Brooklyn

"Well, maybe not too many people will need an introduction, because it’s been a very popular book and a really beautiful movie, which I don’t normally say about most book adaptations. In Brooklyn , we have Eilis Lacey, who comes from Ireland to Brooklyn, where she meets Tony—a plumber with a big Italian family. I don’t want to give too much away, but she’s already very attached to Tony, but then—after maybe nine months or a year—she has to go back because her sister has died, and there she meets Jim. They have the summer together, then she, very abruptly and without saying goodbye, leaves and goes back to her life in Brooklyn. The love story is the motor to the book, although you take away so much more from the book than a simple love story. It’s really a book about emigration and immigration, and feeling dislocated both from where you came from and where you landed. “All the literary novels that I really love have some form of a love story in them” And what do I love about it? Well, just that Tóibín’s writing is beautiful. I love every single one of his books. I’m completely enamoured with his writing. Then, there’s a sequel—which Colm Tóibín wrote years later—called Long Island . On the first page, a stranger comes to the door saying that his wife is pregnant with Tony’s child. So she goes back to Ireland, where she sees Jim again, and that plays out all over again in a different way. Of course, many years have gone by, more than have passed for us waiting for the next book. Jim has never married, but he has his own resentments and feelings. Tóibín investigates that relationship again when they are very different people, and yet similar. Old qualities come out in them that were maybe forgotten. I love that intersection of love and time. I think that’s pretty much my whole focus, as a writer. Yes, the first section takes place in college. There are three people, two love affairs. Then we take two leaps in time. So many things have to be investigated and worked out 30 years later. I’m just really interested in those early attachments and the huge mark they make on you, even if it doesn’t turn into a lifetime together. The reverberations are always there, and occasionally there can be fresh interaction and fresh developments in the relationship. I find that all fascinating. What life and time does to a psyche, and to a heart, is really intriguing to me. Exactly, yes."