Exploring memory, longing and home with author Colm Tóibín

Irish author Colm Tóibín has written short stories, essays, plays, articles and memoirs. But he’s best known for insightful novels such as “Brooklyn,” which follows Eilis Lacey as she emigrates from her home in Ireland to New York City. When she returns to Ireland for a family member’s funeral, Eilis finds herself caught between the comfort of home and the obligations of her new life in America, forcing her to decide between the two.

Tóibín’s most recent novel, “Long Island,” revisits that story more than 20 years later. Eilis flees to Ireland after her life in America is upended and once again grapples with desire and her sense of duty.

Tóibín joins us in front of a live audience of students at Portland’s Grant High School to talk about both books and his extensive body of work.

Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller coming to you today in front of an audience at Grant High School in Northeast Portland. It is an hour with the writer Colm Tóibín. Tóibín grew up in the small Irish town of Enniscorthy and he splits his time now between Dublin and New York, but in some ways he never left his first home. It looms large in his memory, his imagination, his fiction. It’s present in many of his novels, a place of community and also constriction. It’s where characters live or leave or sometimes come back to. Tóibín is the author of nonfiction, short fiction, poetry, and plays, but he is best known as a novelist. He’s written 11 now, including “The Magician,” “Brooklyn,” and “Long Island.” Colm Tóibín, it is my pleasure to have you on Think Out Loud.

Colm Tóibín: Thank you very much for having me. Thank you.

Miller: Given that we are in a school, I’d love to start with some of your own school memories. I have read, you said that no matter what happened and no matter how violent some of your teachers were, you just could not listen in class. What was class like for you?

Tóibín: Yeah, I think there’s a name for that now. Just then it was called laziness or badness or, I mean, in other words, there’s a teacher explaining something on the blackboard and it’s probably to do with mathematics. And it’s probably very important and people, in order to become an engineer, you probably need to learn all these equations. And when he’s finished explaining it, it seems that everyone in the class has been listening to him. But I’m meant to listen. But, then I didn’t. And so everyone is now writing out formulas or doing the sums and I’m just sitting there wondering if there’s any way I can catch up.

It was just about dreaming. It’s still true sometimes that if someone talks to me, halfway through their conversation, I could start thinking about something else. I think this is natural. I don’t see it as an illness or anything, but teachers took immense exception to it and said that you’ve got to stop looking out the window all the time and start listening. To write reports home and things, but yeah, I think it’s just a natural way of being bored easily by teachers.

Miller: You wrote that you lived in a permanent state of dreamy distance from things.

Tóibín: Yeah, yeah. In other words, most of the time, most of the things they were talking about turned out to be useless – for me anyway – and so maybe I was good to be dreaming. But I suppose I had things to dream about, I had a life of my own, and yeah, I’m still like that, yeah.

Miller: Yeah, that’s what I was wondering. It seems like it, I can imagine the ways in which that would help you as a writer, especially a writer of fiction, to be living partly in your own world, in a world of imagination.

Tóibín: Yeah, that sometimes you’re walking along the street and a thing occurs to you. For example, the opening of “Long Island,” the novel, occurred to me out of the blue for no reason, you’re going down the street and here it comes. And what you’ve got to be ready to do now is work. In other words, that this is something you’ve got to now start working on dramatizing, getting the sentences right, making sure there’s enough information for the reader, but not too much, just building pace, building rhythm. But I think when you’re younger, that splash of inspiration can often lead to a sort of frustration because you really don’t, you’re not sure what to do with it.

Miller: When it comes to you now, or maybe then, was it visual? Was it words? Was it a feeling?

Tóibín: It’s a feeling, I think, more than it being visual. In other words, it’s not as though you can see the color. It’s not like that. It’s just an idea, an image, something that… And there’s also an element, I suppose, of what if in it, what if my Auntie Harriet had gone to live in America instead of staying in Enniscorthy? What sort of life would she have had there? The sort of thought I think that you could have in bed when you were 15, and you could think, what if we were really rich? What if we all went to live in Ireland? What if my auntie went to live in some other country? How would she travel? What would happen to her? So it’s that same idea, just leaving the mind free to imagine.

Miller: You are the fourth child in your family, meaning you grew up with three older siblings. How did that shape what you were exposed to?

Tóibín: In a good number of the novels, I reduced that number, that lovely idea of lying in bed, having had to share things with your siblings, thinking, imagine if there was just me. What would that be like if I was the only one? I suppose the other thing is that you get their music. In other words, that the music your older siblings are listening to becomes your music. In other words, you’re 5 or you’re 7, but you’re listening to the music of someone 10 years older.

Miller: That was the split between you and the oldest.

Tóibín: Yeah, that’s the music that’s playing in the house.

Miller: That’s an eon of time for a 5 year old.

Tóibín: Yeah. And I noticed for example, with the band The Beatles, George Harrison, who was the guitarist in The Beatles, and he was also the fourth in a family. And it meant he had that too. He had the music of the ‘40s and ‘50s in his soul, because his older siblings were playing it all the time.

Miller: Let’s take a question from our audience. What is your name and what’s your question?

Charlie Hudson: My name is Charlie Hudson, and my question is, what made you want to start writing?

Tóibín: Oh, the first thing, I mean it must happen to you, where you’re sent into a room and you’re told to study. But you go in there and you study. Well, I found that really hard, I found it really boring and I found it really tedious. And I would try, you’d open the book, try and read about a formula in mathematics or try and read about something in biology, and you’d try and read in say, in chemistry to make methane gas or something. I would learn it all, and then I wouldn’t really. I would look out the window, I’d think of anything else.

And very early on, I wrote a poem. No one asked me to write a poem, no one wanted a poem. The school didn’t especially appreciate, people are meant to study writing poems, but that’s what I did without meaning to. I think it would be, I could have easily written the words to a song, but it was words, it was getting a word and putting another word beside it and getting a sort of sound that had feeling and emotion in it.

Miller: How old do you think you were at that time?

Tóibín: I was 12.

Miller: Because it seems like this is the next part of what we were talking about earlier. I mean, a kid with this relentless imagination, you said a couple times you didn’t mean, you wanted to listen, you wanted to read that chemistry.

Tóibín: I didn’t mean any harm. I mean, I wasn’t going around trying to cause trouble.

Miller: Right? But it wasn’t simply that you had this internal life and imagination, you also had, on some level, early on, had a drive to create.

Tóibín: Yeah, and I wish someone had told me that if you write a poem, just say it’s a Monday, and you write a poem on Monday, it didn’t strike me that what I should do on Tuesday, instead of writing another poem, I should revise the first one. That second thoughts are really more interesting than first thoughts, and changing your mind, changing a word, changing a line, cutting out a line, adding to a line, that’s actually what I should have been doing on Tuesday, but I didn’t know that. I’d write another poem on Tuesday, and a third one on Wednesday. That’s not as good an idea as maybe looking at the Monday one again. And also looking at something in the cold light of morning. In other words, you think you’re great at night, and you wake in the morning and the thoughts you’ve had at night, or the ambitions, or even the poems, just don’t seem so good in the cold light of morning. And that’s a very useful thing to know.

Miller: You mentioned that poem just now, one of the first things you wrote. I wonder if you could read us a lovely part from this autobiographical essay you have called “A Guest at the Feast.” There’s all these short vignettes about growing up in your small town. But what links all of them is different memories of exposures to art. And this short part here, is about a time when members of your family and I think some neighbors or friends were on a beach holiday and the adults are eciting poetry.

Tóibín: “I don’t much like the sea, or the sand or the other children. But I know that if I sit on the edge of a rug and draw the slightest attention to myself, one of the adults will tell me to go away and play. Nonetheless, I love listening to them. And therefore, approaching the adult rug stealthily is always worth trying. My Auntie Maeve is reciting poetry. She is sitting up and staring out to sea, and her voice has the same stilted, serious, and incantatory tone she uses when she’s giving out the rosary. All of the others have grown serious, each in different poses, one lying back, one resting on an elbow, one sitting up.

My Auntie Maeve has tears in her eyes. The poem is long, and it rhymes. I wish I could remember what it was. No one talks when she is finished. I know never to talk when the adults leave silence, because the next thing said is often the most unusual and unexpected. The next thing now is my mother. She is reciting the ‘Lake Isle of Innisfree.’ I’ve heard her doing this before. Her voice is much softer and more dramatic than her rosary voice. But like Auntie Maeve, she does not take her eyes from the far distance when she recites.

And something else too, for both of them reciting these poems are books of terrible sadness that is far from the light, funny talk they normally have here on the Strand. And then Pat Sheehan starts. He’s a captain in the army. They’ve rented a house just beside the winning post. He is from Clare, so his accent is different. He knows poems that they all seem to know, but they allow him to recite them and join in only at the end of verses. He, too, stares out to sea when he recites. He recites the words slowly and carefully.

Then the poetry fades, or my memory of it fades, and the scene melts back to ordinary talk. I don’t know how long this lasts, but it is broken by my Auntie Maeve, who, in mid-talk, without warning, has started to recite another poem. The others all stop and pay attention, but she doesn’t seem to mind about the others. She’s reciting the poem to herself or to the sea, or to some other power, and all of the others recognize this and pay special attention. Once more, she has tears in her eyes, and I cannot stop looking at her.”

Miller: That is the writer Colm Tóibín reading from his essay, “A Guest at the Feast.” He is the author of more than a dozen books, including the novels “Brooklyn” and “Long Island.” What impact did experiences like that have on you, watching adults in your life take part in art making, art appreciating?

Tóibín: I suppose the first thing there is that I really found other children, especially on the beach, really difficult to deal with. They’re always kicking sand in your eyes and splashing you with water, and generally making a nuisance of yourself. So you would try and get away from the other children. I mean, boys were worse than girls, but they were all awful.

Miller: Was that more broadly about your experience of kids as a kid or was it just about not liking the physicality of a beach?

Tóibín: I mean, you have to remember this is Ireland and the sea is freezing and it’s the summer, so you’re meant to get into the sea.

Miller: You’re talking to Oregonians who have the same experience of oceans.

Tóibín: So that’s what you’re here for and you’re told get into the water now. And the water is, the waves are coming towards you and each time you have to jump higher and you have to move out further and your sister’s already down into the sea and she’s saying it’s lovely, it’s warm once you’re down. And you’re just standing there freezing, hoping the winter will come soon, so no one will have to go into the sea. And you think, is there any moment where I’m up to my knees in water, the water’s coming, the wave coming, and then someone decides to splash you? I mean, isn’t that evil?

And someone decides to come behind you and just splash you. You know what to do, you splash them back is a good thing to do. So that really, the idea for me always was just getting somewhere on my own where I could just be left alone by everybody. And the nearest you could get to that was to see if you could get near the adults and just sit quietly listening to what they were talking about.

Sometimes the talk they were having was boring, but this memory, one day they were all there and they recited poetry. And they loved knowing the words of the poems. I think they’d learned them in school or they’d learned them other places. But I mean, some of those poems, like that poem, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” my mother would go “I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree, and a small cabin built there of lake and of the wattles made, nine bean rows will I have there in the hive for the honeybee, and live alone in the Belisle Glade, and then I shall have some peace there.”

And that idea is watching adults doing something they don’t usually do. I mean, normally if you’re a kid, what others normally does is boss you around and tell you what to do. So you need to get away from them sometimes very quickly, before they come up with some new solution to how you should get into the sea. So that day I remembered something different, and it was about those words, and it was really memorable, because they weren’t the sort of people who would normally recite poetry.

Miller: Let’s take another question from our audience. What’s your name and what’s your question?

Georgia Graff: Hi, I’m Georgia Graff, and my question is, in what ways can you connect to Eilis?

Miller: Let me just say first, that our group of freshmen here have read your novel “Brooklyn,” and Eilis is the main character of that novel and one of the main characters of “Long Island,” which we can talk about in a little bit. So, yeah, now to the question.

Tóibín: She’s the young woman who emigrates to Brooklyn in the novel “Brooklyn.” I suppose the first thing is that she’s the generation of my mother, but especially my mother’s younger sisters. I was thinking about that group of women who were there when, like that scene on the beach, but it would be much more a scene where say two of them would have gone to Dublin, which is about two hours away. And they would have gone to a sale and they would have almost bought a coat.

And I’m listening to them and they’re talking so vividly with so much life in them, and they’re laughing so much about the coat they nearly bought and they didn’t buy in the end, it was green, but the buttons were wrong and they would, it would be just whatever they talked about, it was interesting. If my Auntie Harriet came to our house, she wouldn’t knock the door, she’d just push the door and come in and she’d shout, yoohoo who’s here? And you’d always, it would always liven things up.

It was just imagining that she had gone to Brooklyn. Just thinking what would have happened to her had she gone. If she’d gone alone, she was the youngest, just say she couldn’t get a job in the town. Just say eventually everybody said, Harriet, you have to get a job somewhere. And so she worked in an office where her job was to do the wages every week. So all the men who worked in the mill, she would count out their wages and put them in envelopes. And so she was very good with figures and money, and she was very good at counting with addition, with totting. This is before the adding machine.

And so I was just imagining, that really was my first connection. But the second connection was that I had come to America for the first time before I wrote the book and I’d lived in Texas. I was lonely when I went there first. It’s strange, I didn’t expect to be lonely. In other words, you wake in the morning in a bed that’s not yours, in a country that’s not yours, in a house that’s not yours. And you wish you were home. It’s a simple matter, just a simple business of I wish I was home. And that feeling then, you lose it during the day, you distract yourself. But I started to think about her, what she would miss, how she would live, what she would do, where she would go.

Miller: Let’s take another question from our audience.

Lyla Morocca: Hi, my name is Lyla Morocca, and I was wondering how it felt writing from a female perspective for your novel “Brooklyn,” like if it was different or if you took any inspiration from women in your life.

Tóibín: I think the total inspiration was from women in my life, but I also think that if you have a young man going to Brooklyn in the 1950s from Ireland, he will have a very different life to a young woman. For example, he will find a bar he can go to. He will get involved in sports. The streets belong to him. If he decides to just walk home, it doesn’t matter if it’s nice, it doesn’t matter if it’s to go through streets that are deserted, that he will in a way own things or feel, I suppose, a sense of entitlement.

On a Sunday or a Saturday he’ll go to sport. He’ll be with all his friends, they’ll go to a bar, they’ll have no trouble going into the bar, ordering beers. A young woman in the 1950s won’t feel free in that way, won’t feel safe in that way. So therefore she’s much more confined to domestic space. What matters to her much more than a bar is her bedroom. Her bedroom becomes her safe space. And this gives me a lot of chances to write about real homesickness. I think the young man will do everything to disguise that and pretend it’s not happening. She’s alone at night, much more. And the options she has are fewer. And so therefore, within that sort of limit, I can work much more on her imagination.

But I’m thinking particularly about my aunts, about my mother’s sisters. I’m thinking about their voices, I’m thinking about the things that they cared about. I’m thinking about the amount of time I spent listening to them. I don’t think I could write a novel now, about a young woman now. I just wouldn’t know the words. I wouldn’t know exactly, and you would tell me, God, you’ve got so many things wrong in your book. But I felt with that generation, with my mother’s sisters, that I could work with that. But it is an interesting question as to how much a man can ever imagine about a woman’s life. I think it’s a really good question. And the answer is of course there are limits to that too.

Miller: Another thing that strikes me as you were talking about that, and saying earlier, in response to one question before, that you would hear, say if your younger aunt would go to Dublin, and then not buy a coat, in many ways, it’s the opposite of the way you were describing your not being able to listen to your teachers. It seems like you were an extremely observant boy or young man. When you were taken in, when you’re interested in what the adults in your life were doing, it’s the same. It’s what happened when you were watching those adults recite poetry. You were like a camera.

Tóibín: Yeah, you see, I think it’s something that you learn as a writer to do, maybe the most important thing to know is, am I boring the reader? Is this passage boring? Is it interesting? In what way is it interesting? And you think, I was brought up, I suppose that idea of being a kid and just thinking if anything’s boring, I just stop listening, I just turn off. And therefore if anything is funny or new or has a novelty value, if a circus came to the town, it’d be just very exciting compared to another double math, and have to do maths for an hour, have to do physics, biology, chemistry, so boring or you could go with a circus, there’d be animals, there’d be people running around, there’d be clowns.

Miller: I love that, it’s like the sixth time you’ve just said that all these students, when they leave us, they’re gonna go to do all these things. Do you have biology or chemistry today?

Tóibín: I think people know what I’m talking about.

Miller: Yes. I just think the administrators and teachers here are saying stop, stop saying school is boring.

Tóibín: It’s really important, it’s the most interesting thing in the whole world. Mathematics equations. Y equals X equals W equals C. It’s really, really interesting.

Miller: That was very believable. You have a lovely section in that essay I mentioned earlier about your mother’s lifelong idiosyncratic reading style. You write this: “She was what most writers long for and what most of us still write for: the ordinary reader, curious and intelligent and demanding, ready to be moved and changed, and believing still that the written word has all the power to make the deepest imprint on the private self.” When did you realize that about her as a reader?

Tóibín: I suppose in a town like Enniscorthy, where I’m from, about 6,000 people, the local library becomes really important. And that idea that you could browse the shelves, you could go in and find anything you wanted to read. My mother liked books that she called were smart, fast moving. She loved Americans. She loved American books. She thought American people talked in a way that was smart, that Irish people talked in a way that was often slow and ponderous. They’d tell you things you didn’t need to know. But she, I think she got her version of America from the movies. And then she found more of it, I think, in some American fiction. But I suppose that’s the idea of never paying attention. There are no rules governing what you must like and not like in reading. There’s something that everybody else likes, there’s no reason why you should like it. So, I think she was good like that.

Miller: There were rules, though, about what books were even available to her, though, right?

Tóibín: Oh, yeah. The Irish government and the Irish Catholic Church joined forces in banning a lot of books up until about 1965. They’d simply ban a book because it had some reference to sex or some reference to something that they thought was immoral. So, yeah, a lot of books were unavailable. By the time I started to read, that all had changed. Big explosion of paperback books came into the country, and people could read whatever they liked.

Miller: In general, what happens, if anything, in your mind with the characters you’ve created after you’ve written a novel?

Tóibín: After I wrote the novel “Brooklyn” they made a movie of the book. In doing events like this sometimes about the movie, I found myself watching it again. So over a period of two or three months, I probably watched it six or seven times. And even though I had imagined the story, I’m the one that started that story, the way the film was made and the way the actors performed had an effect on me.

One of the actors is a guy called Domhnall Gleeson, that’s spelled D-O-M-H-N-A-L-L. It’s pronounced Donal. He played the character of Jim.

And I thought he did something brilliant. He played this very quiet, very stable, very tolerant, very decent guy, but he gave him a sort of glow, and he gave him a sort of light or something that the camera caught. And I became interested in this and I thought I could work with it. It stayed in my mind and then over a period of about 20 years, it festered, I saw a way that this guy, if you worked on him further, if I made him lonely, if I made him needy, if I made him like he really wanted to get married, but he couldn’t find a proper girlfriend and so I thought I could work with that. And so I wrote “Long Island.”

Miller: Was that film version incarnation of your character, so it sounds like you’re saying he changed the way you thought about your own fictional creation.

Tóibín: That’s correct.

Miller: Had that ever happened to you before outside of a movie, you’ve had a novel turned into a TV series before.

Tóibín: No, no. Never. It’s never happened to me before. And I’ve never met anyone it happened to. I think writers generally find films of your book just hard because someone has stolen, I mean, obviously, you’ve signed a contract with them, but nonetheless, there’s a sense that I imagined this first, how come you’re taking it from me, and even changing lines of dialogue or even changing things. But I didn’t, with that film, I didn’t feel that. I felt that I was getting something back.

Miller: But in other words, for the other books you’ve written, the characters sort of, they don’t die, but they live in a kind of amber. They’re in the pages and they are static, they don’t change. But for you, through this, the sort of the prism of this one character, you saw a new way in?

Tóibín: Yeah, I saw another story I could tell, in which he would be more dominant as a figure.

Miller: We don’t get, I should say we do get it in “Brooklyn,” it’s in the third person, but it’s through Eilis’s experience of the world. In “Long Island,” it’s very different. We get her and at first it seems like it’s only going to be her. And then we go back to Ireland and we inhabit the consciousness, essentially, of two other characters. Of Jim, who you’re talking about, and then, Nancy, who was Eilis’s best friend. How did you make that decision to bring us into their experiences of the world in a way that we didn’t get in “Brooklyn”?

Tóibín: Yeah, I think what the novel can work with is the idea of what’s known and not known. For example, I’m looking at this audience, I have no idea what you’re thinking. Each one of us is thinking a different thing. Someone could be looking at me and as though you’re listening, but you might not be listening at all. I don’t mean you particularly, sorry, I’m just pointing at you. But a novel can tell you what someone is thinking. And then they can tell you what someone is saying. And you’re the reader, you’re thinking, but that what they’re saying isn’t true. They know it’s not true.

How come they’re saying it, and so it’s it’s a unique form in that sense that really a movie can’t do that in the same way. You can say at that very moment, she wanted to tell her mother that she was tired listening to her. And then your next line of dialogue is, it’s wonderful listening to you. Just woo.

Miller: You could do it, but it’s inartful.

Tóibín: And you, the reader, can see that. The novel “Long Island” is filled with silences. It’s filled with people not telling other people things. For example, Jim is engaged to Nancy. He’s going to marry her, but they don’t want it known yet, so they don’t tell anyone.

So that when Eilis comes back from America, she doesn’t know that. Her mother doesn’t know that she’s having trouble in her marriage in America. So all these people are dancing around each other, not knowing things. But the person who knows everything is the reader. And so the reader is turning the page thinking, tell her, tell your mother, or why don’t you tell Eilis, so it goes on. For example, in “Brooklyn,” when Eilis comes home from America, she doesn’t tell them she’s married. And the reader goes, Eilis you can’t do this. Like she goes to a dance with Jim and Jim presumes she’s single. It’s all the time the drama is being created by a conflict between what one character knows and the other character isn’t telling them and what the reader knows.

Miller: It’s almost physically painful. I mean I say this personally.

Tóibín: Thank you.

Miller: That experience that you’re describing of the not telling, which is another way of saying it’s very effective, I suppose, which is why you said thank you, but it’s the experience of being with these people who are not saying what we long for them to say, which we think will make their lives easier in the long run. It is almost like a pain.

Tóibín: Yes, and I think each of us does this as the day goes on. It’s a form of good manners sometimes. If you look at someone and you think, well, that new hairstyle is awful, but you don’t need to say that. So you might say, well, your hair looks great, but the reader knows if you’re writing it down, you don’t mean it.

Miller: You leave a lot up to interpretation at the end of both novels. Not to give things away, but the novel “Brooklyn” ends with less clarity than the movie version does. And the novel “Long Island” also ends where we don’t exactly know what’s going to happen. All these characters have made seemingly fateful decisions, and then it ends. How do you decide where and how to end?

Tóibín: Look, I have a website and it’s got my name on it, and there’s a thing called “Contact,” and you click on that and you find me immediately. It comes straight to me. And the number of people are going nuts, going crazy about the ending of “Long Island.” Almost everyone who reads the book thinks this ending is not right. You need to make another ending. I want another book. I get all these complaints.

It’s like as though I was selling packets of sugar that wasn’t sweet. People are writing in saying, I don’t like this sugar, I want new sugar. So I thought, I honestly believed when I wrote the book and ended it, that I told the reader enough, that to tell more was to tell what was obvious, to spell it out in a way that wasn’t necessary. So I left it there, and that seemingly doesn’t make anyone happy. I don’t know what to do now. I’m public enemy number one.

Miller: What do you want as a reader in general? The way you just described that, is it the same as what you want as a writer?

Tóibín: I suppose I’m interested in mystery. And I’m interested in the idea of having my intelligence respected. I don’t need everything told. Oh, everyone was happy, except so and so. And she was unhappy for the following week over the next 30, 40, 50 years. I don’t need everything to be spelled out for me. I don’t need to be told everything. I suppose we’re back at the blackboard where someone is explaining a formula and I’m in a dream because I don’t need this formula being spelled out. So it just depends on your attitude towards reading. I mean sometimes with a film, with a movie, you just don’t want everything to be told to you. They’re spoon fed to you, so there’s something wrong with you.

Miller: OK, lunch is fully over and you need to go back to your class. I think that’s what that last bell meant. I wonder if you could read us one more excerpt. This is from “Long Island” and this is when Eilis’s mother is going to be turning 80 and she’s explaining why she doesn’t want her kids to give her a big 80th birthday bash.

Tóibín: Now, I just should say that this is Enniscorthy. A lot of the stories in this book would be fully recognizable to anyone in Enniscorthy. In other words, what I’m going to read now, there are people in Enniscorthy who would know exactly who this is based on, and it is based on a real story of something that genuinely did happen.

“‘You must remember,’” this is her mother talking, “‘the old woman who used to live in Number 47.’ A look of satisfaction came over her mother’s face. ‘Well, she was called Miss Jane Hegarty.’” I did change her name, by the way. “‘And she was always cold. She was very noble and kept a beautiful house. Miss Jane Hegarty was a very polite, well spoken person. When she got older, a priest, a friend of the family used to visit once a week to give her the sacraments. And for a while, a nurse came, but she took against the nurse. And then it was discovered that she was going to be 100 years old. And we all got invited to a party in her house. I went only because she had invited me. How could I not go? But the people who organized the party were a low crowd. Not all of them mind, but enough of them to make it into a free for all. Word spread that there was drink to be had. Louts descended on her house, and of course they not only fed themselves lashings of vodka, if it wasn’t gin, but they fed Miss Jane too. And in her innocence, Miss Jane drank it, topped up with lemonade. And they drank, and she drank until someone put her to bed. And she died the next day. She died of the party. Vodka and good cheer one day, and a coffin and a hearse the next. And if anyone thinks this is happening on my birthday, they can think again. I will bar the door.’ ‘It will be just for family,’ Eilis said. ‘Families are often the worst,’ her mother replied.”

Miller: Let’s take another question from our audience. What is your name and what’s your question?

Charlie Raskin: My name’s Charlie Raskin, and we noticed that “Brooklyn” talks a lot about Irish people’s views of America. So what were yours?

Tóibín: Irish people…

Miller: Irish people’s views of America. And I think, do you mean, Charlie, do you mean when he was growing up?

Raskin: Yeah.

Tóibín: People thought America was a land of dreams. It was a land of glamour. It was where you could get a nice suntan, it was where you could have really nice teeth. And people got all these images from the movies and they were certainly there. And when I was 8 years old, I was taken out of school by my father and I was taken to a town 10 miles south of our town called Wexford.

I stood with the crowd and I watched your President Kennedy coming around the corner in an open topped car. Now, in Ireland, we didn’t have open top cars because it rained so much that you’d be drenched. I mean the car would be ruined in one season. But this was the president of the United States who had come to Ireland, and his teeth, you should have seen his teeth, his smile, it was just so gorgeous. Everyone presumed when you went to America, you made money. And when you made money in America and you were Irish, you sent money home.

So that, honestly, a letter from America without money was called an empty letter. Especially in the west of Ireland where people were very poor, huge numbers of people went to America. And America became the place where you could be free. In other words, America became the place where your great grandson could become president, which couldn’t happen in England, because they couldn’t become queen or king, because you inherited that. But in America, if you look at Joe Biden, if you look at the Kennedys, Ronald Reagan, and Obama, in fact, they all had an Irish, some Irish ancestors.

And so that idea of America as a land of opportunity… Of course, if you’re writing a novel, you can then show that in America, you still have to get up in the morning. It’s not as though you can stay in bed until 11, in other words, when Eilis goes to America, she has to work, she feels lonely there. It’s not as though everyone who went to America from Ireland became rich, but the image was there.

Miller: Let’s take another question. What is your name and what’s your question?

Roger McPherson: My name is Roger McPherson, and my question is, when Eilis is homesick in part two, you describe how she felt with a lot of detail. Did any of your personal experiences with traveling away from home and of immigration inspire this part of the novel?

Tóibín: Yes it did. In other words, just before I worked on the novel, I had been in Texas. And as I told you, I had the experience of being in Texas. First of all, I don’t know if you know this, but you guys, you drive on the wrong side of the road. So that if you’re Irish, and you come out of your drive and there’s no traffic around, you’re trying to, is it this way? What way is it? And you could end up driving for a while, wandering all the time, is this right or wrong?

This is only the beginning of a whole lot of things that just make your day, you’re always watching out. You’re watching out for making sure that you’re, everyone wants to ask you where you’re from, your accent. But it’s not just that. It’s that idea that I think naturally as people, we’re not nomads. We don’t want to move every week. We want to settle somewhere. There’s this idea of home, this idea of settlement, this idea of getting a house and staying in it, getting a town and living in it. And then if that doesn’t happen, then something happens called homesickness.

And obviously homesickness gets cured by time, but Eilis doesn’t know that. When she gets her first letter from home, she sees her mother’s handwriting, her sister’s handwriting. And she realizes she’s not going to see them again, perhaps even ever, but certainly not in the immediate future. The place she goes is up to her room, and she wants to be alone there. And what she feels is a sort of anguish, and I think that’s something we have to remember when we’re talking about migration and emigration and people coming into a foreign country. It’s a huge wrench. It’s a very difficult thing to do for the person.

I think it’s something in our politics, both in Ireland and the United States, we should keep in mind that that first move, that arriving on your own in a foreign country is very, very difficult and brings with it an awful lot of sort of ambiguity. First of all, you’re looking for opportunities, but secondly, you’re feeling bad.

Miller: You include this quote in one of your essays. This is by the writer Brian Fallon. It’s about living in small towns, and he was writing about a painter who actually spent time in your hometown, but it’s more general than that. This is what he wrote:

“In a country town, everybody knows you and your family, or at least knows about you. Every death or birth is a kind of communal event, and there is a certain sense of an enveloping cocoon of fatalism, of a preordained round ending in the local churchyard. It’s a difficult thing to put into words, but it is felt by everyone and permeates a small, tight world. And though the town itself may be left behind, you are marked in certain ways for life.”

Does that ring true to you? Does that describe your experience in any way?

Tóibín: Yes, it does. And it means that when I’m writing these novels, for example, “Brooklyn” and “Long Island,” I’m back in that time when all of the family were still alive, when my mother, my father, my aunts, they were all still there. And I’m naming the streets. Naming the streets becomes important. You’re getting something back. You’re able to see something. You’re getting a sort of an emotional anchor as you work. I think for any of us who write stories, that idea of what street is this happening in? What’s the name of the street? What’s the name of that shop? What’s the name of that store? Where’s the post office?

That idea of imagining, reconstructing, remaking a world that’s gone or some of it’s gone and seeing if you could have it back, however briefly. But that idea also of, if you leave the place, it doesn’t leave you. That you can summon it up immediately. You can say if you go to that street, if you turn right, what’s the street called? Who lived there? Who lived in the next street, who lived on the next street? How many children did they have, what was their dog called? That idea of being able to remember. I’m 70 years old, I could take you through the dogs, the names of the dogs in the street, who had what dog.

Miller: From when you were 12?

Tóibín: Yeah, and who didn’t have a dog.

Miller: What are some of the dog names?

Tóibín: Well, there was Loser Lynch and there was Buttons Hayton.

Miller: This is the last name of the humans?

Tóibín: Oh yeah, it was given, the one on the end was Buttons Hayton, yeah, yeah.

Miller: When you talk about home now, what do you mean?

Tóibín: It’s ambiguous. I mean, in other words, you move and you know, in a way, home is where your bed is, but it’s never as simple as that, the idea of going home. But I think you can make a new home. It’s not as though it’s fixed for you for life. All I’m saying is that that idea, I would find it very difficult to write a novel, for example, set in Portland, because the first thing… actually I’ll give you a good example of this. In this novel “Brooklyn,” she goes to a baseball game. She goes to one because her boyfriend’s going and his brothers and she gets a good look at them as they cheer and shout and they don’t pay any attention to her because they’re so involved with the game.

So I went to a baseball game. My first one. It was a bit strange, a bit slow that game. But anyway, so I was writing the book and I just said as I was writing, I wrote, “At halftime, they went and had a hot dog.” And my editor called me up, she’s an American, and said, “Were you actually at a baseball game?” I said, “Yeah, I went to one, I told you.” And she said, “Well, we don’t have halftime in baseball.” I said, “Well, you do.” She said, “No, we don’t. I told you, I’m not, I’m not asking you, I’m telling you.” And I said, “Well, what do you have?” And she said, “It’s called the 7th inning stretch.” I’ve never heard of that. I said, “I’ve never heard of that.” She said, “Well, you better hear of it now because you better put it in your book, because if you don’t put it in your book, people are gonna laugh at you for calling it halftime.” So in other words, you’d get things wrong that seems so – I presume you all, you all already know this about the 7th inning stretch. Is that correct?

Miller: It is correct, it is in baseball.

Tóibín: Is that correct? But I’m sick, I didn’t know this. But it wouldn’t just be that, it would be little, small little ways people talk. Just getting all sorts of, not knowing when Labor Day is. Not knowing when Martin Luther King Day is, just things you would just get wrong and everyone would say, there’s something missing in your book that doesn’t get the spirit of Portland. And the answer would have to be yeah, because I’m just, it isn’t, it doesn’t belong to me in that way.

Miller: The flip side of that quote that I just read is a kind of, to me, almost claustrophobia, of everybody knowing everything about you and your parents and your grandparents of not having any kind of general privacy. Do you revel in anonymity in the rest of when you’re not there, when you’re in Dublin or New York or Portland, do you celebrate that you can walk around and most people don’t know who you are?

Tóibín: Yeah, it’s a funny idea that in a small town like that, everybody knows, it’s not just who you are, but which of them you are, which brother you are. I suppose that would mean you would also know them. And you could pass someone on the street and you’d know all about them. You’d know something their father did or what their aunt did. And yeah, so it certainly makes a difference if you’re in a big city. I think people, some people love it. Just getting away, just getting out of the claustrophobia into a world where people just pass each other on the street without even looking at each other.

Miller: But is that your experience or do you not mind it?

Tóibín: I live in my head, so I brought all this stuff with me. It’s good to be away sometimes.

Miller: Let’s take another question from our student audience. What is your name? What’s your question?

Clara Push: Hi, my name is Clara Push, and my question is, what is one thing you know now about writing that you wish you would have known sooner?

Tóibín: I was talking to you earlier about the idea of revision. The idea that it’s not just in literature, but I think in every area of our life, the second thought you have, if you’re planning a holiday. You need to re-plan, you need to rethink. If you’re writing an essay, I think with everything you do, even if you’re with your friends and you have an opinion, it’s often more interesting, that opinion, when you have revised it and thought it through and and have another version of it. I suppose that that idea that sometimes when I’m writing, the opening I write is terrible. There’s something I haven’t got right.

And what you’ve got to do with that is do it again. I’m talking about an opening two paragraphs. And it’s often the case with an essay, anything you do, the first two paragraphs have something wrong with them. What you’ve got to do is really important is to know that, and to be able to go back and just cross it out completely. Don’t try and just make it better, just do it again. And also to leave time sometimes, think that if I think I should finish this novel by Christmas. Sometimes you’ve got to work.

This business I was talking about earlier, about sitting in the classroom, not listening to the teacher, you can’t go on with that. I mean, I’m sort of talking about it, I sound as though I’m making fun of it but you can’t go on with that. There’s a certain day you have to go in and say, now I’m going to do that. I’m going to actually sit at the front and listen for a change. Because if I don’t do that, I’m going to miss out on something. So it’s that idea that you wait until you get a certain inspiration, until a certain idea comes to your head. You write it down. You may need to rewrite that, but mainly what you need to do now is work. What you need to do now is say, I must work today.

And you need to tell everyone you know, next weekend you’re not going to see me. I’m sure you don’t even care, but you’re not going to see me, because I’m going to be working. I was talking at the beginning about having a sort of lackadaisical or easy relationship with duty or with things you need to do. There’s certain times in your life when you need to say, this next three months, I am going to deliver. And I didn’t know that when I started. I let time go by too quickly and too easily. I wouldn’t do that now.

Miller: We have time for one more question and one more, hopefully quick-ish answer. What’s your name? What’s your question?

Amelia Shaw: Hi, I’m Amelia Shaw. If you were to write “Brooklyn” today, do you think the book would be different? And if so, how?

Tóibín: Oh, I don’t think so. I might have put in more jokes. And… No, I was lucky I got a character and I could give her a sort of life. And getting that Italian guy, which I just got one day, like I have to give her a boyfriend. Where’s he going to be from? I could have made him Irish, which would have been a really Irish story. By making him Italian, I got something else out of the book, but no, I don’t think I would. I mean, strangely, I don’t think I would.

Miller: I’m gonna go back to the work and the editing and the refining. What are you looking for in the editing mode? And how do you at this point know that you’ve arrived, that you’ve made something better?

Tóibín: I think you can never be sure, but what you’re trying to do is make the thing plausible, that, in other words, that the reader, first of all, that the reader doesn’t notice you’re making all these changes. The reader just turns the page. The reader is following the story. The reader is interested in what’s going to happen next. There’s got to be something at stake. In other words, it’s got to matter what the character does for the character, the rest of the character’s life. I suppose you’re creating drama. You’re saying, dramatize, dramatize, dramatize. Is there a drama here?

For example, if she meets this guy, this Italian guy I mentioned, is this going to be just like boy meets girl leads to love, leads to marriage, leads to happiness? No, because she’s not sure she’s going to stay in America. And he’s never sure of her. And so that’s what’s at stake. At stake is she’s not from New York. She’s not from Brooklyn. She’s never ever going to settle properly. It’s always going to be difficult for her. So that falling in love with her brings a danger. What if she goes? What if she doesn’t stay? And so, I’m working with you, with the reader. I’m thinking about the reader. What does the reader need to know now? Because there’s something that might happen. And my job is to keep you interested.

Miller: Colm Tóibín, it was a pleasure talking to you. Thanks very much.

Tóibín: Thank you very much. Thank you, everybody. Thank you.

Miller: Colm Tóibín, thank you. Thanks as well to Olivia Jones Hall from Literary Arts, to librarian Paige Battle and English teacher Jenny Rapaport here at Grant High School, and of course, thanks to our amazing student audience.

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