo.

He's just a died out homo.

A stately homo, isn't that a word?

[Laughs] Would you call yourself a gay man or a queer man, or what?

Yeah.

I'm bald.

But yeah, gay man, queer man.

Any of those things.

Yeah, I'm gay.

I think I'm still in that generation -- Me too.

-- that's happier with gay.

But if you wanna call me queer, that used to be the worst insult, isn't it?

He's a queer.

There's a queer on the team.

There's a queer in the dressing room.

He's queer.

He's nearly queer.

But queer studies, though, has become a big, lovely thing.

Yes.

I'm in favor of queer studies.

The embrace of that word, I guess, started in academia more than anywhere.

Yeah, which is a good place.

Yes.

Well, Well, people often don't list you as a gay writer with a capital G. And you have said that you don't think that people see you as a gay guru.

Yeah, it's mediocre.

I would beg to differ, myself.

Well, I'm sorry, but I know what I'm talkin about.

[Laughs] Would you prefer to be, I don't know, thought of more that way, or not?

Narcissus ended badly.

So, if you put any thought at all into how you're seen, rather than getting on with your sentences, the page is blank.

It is not a mirror.

So, if you started thinking, “I'll write a novel so that people will think I'm the new Ocean Vuong, or the new Edmund White, or people will start following me.

I'll get Alan Hollinghurst's audience.” Yeah, I could do that, but it would be a disaster.

You know There's a lot of drift.

You know this, you drift into a novel.

But if you make a novel that's a deliberate policy decision, then the novel could be a disaster.

You see, I think it's also really good in that if you ever start to think of yourself as a role model for young people, it will be the end of you.

Yes [Laughs] I mean Young people should really throw stones at you.

So, therefore, it's all fine.

It's all just fine.

Well, one thing that I really admire about your writing is the way you portray gay people, especially gay men.

It seems to me that you very much avoid stereotype.

I really think that a lot of contemporary LGBTQ literature written by queer people actually stereotypes queer people.

In that we're often portrayed as we're just partying, we have a lot of money, or we're miserable, self-hating.

I just think your characters are so much more complex than that.

You see, I suppose when I was in Barcelona, this was in the ‘70s, it was a very big time for drugs and sex and rock and roll.

But I had no interest in drugs or rock and roll.

[Laughs] And that left me in a difficult position because when they talk about gay culture, “What?

Like discos?

I wanna go home.” [Laughs] So therefore, I've never really known anything about fashion, as you can see.

[Laughs] All the things I should have done, I didn't do.

And the Pet Shop Boys, honestly, I thought the Pet Shop Boys work at a pet shop.

So, I've never really been part, it's lovely.

But because I don't know it, I can't really write about it because I get it so wrong.

He went to a disco.

What did he do at the disco?

I don't know.

[Laughs] Right.

Well, the characters that you've given us are just most gay people, most LGBTQ people, are just multifaceted, eclectic people in lots of different ways and not just one thing.

So, I appreciate that.

Well, your novels are obviously more character-driven.

It seems clear that you're worried more about the character than the plot.

However, you often use an element of suspense.

I'm thinking of the missing mother in A Long Winter or the question of what Eilis will do in Brooklyn and Long Island.

These sort of, not really a mystery, but it keeps the pages turning.

So, I'm just wondering, are you thinking, “I need to provide suspense for the reader,” or does this just happen organically once you get to know the characters?

The Long Winter is a story that's about, what, a hundred pages at the end of a book called Mothers and Sons.

And it really is just after my mother had died.

And it really is just after my mother had died.

And I got this idea, or someone told me half a story, that a woman had died in the snow and there wouldn't be a thaw until April.

And this is before Christmas, so you have three or four months where her body's buried somewhere close, maybe three or four miles away, but it's covered in snow.

And the sun goes out every day to see if there's any possibility we could find her.

Now, obviously if you do that, that quest, the daily business, you have to have something.

You can't just have him not find her every day.

And therefore, you are dealing with plot because you're dealing with search and you're dealing with something he's seeking.

I suppose in the case of Long Island, which is a much more plot-led, I think, where you really do want to know, the reader just doesn't know.

And I don't know at a certain point what in the name of God is going to happen to these three people, but they're keeping such secrets from each other.

Something has to burst in that moment.

Something has to break.

And my job is to keep that in suspense enough and to keep the outcome plausible, because plausibility becomes a big problem.

Is this credible if you're gonna try this business?

What happens at the end of Long Island?

Is it credible?

Is it preposterous?

There's a huge difference between night and day, which is that at night you can think of the most preposterous thing and write it down and think, “This is great.” And in the morning, who wrote that?

Get rid of it immediately.

And so, there's a lovely editor working through the night asleep, getting ready in the morning to kill the author who's been trying coming up to midnight.

Yeah, that's the best part of it, isn't it?

Getting into that part of the revision and getting it where you want it to be.

Would you agree?

No, I don't because [Laughs] if I am capable of writing something as bad as that, who am I?

[Laughs] And it means that you're still working on the verge of the preposterous and you've got to really watch that.

Is it The Long Winter or A Long Winter?

A Long Winter.

A Long Winter.

I read at some point that you thought it was the best thing that you've written.

Would you still say that?

Yeah.

I'm interested in this idea of arc, that a piece of fiction, a novel or a story, is not a line.

That it moves upwards and then down.

And you get a few times in your life some story that has that shape.

That his mother goes missing and he goes out looking for her.

And it's almost like something in a song.

Like the snow came down and she disappeared and he went out every day.

It's set in the High Pyrenees in Spain, and I went up there that time of the year.

And I literally lived it.

In other words, I went out every day in that weather.

I realized there was this thing called la borrufa.

La borrufa is where it looks as though it's snowing, but it isn't.

It's the wind is blowing the sufficiently that it looks like snow.

Snowing.

And they were hunting wild boar in the forest.

So, all of that is from what was happening each day as I was working on the book.

But what I didn't realize as I was working was that this was really about the death of my mother and the death of my brother, and that I was actually finding a way to describe all of that loss.

In my dream life, I was searching as though this could be brought back.

Where were they?

And I didn't know that that's what I was working out.

In a sense, maybe in therapy, there might be moments where you just wouldn't realize why are you telling one story and not another?

When it was done, it became obvious to me.

And I realized, well, out of that sorrow came this.

And it won't come again in that way.

It's an incredible piece of writing.

I hope people will seek it out.

Because of course people don't read short stories as much as they read novels.

Yeah, and it's like the end of the book of short stories.

And name any book of short stories that you or I or anyone has read right through.

It's often the last story, I leave that for later.

So, that's where it is in the book.

One thing is that I think it's probably your most beautiful, tenderest love story that you've written.

I don't wanna give too much away, but do you think of it that way?

A love story?

You see, it came out in the aftermath of Brokeback Mountain by Annie Proulx.

I used to say about it that it's all mountain and no brokeback.

[Laughs] In other words, that the sex doesn't happen.

Yes It could so easily be that they would find love and it would all be great and they would spend -- no, it's just not like that.

In other words, I wouldn't even give myself the satisfaction of, no, it's all sad.

Yeah, it must be why I love it.

That pining, that yearning and desire, it's a thing that runs throughout all of your work.

Right?

That longing.

Yeah, I suppose that idea we all have.

It comes up in Long Island, I think, where I'm dealing, I think, with the universal experience that all of us have one summer, one dance we went to, one party where there was one person and we just didn't follow through, it didn't work out.

But you often, through your life think, “I wonder where he or she is now.

And I wonder if something else had happened that night.

And maybe I'll go and see if they're on Facebook or something about that person from 40 years ago.” And when you get to my age, even more.

And that stays with you, that idea of somebody else.

There's a shadow life that you almost lived.

And there's a shadow life you lived in your dreams, but there's also the life you long for.

I think especially if you're gay, but I think it's true with anybody, that if you're looking for love, that search is not -- it's a complex one.

That makes me think of Eilis from Brooklyn and Long Island.

Would you say she's your most beloved character?

I don't know.

She reminds me of my Auntie Harriet, in that my mother had two younger sisters, and they both worked in the office of the name.

If there are two sisters like that, one tends to be more powerful than the other.

I suppose the less powerful one, if you're lying in bed, say, you're six or seven years old, and any thought can come into your head as a seven-year-old, including, “I wonder what would happen if Auntie Harriet went to America."

And then, as you're a novelist, you're almost dreaming the same dreams about imagining characters, sending them all places.

So, Nora Webster, in a way, is the novel about my mother staying home, of what it's like to stay in a town and not go to America.

Now, the other two books become the books of going out into the world, but I didn't want to send her to America as a heroine, as someone who would take New York, who would get a big job immediately and marry a millionaire, and go and live in Connecticut.

It just wouldn't be like that.

She would always live in the shadows, and she's easy to push around, up to a point, and I'm interested in that point.

I was interested in those reduced characters, submerged, maybe more than reduced, that I was getting from what I was teaching, what I was reading, especially from Jane Austen, from something like Mansfield Park, where Fanny Price in Jane Austen.

She's just so shadowy in a room.

She exudes no light, and yet her sensibility becomes enormously rich by the amount that she watches, by the quality of her solitude.

This happens again in, say, Washington Square by Henry James, where Catherine Sloper, her father doesn't rate her, no one much rates her, but the reader slowly realizes just how deep her feelings are.

And in a way, that's, again, something the novel can do.

They can show you the depth of feeling in someone who you might otherwise not notice.

So, I'm working with those concepts, or those images, in those two novels, Brooklyn and Long Island, as to how much I could do with her.

It's so interesting you say that, since this character has been played by such a luminous actor, Saoirse Ronan.

So, when you first learned Saoirse Ronan would be playing that role, what was your reaction?

Well, I think what Saoirse's brilliant at is doing nothing.

Just simply letting her face feed on the light and that the smallest part of her face.

So, in a way, she was fulfilling that.

She wasn't someone who's immediately utterly glamorous, and everyone's gonna cheer when she appears.

But she's another way of being.

And so, yeah, she was such a gift when she came.

She's one of those actors that I think is acting most brilliantly when she's just being silent.

Yeah.

Just simply the light on her face.

So, she's perfect for that character.

One of the things about those two books also is they deal with women who are almost versions of women in my family.

There was an enormous amount of life around, say, my mother on a Sunday could have her two sisters, my two sisters, maybe my father's sister.

All of them are in a room together.

Women talking about clothes, and you think, “Well, that shouldn't be interesting."

Well, if you're five years old or seven years old, there's nothing more interesting than Auntie Harriet almost bought a coat in Dublin.

[Laughs] And all of them get around her, “Harriet, what was wrong with that coat?

Could you not go back and look at it again?” They would just talk for the afternoon.

Whereas downstairs, the men could be sitting talking about some piece of sport, a game of golf or some football.

That second goal was good.

The most boring stuff you've ever heard.

So, in a way, as those women began to die, as they were passing on, I thought, just recovering those lives and seeing what I could do with them.

I think that's one thing that people often say about your work is that they marvel at how accurately you're able to capture a female character's point of view.

Is that just because you were raised around such strong, interested women?

Yeah, that I listened to them all and watched them all, I'm not talking about women as much as particular people in particular places that were the same generation as my mother and her sisters.

I listened to every word they said.

I know about that green coat she almost bought in Dublin on that sale and the problem with the buttons.

My mother thought, “Harriet, green doesn't suit you.” And then, they'd all look at one another and wonder.

My mother had said something so bad, that green doesn't suit Harriet.

Well, it does.

Honestly, you could work with that forever, that sort of material.

That's all the trouble you need Well, you must have felt good about the film.

I thought it was just so lovely.

I had a really nice time.

The producer was Finola Dwyer whose parents had gone to New Zealand in the same year as Eilis goes to Brooklyn.

And Finola had come back to live in London.

Saoirse was living on her own for the first time.

She'd been born in America.

She'd been partly born up in Ireland.

So, she had known this business of going and coming back.

And John Crowley, who directed it, was from Cork living in London.

All of us had something at stake in the story.

And some of it was shot in Enniscorthy, because some of Enniscorthy really hasn't changed.

It was a strange night where the film was shown in the local hotel.

They made cinema from the ballroom.

And we all dressed up.

I was at the Oscars.

Many of us looked better, much better than people at the Oscars.

Better clothes, just better hair, better skin, better voice, just better.

But when the film opened, and we saw that it went out onto the street in Enniscorthy.

So, this is me as a kid walking to school by that street.

Me writing it in a book.

The screenwriter putting it into the book, the film being shot in the town, and now we're all watching that.

I supposed that's what happens to people in LA all the time.

But it was new in Enniscorthy.

It really was.

I'm not sure if validation is the word, but it created an excitement around something that looked everyday up to them.

And the bar at the hotel was open until very, very late.

We all celebrated, I'm not sure what, but maybe ourselves in our town until the dawn, really.

That's wonderful.

More than they did at the Oscars [inaudible].

Well, since it's your most recent book, I wanna make sure that we give some time to Long Island.

I have to admit I was nervous when I heard you were writing a sequel to Brooklyn because I thought Brooklyn was perfect as it was and I didn't want it to be messed with.

So, did you have any hesitation about doing it or was she just not finished with you and you had to keep writing about her?

I hesitated for about 14 years.

For years, I didn't do it.

I never thought of doing it, and I hate sequels.

And if we had sequels, can you imagine if there was a sequel to Moby Dick?

Can you imagine if there was a sequel to Ulysses, James Joyce, where it happens in a single day and say the following morning Leopold Bloom woke up again and have another big day based on the Iliad this time?

Honestly, except for Godfather 2, you're in Gladiator 9 territory.

That's right.

It's just awful.

It wasn't to be done.

In other words, the reason it wasn't to be done is that she went back to America.

She settled down in the suburbs of a city.

She knew happiness.

She had two kids.

She was very happily married.

I can't get a novel from that.

Some people could, but not me.

I need something.

And one day, the thing occurred to me and I remember thinking, “Oh, my Lord.” I had an opening for the book and I had a form for the book then that she would go back to Ireland.

And I got something from the film, which I got from Domhnall Gleeson playing the part of Jim that he played.

With scripts about Ireland, often the man is depicted as being alarming or charming or brooding or drunk or violent or unnecessary in some way, whereas he played him as a stable man who had a lot of glamour on life.

Just a good guy.

But a good guy without being a dull guy.

And I watched that very carefully, and from that I got an idea.

If only I could keep him unmarried.

Just keep him.

Oh, Lord, keep Jim unmarried until maybe she's back again.

I keep the mother alive.

She's gonna be 80.

Keep Jim.

Over 20 years, the mother has to keep healthy.

Jim has to keep single so that I can get another novel.

And then, I'm just home.

You see, again, the pandemic was good because I thought I'll risk this and if it doesn't work, well, at least I didn't get COVID during it.

It was one way of keeping out of harm's way writing a novel.

So, the word sequel was not used by anyone until I delivered the book.

I think if the publisher had said sequel, I would have withdrawn into my shell.

I would have said, “Hold on a minute, I'm not writing a sequel."

But the minute the sequel was written, what could I do when they all kept calling it a sequel.

Yeah.

So, you just put up with it and hoped it was okay.

It stands completely on its own.

I hope so.

I put a lot of thought into that, but I feel slightly ashamed about it.

I do really, sequels.

I know what you mean.

This is important because a novel is a form.

It's got its own rhythms.

It moves like an arc.

And when you're coming towards the last one-third of a novel, you have to feel it's moving towards completion as much as conclusion.

And if you don't feel that you're being cheated in some way, this book is being made as a book for this reason.

And if you tamper with that, it's something quite important.

And so, I tampered with it.

I put a lot of work into trying to make it okay, but I'm not sitting here proud or anything.

Yeah Well, I tend to think that all good writing is psychological in nature You are particularly known for your psychological examinations of your characters, especially Eilis.

So, tell me about using that device.

It's really just the internal that you're exploring.

Yeah.

I would call it third person intimate.

I would say that it was really refined by Henry James, say in the 1870s and in the early years say in the 1870s and in the early years of the 20th century.

And it is a simple matter.

Every single thing is told from the point of view of a person.

You do not use their voice.

You do not say I went, I did, because that is the otherness of the person.

That's the person talking in that person's voice.

Everything the person saw, heard, felt, remembered, even sort of analysis he began to believe is told from a fully embedded and intensified way.

The theory is that the reader on turning a certain page becomes that person or enters that person's spirit and starts to see the world from that person's perspective.

What you have to do, really important, is to make sure that every detail is as accurate as possible about what somebody felt.

If you give people a feeling that they didn't have, that might be colorful or funny or extreme in some way, don't do that.

Bring it down all the time to not just what's plausible, but what seems organically there in the way the person would proceed in their thoughts, in their memories, in their feelings, or in their response.

You give them a great solitude, because reading is a solitary experience.

Even listening to audio is a solitary experience.

And therefore, it doesn't matter if it's a man or a woman.

It doesn't matter what century it's in.

It doesn't matter what you're doing.

Just stick to it, and concentrate all the time on making sure that you're not overdoing it and you're not giving the person too many feelings.

The big problem is backstory.

You can't just go, “Five years earlier when she met her second husband, George, she said,” don't do that if you can.

Just try and put that into the story as organically as possible.

It's an intense experience doing it.

The effort is that the reader then has something quite intense to work with.

Right.

Right.

Well, just to switch gears a little bit.

It's interesting to me that Ireland, a country so long dominated by religion, has in the last 20 years or so become so much more progressive.

And America, a country so dominated by religion, has become so much more conservative in that same time.

What are your thoughts on that?

Yeah, it's absolutely fascinating that, for us, you were so ahead, so glamorous, so looking into the future, so filled with, even your Constitution, how your systems worked, that everything was ready for freedom, even the term “the pursuit of happiness.” Just take habeas corpus, freedom of the individual, the idea of the individual pursuing their dreams.

That's what Irish people went to America to do when they couldn't do in Ireland, because of poverty.

You went to America to pursue your dreams.

But what we understand, I think, from Ireland is that you can have a very dark time.

We had a particularly dark 1980s with the referendum on abortion, which got put into the Constitution banning abortion.

At a time when Irish women they would have to go to England, it was a very lonely experience and there was a lot of silence around that, but even contraception, and of course divorce, there were two referenda, but the first one say you couldn't get divorced in the Constitution.

say you couldn't get divorced in the Constitution.

So, I'm 30 at this point and that looks really awful.

The gay thing isn't even to be mentioned.

There's an Irish Supreme Court judgment on gay rights that you wouldn't believe is possible.

And that's from what, again it's 1980s.

So, that decade, let's say, is a lost decade if you're a liberal young person in Ireland.

There's only one place to go, get out of here.

Or if you're going to live in Ireland, find five good friends and live as though you're in a totalitarian society.

And [Laughs] we got out of that by just argument.

Women especially just got fed up being told they couldn't use contraception, or that their gay son was some sort of little monster.

People just got tired.

Also, so many women had gone to have abortions and were told they couldn't even mention it when they came home.

The health problems could arise from that.

No doctor would treat it.

Everything was awful.

And we got out of that.

Part of our help was the Constitution itself, but part of it was the general idea of people over time.

That idea of the sheer nastiness of some of those court decisions, some of those political decisions, and some of those church decisions.

So, we're in a better position now, and you will be too in the future.

We would do anything we can to help you.

That gives me some hope.

Thank you.

[Laughs] Thank you.

Well, as a last question to wrap it up, you are living full time in Los Angeles now.

So much of your writing is about a deep homesickness for Ireland.

Are you homesick?

Yeah.

My partner can certainly find about 7:00 or 8:00 in the evening, and I've started to go through Spotify to try and find some really sad-eyed songs [laughs] in the Irish language, or some singer I heard years back, and I start putting them on, and I realize it's a lost evening now.

But then, the next morning, I'm just fine again.

The sunshine is extraordinary.

We don't have much of it in Ireland.

And if you have a good day, the next day will always be bad.

You end up paying for it.

You pay for it.

But in California, the next day can also be fine, and the day after.

LA is also a very good place to work, because if you don't use the freeways, there are long, lovely days, and you can work.

But the other thing that happens is you go, and everyone in Ireland knows this, I think it's most intense at JFK, where you go to JFK, and you're just so busy trying to get on time, and you forget you're going home.

And you remember, as soon as you get towards the gate, the Irish, there they are, and you're home.

There's someone talking in a particularly Irish way, saying, “Hello.

Where are you from?"

"Enniscorthy."

"Oh, I know."

Suddenly, the cabin crew are all Irish, and for about two hours on the journey home, you're in the cocoon of home.

It wears off after a while.

You wanna go away again, but it is something that everybody recognizes, that funny business, that there is a place called Ireland, and it is in certain ways, some of them ironic, and some of them real, home.

It is home.

And that's where we're from.

And a lot of us have travelled, and a lot of the ballads are all about being in New York, and all you want to do is be home with your granny.

And it's a true feeling, but it's not a permanent one.

Obviously, I live in that ambiguity between deep feelings and between shallow feelings, and sometimes I prefer the shallow ones.

Well, we're so glad to have you in the United States.

[Applause] Thank you very much.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

[Applause] Thank you.

Thank you for being here.

[Applause] [music playing]