Writer Colm Tóibín: Writing With Unresolved Emotions | Louisiana Channel

”If I don’t dramatise this, it will never be known.” Acclaimed Irish writer Colm Tóibín reflects on the challenges of balancing personal experience with fictionalised storytelling.

At age 12, Colm Tóibín suddenly lost his father. Though it wasn’t clear at the time, the traumatic experience shaped him and his writing from an early age: “There were some poems that really, really meant a great deal to me in those few years between the ages of 12 and 15,” he says and continues: “They probably are all images of loss, images of decay. But I suppose I was the saddest little boy that I had ever seen. And there was no support of any sort.” Tóibín notes that the “psychic wound” became a source of energy and significantly impacted the books he wrote.

One of Tóibín’s most notable works, Nora Webster, is based on growing up with his mother after his father’s passing. He was observing her and the people in her life. For years, he was circling the idea of writing it. Or rather, not writing it. “It was too close, and also that it wasn’t that interesting,” he recalls. But both Nora Webster and later Brooklyn, which became a successful motion picture, were inspired by his close family. “The books were really not about women, but about lying in bed thinking, ‘I wonder if my auntie Harriet if she’d gone to America, what it would have been like for her there.’ Just that simple though would have been one of the inspirations for Brooklyn.”

“I found writing them very emotionally draining. I thought, I never want to go near that again. I feel also that it’s a delicate material.” For Colm Tóibín, writing about his private life, people he knew, and personal experiences was a huge challenge: “There was a shadow on me writing novels, creating fiction around areas that are so filled with unresolved emotion,” he says and explains: “I mean, it’s not morally helpful. I’m not sure it’s even right. I mean, you’re getting something that belonged to other people. That was so delicate, so strange at the time, so filled with shadow, so unresolved, so personally wounding, so undealth with and so private. And you’re publishing it. You are changing it. You’re fictionalising it. You’re going around the world doing readings from it. And there’s something disgusting about that, no matter what way you look at it.”

Colm Tóibín (b. 1955) is an Irish novelist, short story writer, essayist, playwright, journalist, critic, and poet. His notable works include The Heather Blazing (1992), The Story of the Night (1996), The Blackwater Lightship (1999), The Master (2004), Mothers and Sons (2006), Brooklyn (2009), The Empty Family (2010), Nora Webster (2014), and Long Island (2024). Tóibín has received numerous prestigious awards, including the 2004 Lambda Literary Award and the 2006 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for The Master, as well as the 2009 Costa Novel Award for Brooklyn. He was awarded the Irish PEN Award in 2011 for his contribution to Irish literature and has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize multiple times. Currently, Tóibín is a professor at Columbia University in the U.S.

Colm Tóibín was interviewed by Eleanor Wachtel at the Louisiana Literature Festival in August 2024 at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark.

Camera: Simon Wehye
Edited and produced by Roxanne Bagheshirin Lærkesen
Copyright: Louisiana Channel, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2024

Louisiana Channel is supported by Den A.P. Møllerske Støttefond, Ny Carlsbergfondet and C.L. Davids Fond og Samling.

Subscribe to our channel for more videos on literature:    / thelouisianachannel  

FOLLOW US HERE:
Website: http://channel.louisiana.dk
Instagram:   / louisianachannel  
Facebook:   / louisianachannel