Engaging with his family’s history through his own work
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Journalists almost always ask Colm Tóibín – pronounced COL-um toe-BEAN – about his mother.
In a piece in The Guardian, he reflected on their relationship. “It mattered to her that she could have, or might have, been a writer, and perhaps it mattered to me more than I fully understood,” he wrote.
Tóibín says she used to watch for his books with considerable interest and would write to him about each one. He suspects his novels made her uneasy: “She found them too slow and sad and oddly personal. She was careful not to say too much about this, except once when she felt that I had described her and things which had happened to her too obviously and too openly.”
In response, she told her son, that she too might soon write a book. “She made a book sound like a weapon. Perhaps a book is a weapon; perhaps an unwritten book is an even more powerful weapon than one which has been published. It has a way of filling the air with its menace or its promise, the sweet art of what might have been,” Tóibín wrote.
Born in Dublin, the award-winning Irish writer has produced eight novels, several essays and short story collections, poetry, multiple non-fictional works and the play ‘Beauty in a Broken Place’ which was performed at the Peacock Theatre, Dublin in 2004.
Being shortlisted for the Booker Prize is a recurring honour for his novels: ‘The Blackwater Lightship’ (1999), short-listed for the Booker Prize; ‘The Master‘ (2004), winner of the Dublin IMPAC Prize; the Prix du Meilleur Livre; the LA Times Novel of the Year; and shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize; ‘Brooklyn‘ (2009), winner of the Costa Novel of the Year; shortlisted for the 2011 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award; long-listed for the 2009 Man Booker Prize and ‘The Testament of Mary‘ (2012), which was also shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2013.
Tóibín has engaged with his family’s history through his own work. He said: “I listened carefully when they talked about the past, and I absorbed it and came to see it. Sometimes in dramatising a scene in a book or a story, I found myself in the rooms that these people – the one or two generations before mine – had been in, and was impelled, almost compelled, to conjure up what I knew must have happened, what was hardly ever mentioned but was half-known, half-understood.
It was like working with ghosts rather than imagined characters, with dust and faded things as much as with words and sentences.”
His latest novel, Nora Webster (2014) dramatizes the life of a woman and her family in a small town in Ireland in the late 1960s. The book sees many parallels to the author’s own life: He experienced a trauma in childhood that parallels what Nora’s children, particularly her son Donal, experienced: Like Donal, Tóibín’s father became ill, and he and his brother were sent to live with their aunt. Their mother didn’t visit or write at all for months, and their father passed away when Tóibín was still very young. And many of Donal’s traits, including his stammer, are ones Tóibín shared.
But the author decided to tell the story from the perspective of the mother. He told journalists: “I felt there wasn’t enough depth in the boy, Donal, that he was too young, and that you could write a very melancholy, Irish short story about his coming home from school but it wouldn’t be any more than that.”
Tóibín’s writing has so resonated with readers that it has been translated into more than 30 languages, and three books have been published on his work: ‘Reading Colm Toibin’ (2008); ‘Mother/Country: Politics of the Personal in the Fiction of Colm Toibin’ (2012); and Eibhear Walshe’s ‘A Different Story: The Writings of Colm Toibin’ (2013).
The recipient of several honorary degrees, he was a professor of creative writing at the University of Manchester and is currently Mellon Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.