In “Long Island,” Colm Tóibín gives a second act to characters from his beloved novel “Brooklyn”

Note: Text has been edited and does not match audio exactly.

Phoebe Neidl: Hello and welcome. I'm Phoebe Neidl, an editor here at Audible. Today I have the great pleasure of speaking with Colm Tóibín, novelist, poet, essayist, professor, and winner of a boatload of literary prizes, including being shortlisted three times for the Booker Prize. His novels include The Master, The Magician, Nora Webster, Brooklyn, and now, his latest, Long Island. Welcome, Colm.

Colm Tóibín: Thank you.

PN: So, Long Island picks up a few decades after the events in your novel Brooklyn, which followed Eilis Lacey as she immigrated to America in the 1950s and found herself torn between two possible lives and two men, one in New York and one back in Ireland. In this book, we fast-forward to the 1970s and we find Eilis living with her choice of going back to America. She's married to Tony, they have two teenage children, and they live on Long Island surrounded by Tony's big Italian family. So, I'm curious, at what point did you know that you were not done with the characters you'd created in Brooklyn? And what inspired you to revisit them now?

CT: I really thought I was done with them, and I never put a thought into it again, as I haven't really with any of my other novels. I just let the novel go. You know, ending a novel requires a lot of work. You have to start bringing the rhythm down. It's like driving a car that’s moving towards the coast. You can feel in the air something, like the end of the landscape or the end of solid earth. And so, I had done that, I thought, the first time with the novel Brooklyn. And when it was out, it never occurred to me to revisit it. I don't like sequels, and I didn't plan to write one.

So, one thing stayed in my mind, that maybe 20 years later or 15 years after the novel Brooklyn, that somebody, maybe her brother, Eilis's brother, is walking along the beach in Wexford, and he's with two kids, like teenagers, and they don't look Irish, meaning they have maybe very dark eyes, dark hair, and they could look Italian. But somebody stops them and says, "Oh, hello." And then says, "Who are these?" And they say, "Oh, they're Eilis's children. They're home from America to see their granny." And the person from Enniscorthy just takes in the scene, takes in both of them and just says, "Ha." That was all I had. And I didn't think I could do much with that. And in fact, that doesn't even make it into the book Long Island. It was there for a good while, and then I cut it out. It just wasn't needed.

And then I got an idea for an opening of another novel. And in a way, Long Island is not a sequel to Brooklyn, the novel, as much as a sequel to the first three pages of Long Island. In other words, something happens in the first three pages. And I felt, "Why not begin a novel with something instead of setting an atmosphere or building a character or showing what the weather was like or just generally doing nothing much for three or four pages before something begins? Why don't you just do it before the first page is over?"

I hadn't done this before, so I thought it was an idea. Normally, with an idea like that, I'd put it out of my mind. I'd think that it's too colorful, it's too strong. I'll spend the rest of the novel recovering from it. But it stayed in my mind because I'd been thinking about the idea of plot. What is a plot? A plot is an action that has consequences. A plot is an action that allows consequences to matter. Consequences are not a pattern, they're not predictable. So, therefore, the point of the initial action is to allow the consequences to take place in as, let's say, unpatterned, unstructured a way as possible. So, the reader cannot predict what will ensue from this, but something will have to ensue.

And so I was thinking about this as an abstract idea, because I teach a course at Columbia University on the novel. And then I thought, "I have a plot, because I have that initial story that I had toying around in my mind that is the very opening of the novel Long Island now. And the rest of the novel will be ways of responding to it." And so instead of it being a sequel to Brooklyn, it will be a novel of plot, which has the same characters as Brooklyn.

PN: The plot ends up kicking us towards Ireland. So, she ends up going back to Ireland for the first time in 20 years, since the events of Brooklyn. And one of the things that was striking about the plot to me was that it ends up being told from three perspectives, from Eilis's and from Nancy's, her best friend that she grew up with, and Jim, the man who she had been tempted to leave Tony for 20 years earlier. And one of the things that's so striking about your writing is your ability to sort of convey the space between people, the sense of how hard it is for people to say what they really want and how they really feel. And this really came up in the dynamic between these three characters. And because we have those interior views of the characters, the moments when they do say what they really want or act decisively in the story are really powerful. Do you see those moments coming at all when you're writing? Do you find yourself writing towards that moment, or does it really just unfold for you in the process?

CT: I think the novel as a form lends itself more than any other art form to letting us know what someone is thinking and then letting us see what they're saying, and looking at the gap between those things. But it could do something more. It can let us see what someone is thinking and realize that they don't know yet what they really do know, that they haven't sort of come around to knowing what is available. And so you're constantly dealing with ideas of knowledge, which looks hidden, concealed, slightly revealed. And the worry I had with this novel was that if it were told only from Eilis's perspective, as Brooklyn the novel is, as the first section of this novel Long Island is, but once the first section is over and Eilis is back in Enniscorthy in Ireland, then what she doesn't know becomes really important.

"I think the novel as a form lends itself more than any other art form to letting us know what someone is thinking and then letting us see what they're saying, and looking at the gap between those things."

Now, how can I convey to the reader what Eilis doesn't know if I only have everything from Eilis's perspective? And so I didn't want to be an omniscient narrator saying, "Well, what she didn't know at this moment...” So, therefore, I thought if I divided each section then into three, one told from Eilis point of view, one from Jim Farrell with whom she used to have a romance, and the third from Nancy, and I won't say what this is because we'll give the plot away. So, each of them has a turn, so you can see basically how much they know, how much they're concealing, what's hidden, what's clear, what's revealed. And you can start to see a sort of web between them of knowing and not knowing, and who knows and when they know and why they should know, and why they mustn't know.

PN: Yeah, it worked really beautifully. I thought it drove so much emotional tension. So, you mentioned her children in it earlier, and I really enjoyed watching Rosella and Larry, her teenage children who go back to Ireland with her, exploring Ireland for the first time, and sort of exploring the Irish sides of themselves for the first time, because they'd grown up around their Italian family. And the town they're exploring, of course, is Enniscorthy in County Wexford, which is also the town that you grew up in. So, I'm curious how the place and the setting kind of functions in your inspiration?

CT: The novel is set in the summer of 1976, and one of the reasons is that this is the last summer where I was around Enniscorthy myself. Afterwards I came to visit, I was back and forth, but this summer I think I know what pub people were in, what people were wearing, what a returned American could look like. So that was the first thing.

Second thing is that with a novel like this, which is so intense because it is really focused on three characters and their interactions, you do need something else. Now, one possibility is you bring in the town as the people of the town, but I decided that this wouldn't work and I couldn't integrate it with the three characters. I could use the town itself, its topography, not merely as bedrock but as living force. But what I needed were a few characters who would do something else. And I found that Eilis's kids, you know, at first there was no real need to bring them to Ireland. She could come on her own. But then I thought if she has them with her, or if they come a bit later, then Larry going around the town to the pubs, would at least bring the tension down. And Rosella will do something very interesting because she will really befriend her grandmother, and we can start seeing slowly—her grandmother appears like a pain in the neck at certain points, and is just a complete bully—but we realize the extent of the grandmother's pain when we see how easily she softens. Once Rosella comes, her granddaughter, she's never met her before, and the two of them just seem to spend every day together just talking.

I needed that because when that's happening, the reader realizes that Eilis, the mother, is thinking about something else. And we know what she's thinking about. But we need a bit of silence so that we don't even see her thinking about it. We just know that she is. And it's a funny thing to do in a novel, because if you get it wrong, if you give it too much time, you end up letting the side characters and the comedy of that take over the novel. So, you have to do it enough. And the only way you can really do that is to write it and then read it. You read it at night, you think it's good. You read it in the morning, you think it's awful. There's a coldness about me, I think about a lot of people, in the morning where you can be much more ruthless saying, "Cut, cut, cut, cut. Go back, write it again, try it again." And so you do it again. And the point is to try and just get enough of Larry without feeling, "If Larry speaks one more time, I'm going to throw this book at the wall."

PN: Do you write and edit every day or do you like to write a big full first draft in a big chunk before you go back and edit?

CT: I write in longhand on the right-hand side of an A4-size notebook. And then I leave the left hand blank. Theoretically, that's in case I need to make new paragraphs or something on the left-hand page. But what I usually do is I just write it, so it's done. When I get a section done, I type it onto a word processor, and then I have it and I can print it out.

What I did, I usually do as well, just often by accident, really, but it happens a lot, is with the first section of that book, I had that for a year before I wrote anymore. And I didn't really do anything much else. I wrote some essays. I'm a teacher, so I was being a busy professor, you know, giving my theories on the novel. But what I was really doing was just waiting and waiting until I was sure what to do with that. And the problem then was when I wrote the rest of the book, that first section was too long, too detailed, it just didn't lead into the rest of the book well enough. Luckily, I had time, and luckily I had a few friends and editors, but I did the work myself, really, which was just cut back, cut back, cut back on the detail in that first section, move on, move on, move on. Because this is a plot-based novel.

PN: I could see how the town functions in the plot too, because whereas people have a hard time speaking to each other about what they really want, the town is an incredible carrier of information. And that was the case in Brooklyn, sort of, too.

CT: Yeah, but I think it's important that it isn't just the whole town's in a state of permanent gossip. It's only the mother finds out why Eilis has returned. No one else in the town knows that or ever finds it out. She keeps that to herself. So, there are things that do remain secret. The town is watching, certainly, if something, if some news became available. For example, who's paying for Eilis's rented car, which is a big subject in the town, because no one would ever dream in 1976 of getting a rental car and keeping it outside your door for a week. But who would do that? Eilis will do it because she just happens to have money; her brother-in-law gave her money. But people would see that as a waste and see that as an American thing.

PN: Yeah, she still very much feels like she’s not fully home in Ireland anymore and not fully home in America with Tony's family either. There's still sort of a displaced feeling, I would say, to Eilis in this book, even 20 years on.

CT: Yeah. This is a novel about displacement. And what I was trying to make sure was that it's about one particular form of displacement in one particular life. If I try and make a big sweeping statement about what it means, home—what does home mean?—I believe the worst of me will come out, you know, I will start preaching and pontificating and theorizing and going on. No, no, this is just about what she did when she was caught between two countries. She was caught between, in the novel Brooklyn, caught between two men and caught between two countries, caught between choices. And in a way, this happens again. She gets a second chance at being caught. But I wanted to leave the larger questions about migration, about losing home, getting home, about identity, and about belonging out of the novel so they could be there by implication all the more.

PN: So, just to talk about the audio, Jessie Buckley, wonderful actress, does the narration for this audiobook. What was the process like of choosing her as the narrator? And what was it about Jessie that made her right for the story?

CT: Well, I think it was great that it was somebody Irish, but being Irish is obviously not enough, I mean, there are millions of Irish people. But that she has this very beautiful and expressive voice and a voice also that, I think, can move register so that she's not just reading the book in a sort of tone but that she's able to do something with it. And I think she's a great talent. And look, the day the news came in that she was doing it was just great because it was a first piece of good luck. And we said, "Right. Got Jessie Buckley. This is great."

PN: Yeah, she did an absolutely beautiful job. She has such a depth to her voice, I think. And as a performer, as an actress, she's one of those that she gives this sense of there's a lot going on underneath the surface, like she's able to kind of get across that subtlety, which I think was such a perfect match for the narration of the story and for Eilis.

So, some of your books have been made into movies, including, of course, Brooklyn, which was nominated for three Academy Awards, and you've had some incredible actors narrate your audiobooks, Jessie Buckley among them, and also even Meryl Streep who did The Testament of Mary. What is the process like for you, in general, of watching or listening to other artists bring their own sensibilities to your work?

CT: I mean, Angela Lansbury, in the film of my novel The Blackwater Lightship plays the grandmother. And it was really extraordinary to watch her and to watch what seemed effortless for her. And there was one moment when they were on the set of The Blackwater Lightship, and it's a big scene between Angela Lansbury, Dianne Wiest, who people will know from the Woody Allen films, and an English actress, Gina McKee. And they're playing three Irish women, three generations, and they have to have this intense argument, which is filled with recrimination. They don't know me, but they have to stop and they just go out to the director and say, "Who's that guy sitting watching us like that?" And it was me! A backstage Johnny isn't the word for me. I mean, I was just starstruck, awestruck. I just couldn't believe this was happening. And that the words I had written were being not just transformed but really, really just made whole. It was something extraordinary happening.

"This is a novel about displacement. And what I was trying to make sure was that it's about one particular form of displacement in one particular life. If I try and make a big sweeping statement about what it means, home—what does home mean?—I believe the worst of me will come out"

And so it goes on, and each time it is the question of being amazed. And something funny happens. It isn't that the words get taken away from me, it is that they get handed back to me. So, the emotion is raw, and that shouldn't be. The emotion, I should know it all. I should have had it all. But the emotion in this, in Long Island, the emotion from Jessie Buckley's reading, it comes back raw to me. And therefore it's slightly odd and slightly disconcerting, and then it's just wonderful.

PN: Yeah. That's amazing. Do you revisit your novels years later? Some writers, I feel like they're finished with it and they sort of don't ever want to look at it or listen to it again. Do you revisit your works much?

CT: I never do. I never revisit the books. I mean, I never read them again. They're somewhere if I need something, a paragraph for some purpose, but in general, I don't need that. So, no, I would never open a book of mine. I mean, I listen to the audios when they come in. I haven't gone back. Maybe in my old age, I'll sit in some great nursing home and as a reward for being good, I'll get to listen to all my audiobooks again.

PN: Nice. So, one thing I'm curious about, is your writing process very different for you when you're getting inside the mind of a real historical figure like you did with Henry James in The Master or Thomas Mann in The Magician, versus when you're writing a more fully fictional character?

CT: So, in fact, what I'm doing constantly is imagining how someone responds to experience, what they say, what they feel, what they don't say, what they conceal even to themselves. So, I'm working with the same sort of things. If it's a real character, every so often you can go and look and see what letters they were writing, or did they go to Switzerland that week, or is there anything I can do with them. Especially when you wake in the morning sometimes, it's lovely to have books already written about your character. So, you can see what was Henry James doing in February 1897. And you can find out immediately because he wrote so many letters. He kept notebooks. And so, often, all you need is a single sentence from a notebook or from a letter, and that would get you off for the day. It's like a sort of kickstart, it's like a coffee.

Obviously if you're dealing with purely fictional characters, you just don't have that spur, that great way of starting. So, you sort of reach back into memory sometimes. So, working with Enniscorthy, in a way, working with the town gives me the topography, meaning the actual streetscape, gives me energy in the same way as a biography of Thomas Mann or Henry James or indeed the New Testament for The Testament of Mary, you know, the actual New Testament. Those books could help me in the same way as the streets of Enniscorthy, just thinking about them, just going back into names of streets that will give me the same sort of kickstart. I think I've written five novels that are set in Enniscorthy. So, the reason, part of the reason is that I can just at any moment summon up, you know, did she go down Slaney Street or did she go down Castle Hill?

PN: And it sounds like for the historical figures, you are careful not to get too weighed down in the research. You know, if you get too kind of obsessive reading, then your imagination can't do its own thing, right?

CT: It's really important with historical novels not to start showing off about how much you know. There's a moment in the Henry James novel, The Master, where his house in Kensington, his apartment gets wired for electricity for the first time, so where all the plugs go, all the lights go, the lamps go. And I realized, that's a great scene. But then I thought, if I write that scene, I lose him, in trying to describe the whole business of the age and the accoutrements of the age. So, I left it out, and it was lovely leaving it out.

PN: So, on this topic of writing generally, I'm curious, what is your best advice for aspiring writers?

CT: Oh, that would be simple. There are two things. First one is finish everything you start. That if you start something, there's a reason. It's very easy, especially I think with prose, with fiction, that you know the story. Certainly, by halfway through, you really know what's coming, more or less, and you realize, "I don't need to write this because I know it." And then you have to realize that this is a form of communication. It is not a form of self-examination. It is not really about you. It is about someone else. And it's a strange thing that somebody may never know and never see it, but it's not really a mirror. You know, if you want a mirror, go and look into a mirror, there are plenty of mirrors.

The second thing, which is even harder, I think, for anyone to stomach the idea, is if you can't control your weekend, you can't write. If you want to go out on a Friday night with your friends and then go out again on Saturday night with your friends and come home late, and you've got the weekend gone, you almost end up spending the rest of the week recovering from some terrible amount of drinking you did or dancing or something you did on the Saturday night. You can't write a novel because you need a lot of just really quiet space, quiet time. And so if you're going to write a novel, especially your first novel, first thing you do is control your weekends.

PN: Nice. That is excellent advice for sure. And it leads me to a couple of my other questions. So, I was thinking about how one of the side effects that your stories has on me when I'm listening to them or reading them, is they make me sort of slow down and notice the little things more, I think because of the way that you build your stories out of these small, ordinary moments. And it makes me slow down a little bit. And it made me wonder, when you write, how much of a desired effect on your audience you have in mind. Are you writing for them? Are you writing for yourself? Or is it a little bit of both?

CT: I think when you're writing, it's almost like the singer and the song, and in Ireland, certainly, there's a great tradition of the singer believing in the song. And the singer's job is to interpret the song and make it matter to the listener. The singer ceases to matter. The song is what's important. I think with writing, the same idea is there, that you sometimes need an enormous sort of self-suppression, that you don't need to put in your opinion about anything. No one really cares what you think. But if you could get a detail right, if you could describe how light falls on stone or how a door creaks when it opens or how it bangs, that might actually be more rich than some immense interpretation of our political system. In other words, these large questions might be better left to someone else. I work on what's intimate, what's whispered, what's almost ironic, what's strange, what's hidden. And what I've got to do is work at that and not worry about anything else.

PN: Yeah. No, it's beautiful. It's all in the details. And that's how we all live our lives for the most part, is in this stuff that's going through our head and all these little moments. So, I think that's part of what is so powerful about your writing, is the way you capture that. I love it. Do you wrestle at all with distraction, as so many of us do in this information-clogged modern world? Is it ever a struggle for you to shut out the world, to get into that solitary head space of writing? And do you have any rituals or routines that help you get there?

CT: I don't find it difficult to shut out the world, but I find that I'm the worst temptation. Instead of moaning about, "Oh, I have all my emails and all this social media and all this stuff," I actually, I think I'm lazy. I'm easily distracted. I postpone doing work. I do everything except work. I mean, I wash socks if I have to, you know, not to have to write what I need to write. But the thing is, eventually I settle down and do it. And you don't really need that much time. I mean, in other words, if you just say you worked for three or four hours a day, that would be a lot of work. The thing to do, of course, is to try and get one of those hours absolutely clear, just concentrate. After that you can do anything you want, really. You can check your emails all day. If you could concentrate for an hour a day, you're doing fine. And the rest of the time you could just wander about. You could teach if you want to teach, and you could have a full-time job even.

"It isn't that the words get taken away from me, it is that they get handed back to me. So, the emotion is raw, and that shouldn't be. The emotion, I should know it all. I should have had it all. But the emotion in this, in Long Island, the emotion from Jessie Buckley's reading, it comes back raw to me."

But it gets harder as you get older because you need a lot of free time to imagine, to get ideas, to put them out of your mind, to put them into your mind again, to refine them, and to let them dissolve and let them emerge again. And to do that, you actually do need a free mind. And, actually, social media is useful because you can distract yourself from it or into it. It doesn't take a huge amount of psychic energy or fierce concentration. So, it's probably quite useful, actually. You need to laze around a lot. You need to be just doing nothing or nothing much, not thinking, and then become receptive in the strangest moments to an image, a character, an idea, something you can use in a book, or a new way of seeing something you're already thinking about. It doesn't mean you go around all day thinking about this, but it means that every so often in the most surprising moment, something occurs to you and you can use it and work with it.

PN: I imagine you're pretty focused and busy with your book tour right now, but do you know what you're working on next? Do you have another novel or another book in the works?

CT: I wrote a libretto for an opera.

PN: Oh, wow.

CT: It's lovely work because you write the line and it's sort of almost irresponsible because the real work would have to be done by the composer and the singer, but your job is just to write the line, just give them the line. But I realized, just looking at a lot of libretti for operas, is that you need a story. If there's no story, the audience, even if they love the singing and think this is gorgeous, they're following a story. Make sure you're doing nothing else but giving them the story. It means, okay, you stop for songs, you have chorus, you have different variations, but it's always moving, the whole narrative. And it's a funny idea because you think, surely in an opera you could just have people singing and different things happening. You need a story. So, anyway, it's opening at the Wexford Opera Festival in Ireland in October.

PN: Do you think that there is something almost musical to even novel writing, prose writing, like the rhythm of the sentences and the way they go from one to the next? Does it feel like there's a strong comparison to the musical writing process there?

CT: Yeah, I think one of the ways that writing and reading a novel and listening to it on audio connect is that even though reading is done in silence, you get a rhythm. Something comes in on your ear as much as in your eye. You get the sound of the words, even if you can't hear them. And I don't really understand this, but I know it's true. And what holds you sometimes and makes you want to turn the page is rhythm even though you're reading silent. So, as you're writing, you have to be aware of this. If you overdo it, you lose it. People just think you're trying for effect. You're striving for effect so that you then find a sort of hidden music or sort of an undercurrent that is rhythmic and you work with that.

PN: So, we always love to ask authors for any recommendations. Is there anything you're reading or listening to lately that you've absolutely loved that you would recommend to our listeners?

CT: I suppose in fiction, the Irish novelist Mike McCormack has a novel called Solar Bones, which is a novel that I really love. I was going to say it's set over a single day, but that's not true. It's a single sentence. I really admire that book. There's another book called Soldier Sailor, and it's by Claire Kilroy, who's an Irish novelist. And it's just come out. That's an extraordinary book because it's about a woman having a baby. Now, that's been happening, obviously, women have been having babies since time began. This is the first time I have read an account of what it is like to be a mother for the first two years of a baby's life. And you're married, but your husband insists since he's the breadwinner he has the right to go asleep. You must be the one to get up and feed this thing, who's screaming no matter what you do, it's teething, it's screaming, it has an infection, don’t know what to do. You go to the doctor.

It's an extraordinary novel about what that does to a woman's body. But what it does to her mind as though the mind, the mind and the body come together. If you're a man reading this book, if you're a guy, a bloke, you go, "Oh, my Lord." If you're a woman, you go, "Yeah, well, that's the best kept secret ever, you know?" But it's told as a novel, so it really comes at you very powerfully. It's relentless in the way it presents this detail. I found the book absolutely fascinating. It's a book that every woman has to give her son, her husband, her boyfriend, her father, her uncle, because, honestly, it was all news to me.

PN: My son is only 10 right now, but I'm marking that down [laughs]. I'm going to give him that one in a few years. That sounds amazing. Is there anything about Long Island that we haven't touched on that you think is important that readers kind of keep in mind or listeners keep in mind?

CT: Yes. I think the title is important because it's like Brooklyn in that the next generation will get to know Long Island. You can imagine Eilis's children will know the island, in all the school they went to, the friends they had, the parties, the beginning of teenage years, dating for the first time, in a way that she will never know. So, the Long Island for her is the interior of the house, it's her garden, it's Jones Beach nearby, but it isn't as though she inhabits Long Island other than she knows its name, which I think is one of the things that happens to people who move away like that. It's so different from Enniscorthy because, of course, she knows the name of every street and she knows how the shadows fall.

PN: Yeah, no, absolutely. It made me think of that. And I know it's a story about one life in the details, but it does have application to so many lives. It's such an American story and such an Irish story because so many have been displaced. I'm Irish, but my family's been here for what? Five generations? So, it's like, what does that mean at that point that I'm Irish? That I've never even set foot in Ireland. And the book really made me contemplate that sort of thing and I appreciated it.

Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us today, Colm. It's been such an honor to speak with you. I really love this novel and I'm so excited for people to hear it.

CT: Thank you, Phoebe. Thank you very much.

PN: And listeners, you can get Long Island now on Audible.