Irish - Novelist | May 30, 1955 -
Look at Austen. In her novels, you get a dance, followed by an encounter, followed by a letter, then a period of solitude. No flashbacks and no backstory. Let's have no more back story!
Colm Toibin
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Between the time I was 16 until I was about 20, the books I read were by people like Thomas Mann, James Baldwin, Thom Gunn, Elizabeth Bishop. All gay, of course, although I swear I didn't know that at the time. Yet all of them, it turned out, had had a parent who died during their childhood. Sexuality is nothing compared to that.
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When a book comes from the publisher and you see it for the first time... Of course it's not remotely like seeing a baby for the first time, but I can remember with each book what room I was in when I opened it. That would be excitement, though, I think. Not pride.
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I suppose one should have an integrated personality, but I've never really seen the point.
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Solitude is good in the evening. Dublin is a quiet city when you get to a certain age, when your friends settle down and have kids. Nothing much happens here.
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Suffering is too strong a word, but writing is serious work. I pull the stuff up from me - it's not as if it's a pleasure.
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People love talking about writers as storytellers, but I hate being called that: it suggests I got it from my grandmother or something, when my writing really comes out of silence. If a storyteller came up to me, I'd run away.
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I work very deliberately, with a plan. But sometimes I come to a point that I planned as the end and it needs softening. Ending a novel is almost like putting a child to sleep - it can't be done abruptly.
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I never listen to music when I am writing. It would be impossible. I listen to Bach in the mornings, mostly choral music; also some Handel, mostly songs and arias; I like Schubert's and Beethoven's chamber music and Sibelius' symphonies; for opera, I listen to Mozart and in recent years Wagner.
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My first novel was turned down by about twenty publishers over a period of two and a half years. Because my name is Irish and would not be familiar to English editors, one of them said: 'If she writes anything else, do let us know.' Slowly, very slowly, the books began to sell and be noticed.
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It is important to find a publisher and equally important not to be noticed until your third or fourth book.
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I think fiction lends itself to messiness rather than the ideal, and plays well with the ironies surrounding what happens versus what should happen.
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