Interview

STORIES AT THE TABLE - AN INTERVIEW WITH THE IRISH ECHO

What is your latest book about?
“The Book of Kehls” is an Irish love story about our family’s long, excruciating battle with Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy.

What is your writing routine? Are there ideal conditions?
I write in the morning. I begin with journal entries in a marble notebook, which is also where I start my novels. The possibility of an emerging novel (hurray!) means that I switch to a brand-new notebook. But if the “emerging novel” doesn’t “take” - and most of them don’t - then the brand-new notebook is downgraded to a journal. The result is that at any given time, I have at least a dozen of these novels/journals (novals? journels?) lying around. (Profane and funny can only take a writer so far - too bad they didn’t teach me organization.)
Besides the marble notebooks, all I need to write is solitude, the music of an instrumental CD, some sharp pencils and a pot of coffee. (I write better when it’s sunny outside rather than gray, but you can’t have everything.) When my writing in whichever notebook acquires enough of a “shape” to stand alone, I switch to computer - though computers can be dangerous for writers. You start weighing your output by the ream.

What advice do you have for aspiring writers?
Read everything you can get your hands on. Invest in comfortable chairs and good lighting. Buy lots of books, and leave them everywhere. A house without books is a house without ideas: no throw pillow ever changed a life. Hunt out and then haunt libraries. Stare at the stacks. Writers need the company of books, the older the better, plus lungsful of dusty library air. Pay attention to the world, eavesdrop, listen up. Material is everywhere, even cell phone conversations - unless they are reminders for someone at the other end to defrost the chicken - can be literary gold. Expect to be rejected. Allow yourself exactly five minutes to feel humiliated, and then go and have some ice cream. Remember that “The Great Gatsby” was once considered a flop, and that William Kennedy’s “Ironweed,” Pulitzer Prize winner, was rejected by 12 publishers.

Name three books that are memorable in terms of your reading pleasure?
“Angela’s Ashes” by Frank McCourt; “A Death in the Family” by James Agee; “Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant” by Anne Tyler.

What book are you currently reading?
“It’s All Right Now” by Charles Chadwick, a first-timer. It’s a big novel in the form of a claustrophobic journal written by Tom Ripple, a British Everyman and desperate punster who is rummaging through an isolated, struggling, funny life.

Is there a book you wish you had written?
“The Corrections” by Jonathan Franzen.

Name a book that you were pleasantly surprised by.
“For Rouenna” by Sigrid Nunez, a novel about a U.S. Army Nurse in Vietnam.

If you could meet one author, living or dead, who would it be?
Ralph Waldo Emerson

What book changed your life?
“The Accidental Tourist” a novel by Anne Tyler. I was a reader when I started that book, but by the time I put it down, I’d become, however itty-bitty, a writer yearning to write.

What is your favorite spot in Ireland?
My favorite spot in Ireland is Galway Bay, my family’s ancestral home, wherever the horses are running.

You’re Irish If
....you believe in fairies, despite all evidence to the contrary.

FINDING SOLACE IN WRITTEN WORDS - An Interview with Newsday’s Caryn Eve Murray

How did you begin the chronicling of all of these stories?
It was almost like a lament when I began. I just didn’t know where I was going with it. Then I began writing, and writing and writing, and after a while, there were things I found out, through the writing, that I couldn’t have discovered any other way.

So the writing process revealed surprises?
Yes. Though I knew that my son, Jamie, had been very brave in facing his illness, that he was valiant, that he had a lot of guts, it was through writing the memoir that I realized that the rest of us - my husband, Patrick, our son, Patrick Jr., and myself - had done our very best to see Jamie through. Through the writing of the book, I also came to see that I hadn’t had the very sad life I thought I’d had.

Where did you find the strength to hang in there?
I credit a lot of being able to handle this to my mother. My mother had an Irish sensibility....a kind of “stop carrying on, put on your lipstick, and get out there.”... I come from a long line of Irish women who were awfully funny, and that was a big help.

What was it like to read from the book last month at the Book Revue in Huntington?
It was very special to me because most of the people who were there had known Jamie and our entire family; they knew the whole story.

What is your next project?
I’m going to write something funny. That’s what I’m aiming for right now. You have to rotate the crops, I guess.