An Interview with Colm Tóibín

In Ireland,” Colm Tóibín writes, “what happens within the family remains so secretive, so painfully locked within each person, that any writer who deals with the dynamics of family life stands apart.” Because he deals relentlessly with such dynamics, Tóibín’s novels and stories, like their author, stand apart.

Born in 1955 in Enniscorthy, Wexford, Ireland, Tóibín, at the age of eight, saw his father fall dangerously ill and, at the age of twelve, saw him die. This illness and this death and the events in his family that they precipitated etched themselves on his imagination and led to his writing about like disasters: a mother walking out on her husband and their son in The South (1990); a High Court judge having his wife and children consistently at odds with his legal judgments until she dies and they go their own way in The Heather Blazing (1992); a young man with a dead father and a constantly complaining mother, who also dies, living abroad and contracting AIDS in The Story of the Night (1996); a son with AIDS, similarly fatherless, returning to his grandmother’s house because, like his sister, he finds his mother impossibly selfish in The Blackwater Lightship (1999); and Mothers and Sons (2006), dramatizing the incompatibility of parents and children in story after story. Each of his novels has undoubtedly set Tóibín apart, as one literary prize after another indicates. None has been more celebrated than his novel about Henry James, The Master (2004), which is impregnated with troubles in the James family. It was short-listed for the Booker Prize—as was The Blackwater Lightship before it—and received another five awards as well. Taken together, these works and his nonfiction books have been translated into twenty-five languages.

Although most of Tóibín’s fiction has been focused on Ireland, he himself has traveled widely. Upon graduation from the University of Dublin in 1975, Tóibín immediately went to Barcelona, where he taught for a time at the Dublin School for English. Principal events in The South are set in that city and its surroundings. After returning to Ireland, where he was features editor of In Dublin magazine (1981) and then editor of Magill, a current events journal (1982–85), he traveled widely in South America, settling for a time in Buenos Aires. There he attended and reported the trial of the generals responsible for the Falklands War and for the disappearance of untold numbers of Argentine citizens. The Trial of the Generals: Selected Journalism, 1980–1990 was published in 1990. A fellowship from the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library in 2000 led Tóibín, using original documentation, to write Lady Gregory’s Toothbrush (2002), which details Augusta Gregory’s lasting influence on Irish writing and culture. Subsequently he spent a quarter at Stanford and a semester at the University of Texas at Austin as a visiting writer. The New York stay allowed him to visit places associated with Henry James, and the Stanford and Texas fellowships contributed to short stories that will appear in a forthcoming collection. Prior to his visits to the United States, Tóibín traveled extensively in Europe for his book on Holy Week celebrations, The Sign of the Cross: Travels in Catholic Europe (1994). And his travels at home led to his writing Bad Blood: A Walk along the Irish Border (1987), a report on the people and towns on either side of the once dangerous border between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic.

In 1994, Colm Tóibín began to write for The London Review of Books and soon afterward for The New York Review of Books. He selected a number of essays from these reviews for Love in a Dark Time and Other Explorations of Gay Lives and Literature (2001). An invited talk on Henry James by Irish Radio brought him to realize the novelist himself as a character, rather than a subject for a series of essays. Thus The Master, seen by many as...