I finished The Master in 2003 and Nora Webster in 2013. I began The Master and Nora Webster in the spring of 2000. What was the chronology of your writing the various works? And did The Testament of Mary – and collecting the essays in for New Ways to Kill Your Mother – divert you from the novels, or help inform them? You also adapted the stage play Testament, as The Testament of Mary, while you were planning these novels. “ Rare and tremendous… It does everything we ought to ask of a great novel.” – Tessa Hadley, Guardian It might be interesting to read those first four novels and some of the short stories together, but I am not sure what you would get. The Story of the Night, The Master and The Testament of Mary are all set in other landscapes. Of the eight novels I have written, four are set in Enniscorthy or in the landscape around there – The Heather Blazing, The Blackwater Lightship, Brooklyn and Nora Webster.
Do you see them as a pair of novels to be read together? The two novels are tonally very different, although they have several characters and (reported) events in common. Much of the detail in Nora Webster, on the other hand, is from memory much is also made up.
I imagined everything after that – her job, her life, the boarding house, the sort of guy she met, what happened when she came back. But I only had two sentences – that she had gone to Brooklyn and then come home and not told them at home that she had got married in Brooklyn and, once she told them, she returned and lived in Brooklyn for the rest of her life. So how autobiographical (or biographical) are these novels?īrooklyn is based on a story I heard about a girl from the town.
You’ve acknowledged that the young widow Nora is broadly based on your mother, you’ve drawn on memories of family neighbours, and Nora’s son Donal is widely perceived as being a version of your younger self. The same week saw the Sundance premiere of John Cowley and Nick Hornby’s adaptation of his earlier novel Brooklyn.īrooklyn and Nora Webster both deal with characters from Enniscorthy, the town where you grew up. We catch up with the prolific and acclaimed Irish author on the launch of the paperback of Nora Webster, his part-autobiographical novel about grieving and renewal.
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