{"id":673901,"date":"2026-09-05T12:49:22","date_gmt":"2026-09-05T12:49:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/673901\/"},"modified":"2026-09-05T12:49:22","modified_gmt":"2026-09-05T12:49:22","slug":"sebastian-barry-my-mother-was-interesting-extravagant-it-was-difficult-to-be-a-child-of-such-a-person-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/673901\/","title":{"rendered":"Sebastian Barry: \u2018My mother was interesting, extravagant. It was difficult to be a child of such a person\u2019 \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

If the divided loyalties and complex identities of his forebears gave Sebastian Barry<\/a> the key subject and the essential structure for his career as a writer, witnessing while a student at Trinity College Dublin part of the loyalist triple car bombing of Dublin in May 1974, which killed 27 people, was the catalyst.<\/p>\n

The description of the aftermath of the attack on South Leinster Street in his novel Old God\u2019s Time<\/a>, from 2024, is so vivid that it feels like lived experience. The shrapnel scars are still visible on Trinity\u2019s perimeter wall and the images are still vivid more than 50 years on in the writer\u2019s mind.<\/p>\n

One of the Ulster Volunteer Force bombs that detonated on the other side of the Liffey minutes earlier is also at the heart of his play The Pride of Parnell Street, from 2011.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was a very ignorant, sheltered, middle-class Irish student,\u201d Barry says. \u201cMy first instinct was to leave the country and be done with it completely, because I couldn\u2019t understand why anyone on the island would want to incinerate shoppers going home. <\/p>\n

\u201cIt was also an enormous, high-speed education in what people were suffering in the North of Ireland, that mysterious country that we could never really get our heads around. <\/p>\n

\u201cIf you\u2019re a sensitive or even vulnerable person coming out of Lincoln Gate [at Trinity] and there is this enormous noise \u2026 My first innocent thought was that a butcher\u2019s shop had been blown up, because there were literally steaming cuts of meat; then I saw people kneeling to these and whispering \u2013 a moment of humanity and inhumanity.\u201d<\/p>\n

As soon as Barry graduated he left for Paris, Greece and Switzerland, but then he set up home for seven years on North Great George\u2019s Street, just off Parnell Street, with Alison Deegan, who is now his wife; it gave him a deep identification with the people of the inner city and an understanding of the history that had befallen them.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt created an ineradicable sense of home. Living there made it important to me that I was born between the canals. That\u2019s where the little fire was lit for feeling I could possibly, truthfully, be from here. That inexplicable murderousness in Dublin that day cancelled my passport but was the beginning of a truer sort of documentation, all written with blood and in the heart.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"SebastianSebastian Barry. Photograph: Nick Bradshaw <\/p>\n

We are talking in the old Church of Ireland rectory in Co Wicklow that he and Deegan have restored and where they raised their family. It\u2019s an obvious metaphor for his writing, which has sought to make Ireland a warmer house for those who do not conform to the Catholic, nationalist tradition that created a narrow notion of Irishness.<\/p>\n

He recalls reading Netherland, Joseph O\u2019Neill\u2019s great 9\/11 novel, whose enormous explosion triggered memories of the Dublin bombing, \u201ceverything blackened and ruined. The book is like a forensic reconstruction after a plane crash, and he somehow makes it again that you could fly it. That\u2019s what I feel I was doing for decades: trying to find all the bits and put them back together.\u201d<\/p>\n

Barry has also built a towering reputation, twice winning both the Costa book-of-the-year award and the Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction. His novel The Secret Scripture has been called an alternative history of Ireland \u2013 a description that could sum up his life\u2019s work \u2013 and he has been praised as an unrivalled chronicler of lost lives.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo much Irish history is about othering people \u2013 \u2018we belong; you don\u2019t\u2019 \u2013 that to create a sense of communion for someone who has no gift for it, it\u2019s compensatory in a way.\u201d<\/p>\n

Adam Begley in the Atlantic wrote that Barry should \u201cbe widely read and revered \u2026 He ought to be a laureate for fiction everywhere\u201d, a reference to his former role as laureate for Irish fiction. He also recognised Barry\u2019s early tendency to poetic excess, prose that \u201coccasionally goes all purple\u201d and \u201can unabashed delight in metaphor\u201d but traces his evolution from the poet and dramatist he began as.<\/p>\n

Robert Gottlieb, reviewing all of Barry\u2019s novels to date in a stellar New York Review of Books essay in 2018, wrote that \u201cBarry\u2019s novels give us lives, not plots \u2013 that is their power \u2026 His family\u2019s past is his material, not his subject.\u201d<\/p>\n

Barry sent Gottlieb Old God\u2019s Time and he replied, referencing Toni\u202fMorrison\u2019s Beloved, which he had edited. <\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m that passportless, tentative individual that I\u2019ve always been, yet he is bringing to my efforts this graceful majesty. When he died recently I felt as if I had lost a brother, father, angel,\u201d Barry says.<\/p>\n

\"RobertRobert Gottlieb at home in Manhattan, 2016. Photograph: George Etheredge\/The New York Times<\/p>\n

He had a similar friendship with Harold Pinter<\/a>, who wrote him a letter praising The Secret Scripture and A Long, Long Way. \u201cI thought it was from my father, as they used the same black ink. I opened it with concern, as he only ever wanted to put a razor slash inside me.\u201d<\/p>\n

Barry didn\u2019t in fact read Gottlieb\u2019s article, but Colm T\u00f3ib\u00edn<\/a> had briefed him of its content and import. \u201cColm\u2019s two months older than me, so he\u2019s my big brother.\u201d<\/p>\n

But telling tales has come at a high price for Barry. Like T\u00f3ib\u00edn, Barry was a friend and long-term patient of the psychiatrist Ivor Browne<\/a>. Whereas T\u00f3ib\u00edn\u2019s father had died young, Barry\u2019s father, Francis, an architect, poet and womaniser, was very much alive, but they were hopelessly estranged, as he was from his mother, the actor Joan O\u2019Hara, and maternal grandfather, Jack.<\/p>\n

[\u00a0The mystery of Sebastian Barry\u2019s grandfatherOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

His childhood, and that of his siblings, was troubled. His parents were \u201cselfish, not very nurturing, narcissistic\u201d, he says. Their home in Monkstown, in south Co Dublin, sold for \u20ac1.75 million<\/a> in 2017, but material privilege was accompanied by emotional poverty.<\/p>\n

When I suggest that Barry\u2019s family is the structure around which he has built his work, he corrects me that Deegan and his children and dogs are his family. His books and plays deal with his previous family.<\/p>\n

Is his happy home a riposte to how he was raised? <\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a miracle,\u201d he says. \u201cYou might be surprised to hear this, but I was awful good-looking once. I think Ali noticed I was in need of the sort of rescue she could supply. She had the skills from her own childhood. She is a very good doctoring presence to me. <\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m probably one of those GPs who should be struck off; nevertheless, I try to reciprocate. I think in a more primitive psychiatric atmosphere I would have been sectioned, descended into a depression\u202fso deep I wouldn\u2019t have got out. <\/p>\n

\u201cAt a certain point you have to dispense with the oral history and write The Odyssey. That\u2019s really all I\u2019ve been doing for 50 years.\u201d<\/p>\n

Barry once expressed surprise that John McGahern<\/a> had written a memoir, effectively decoding his fiction. Might he follow suit?<\/p>\n

\u201cI was trying manfully\u201d \u2013 \u201cnot my strong point,\u201d he adds wryly \u2013 \u201cto think about, with these books, the Dunnes and the McNultys. What unites them is the marriage of my parents, which I did manfully try to touch on in Old God\u2019s Time.\u201d<\/p>\n

But when he attempted in 2024 to write a memoir, \u201cthe whole idea of traipsing through the whole thing again, which one has done endlessly in therapy, there was absolutely no engine for it. <\/p>\n

\u201cMaybe I\u2019m just not at the right door. Essentially every book is truthfully a found object; it\u2019s already there. The joy of it is having the patience and absence and discipline and freedom and time to recover it from whatever silence it sits in.\u201d <\/p>\n

When Barry hit on the opening line for Days Without End<\/a> \u2013 \u201cThe method of laying out a corpse in Missouri sure took the proverbial cake\u201d \u2013 \u201csomehow I could tilt that sentence and see the rest of the book, like a range of sentences stretching out for 300 pages\u201d.<\/p>\n

I can\u2019t help noticing a pile of books with a Native American theme on the table beside us. Having already written a sequel, A Thousand Moons<\/a>, somewhat to his surprise, he has written a third novel with that setting. The Newer World is the story of Tennyson Bouguereau, the freed man in the first two books, who leaves his farm to join first a black choir and then the army.<\/p>\n

The Newer World\u2019s birth was not so much difficult as delayed. In 2020, having developed Tennyson\u2019s character in A Thousand Moons, \u201cI thought I would go straight on as Tennyson was beckoning, but instead I wrote Old God\u2019s Time. That happened before: I was working on The Secret Scripture and then wrote A Long, Long Way instead.\u201d <\/p>\n

Barry\u2019s novels are like a family tree or solar system, with related characters and a gravitational pull between their orbits. <\/p>\n

\u201cThis book speaks back to the first book, The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty, since Eneas and Tennyson have both been cancelled as people in their home places.<\/p>\n

\u201cTennyson, Willie, Lilly, Roseanne: what my characters all have in common is courage.<\/p>\n

\u201cLilly Dunne in On Canaan\u2019s Side is the sister of Willie in A Long, Long Way. It\u2019s all intertwined, intensely familial. Minnie [in The Newer World] marries a man called Kinderman. The man that Lilly Dunne marries is Joe Kinderman, so he must be their son. <\/p>\n

\u201cThe moment I put that name down was a moment of intense happiness to me, because it is our connectedness that matters to me. As long as you can prioritise the wonderful things we have in common, then we are doing our jobs better as humans, recognising that we are all the same family. That\u2019s a fact we\u2019d like to drill into some of the more blinkered politicians.\u201d<\/p>\n

[\u00a0The best new books to look out for in autumn 2026Opens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

This partly perhaps answers the vexed question of cultural appropriation surrounding a white Irish writer telling the story of a freed black slave in 19th-century Tennessee.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think that\u2019s definitely what gave me pause in 2020,\u201d he says. \u201cI\u2019ve been working full time as a writer for 49 years. Other generations must decide for themselves, but we have conducted ourselves in a certain way. <\/p>\n

\u201cI would call a book like this cultural reverence, a desire to reach out to a member of the human family who turned up in Days Without End and plays a large role in A Thousand Moons. I think of it as people meeting across the so-called barriers of time, which of course Einstein tells us don\u2019t exist. <\/p>\n

\u201cIf I was to characterise Tennyson and me, I\u2019d say I was the only eejit he could find to write his book. I\u2019m very proud and strengthened by having been in his company.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"SebastianSebastian Barry. Photograph: Nick Bradshaw <\/p>\n

Tennyson, the now unfashionable poet whom Barry fell for at Trinity College, also inspired the title, \u201ca newer world\u201d being a line from his poem Ulysses. Littlefair, the slaveowner who raped Tennyson\u2019s mother, also admired the poet. <\/p>\n

\u201cI was looking for an aspect of him that wasn\u2019t disgusting. Even our tyrants have other qualities.\u201d Barry recalls Ian Paisley once charming a Late Late Show audience. <\/p>\n

\u201cAll my books are about someone trying to make a world when it is so difficult to be alive. Tennyson engenders in me an immense respect. He also has this great singing gift. That also rings an enormous chiming bell with me. My rescuing aspect as a child was the fact that I could sing as a boy soprano. You can only give your characters what you\u2019ve read or lived yourself. That\u2019s what kinship is, actually.\u201d<\/p>\n

Barry\u2019s aunt Mary O\u2019Hara was the finest singer of her age. Now 91, she is in a nursing home in Galway, and he mentions the burden of taking on the enduring power of attorney, taking over someone else\u2019s decision-making, which makes me think of an author\u2019s responsibility to their characters. \u201cBeautifully put,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

A puzzling aspect of The Newer World is Tennyson leaving his lover, Minnie, to soldier with his friend George. Barry wanted to shine a light on the importance of male friendships but also hint at how the world\u2019s darkness discourages people from bringing new life into it, a choice a Belfast friend made during the Troubles.<\/p>\n

Is the past Barry\u2019s natural element? His early books, no longer in print, had used his immediate experience, like Henry Miller did, in a way he found troublesome. <\/p>\n

\u201cThere is an incomprehension towards your own present moment. That isn\u2019t helpful to a writer. I don\u2019t understand it enough.\u201d <\/p>\n

He also cites the hostile reaction to Hinterland, his Charles Haughey play \u2013 \u201csuch an emotional catastrophe\u201d. \u201cI was running scared, but I found a new home in the past, where I could write in a primal way, not safer but more peaceful.\u201d <\/p>\n

Einstein\u2019s theory of relativity, the idea that past, present and future are contained in the same universal moment, \u201cleads me to believe that if you sit still enough and absent yourself enough then somehow you can make a connection; you can be in cahoots with Tennyson\u201d. <\/p>\n

Tennyson travels to England with a choir of black singers, an art born of torment, which blossomed after emancipation, their field songs piercing the hearts of listeners in a way light opera did not. \u201cIt is important to notice these things. That way lies salvation.\u201d<\/p>\n

Barry calls his books \u201cstepping stones across this isthmus of chaos. I have tried to make my response, the books and plays, equal to the gravity of the anguish of my younger life. I rise up to meet it.\u201d <\/p>\n

The book ends with John Cole and Thomas McNulty leaving for the Alaska gold rush. Barry might well follow them but possibly after a different book.<\/p>\n

Many books fed his imagination, but the most inspirational for Barry, \u201ca soldier manqu\u00e9\u201d from a military family, was Army Life in a Black Regiment by Thomas Wentworth Higginson, an officer who was also a friend and correspondent of Emily Dickinson, whose unique take on language is equally present in her letters, to Barry\u2019s delight. <\/p>\n

\u201cPeople sometimes praise me or accuse me for a sort of lyricism, but it\u2019s the way my mind works. That\u2019s my own birdsong, my whistle tune.\u201d <\/p>\n

Barry has a gift for gripping plots and sentences that shine. But editing \u2013 revising what a different part of his brain has created \u2013 is a big part of his process.<\/p>\n

For him, editing is weeding, or finding and removing the dead wood. As with theatre, every second has to function. \u201cI am the happiest man in the world to cut anything that doesn\u2019t work.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

My mother was an interesting, extravagant person, probably bipolar. It was difficult to be a child of such a person<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Like T\u00f3ib\u00edn, Barry could not read or write until he was seven or eight, and is still a slow reader, so research is laborious. It must be buried deeply, \u201cso that anything that rises up in your manuscript, it\u2019s as if it\u2019s from your own experience\u201d. <\/p>\n

Barry reviewed Brian Moore\u2019s 1985 novel, Black Robe, positively in The Irish Times. Did his fellow author\u2019s Native American novel somehow plant a seed for his own novels in that field?<\/p>\n

\u201cThat stayed with me. I can sit here with you seeing that book as if it were in some ways my own. What really affected me is the way the native characters were translated, all cursing roundly. In a different generation all emphasis would have been on the Jesuit\u202fpriest, but he had gone further.\u201d<\/p>\n

Barry was inspired to write about gay friendship in Days Without End after his son, Toby, came out. With Toby\u2019s blessing, he also wrote a letter<\/a> to The Irish Times to back a Yes vote in the marriage-equality referendum of 2015.<\/p>\n

[\u00a0Sebastian Barry: \u2018My son instructed me in the magic of gay life\u2019Opens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

As a bohemian Irish boy who felt he didn\u2019t belong, Barry had identified with Jewishness. He aspired to be the next Bob Dylan and grew his hair to his waist, which may have got him the part of Tonto in a Trinity play, \u201cwith no lines, interestingly enough. I had a huge desire to give lines to Tonto.\u201d<\/p>\n

He was staying in another old rectory, in Kerry in 1974, when visiting a neolithic fort inspired the line \u201cThey huddle in the walls where the creepways end\u201d. That one good line told him he could be Sebastian, not Bob. \u201cIn that moment I had identified as a writer.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Barrys had moved to London for work, and Sebastian had returned with a London accent, which he had to shed swiftly lest his Dalkey schoolmates murder him.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is why I felt a strong identification with Ali, who is a Dublin Presbyterian. I presented as odd to other children. I never felt that anything I was could be included in a sense of Irishness.<\/p>\n

\u201cA lot of people felt they didn\u2019t have enough of the adjectives describing Irishness to qualify. Certainly, Dublin Protestants were told they didn\u2019t really belong. I have spent 50 years trying to include some adjectives into the mix. I now feel profoundly Irish, but I fought for it.\u201d<\/p>\n

It is not enough for Ireland to accommodate outliers or newcomers, he says. We must appreciate and welcome them.<\/p>\n

Barry wrote a laureate lecture called The Fog of Family about his parents, but it was too honest, so he rewrote it to be more palatable, if less true. <\/p>\n

\u201cA lot of people loved my mother professionally. I got a lot of letters when she died. It felt churlish to say, \u2018Yes, but …\u2019 She was an interesting, extravagant person, probably bipolar. It was difficult to be a child of such a person. <\/p>\n

\u201cIf she were here, she could manage this conversation, she was so\u202ffearless. My father much less so. For the last 40 years of his life I was the enemy, because I had spoken certain truths, and that was unforgivable. <\/p>\n

\u201cHe followed his appetites to an extreme degree. Womanising was the least of it. It was destroying my mother. She needed to live with certain myths intact. Any truth-telling\u202fwas as unwelcome for her as it was for him. They were difficult people. And we are sundered people.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even in death there was pain. Barry did not attend his father\u2019s funeral and was away for his mother\u2019s. Scattering her ashes on Knocknarea, in Co Sligo, he fell and cracked two ribs. He loves his siblings, but his sister Siuban lives in France, and he hasn\u2019t seen Guy since 2007, and doesn\u2019t know where he is. <\/p>\n

\u201cHis memories are too painful to be near fellow survivors. In the classic Abbey play we would reach a scene where people apologise to each other, but no.\u201d<\/p>\n

[\u00a0Joan O’Hara obituary: Admired and gifted Abbey actor who put family firstOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

In a creative sense, Barry very much followed in his parents\u2019 footsteps; in terms of character, he rejected them.<\/p>\n

His mother and grandfather brought him up on a well of family stories, but \u201cwells get spoiled\u201d. He shared a bedroom in Monkstown with his grandfather Jack, who inspired The Temporary Gentleman<\/a>, his 2014 novel. Wasn\u2019t that odd? <\/p>\n

\u201cNo, it was a great benefit, because it was freezing. He told me stories about his war years. He needed to think of himself as pretty magnificent.\u201d<\/p>\n

He was a recovering alcoholic, and his wife had died of alcoholism. She inspired Barry\u2019s play Our Lady of Sligo. <\/p>\n

\u201cHe was as near as I could get to a person I was close to. He introduced me to his parents. I never saw it as material; I was just a little boy, grateful for companionship. He wasn\u2019t loving or demonstrative, but he spent time with me.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe did have a falling-out over me writing stories. He hated that, because I described his parents\u2019 house as poverty-stricken \u2013 not a truth he wanted propagated. I never had the wisdom to make peace with him. I was too young and stubborn and stupid.<\/p>\n

\u201cConflict and mutual hurt are a given in human affairs. Our job is to find common ground. There was no reconciliation possible with my parents, as they weren\u2019t looking for reconciliation. For them I was utterly in the wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n

Barry has been a lifelong full-time writer, a rare breed, \u201cnot so much an occupation as a preoccupation\u201d. In his early years he \u201cwas probably depressed, certainly hypochondriacal, neurotic, but I did notice if you got up in the morning and had a story by the evening it was an extreme form of compensatory happiness, the feeling\u202fof making something\u201d.<\/p>\n

Donal McCann<\/a>\u2019s performance in The Steward of Christendom, Barry\u2019s theatrical masterpiece, made it the finest production I have ever seen. Its success first in London, then in Dublin and off Broadway, enabled the Barrys to buy their first home.<\/p>\n

A fine self-portrait by McCann hangs on Barry\u2019s wall, with a map of Australia on his forehead, like a cross-section of his brain, drawn while touring the play there. They had a unique bond.<\/p>\n

\"DonalDonal McCann: ‘When Donal died, part of me died,’ says Barry <\/p>\n

The play\u2019s phenomenal success was \u201ca bit defining\u201d. It led some to mistake Barry for the new Friel or even think of him primarily as a playwright. <\/p>\n

\u201cAs Thomas Kinsella said, there is no mantle and it does not fall.\u201d <\/p>\n

He was writing The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty, his first mature novel, at the same time.<\/p>\n

\u201cI didn\u2019t give up on the theatre, but something happened, which was that Donal died. One of the reasons I came to the earth was to meet Donal. It was a perfect conjunction: an actor in two years of sobriety; a play he thought somehow I had thieved out of his brain.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe made a total identification with it; I made a total identification with him. He was the great actor of my childhood. He could be absolutely terrifying \u2013 but never to me. He showed me the greatest level of mercy. He treated me like a god.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe was so pleased when it made a lot of money; we were able to buy the house in Greystones. Before, when we were rehearsing, he was giving me a pound or two for McDonald\u2019s. He was so proud, because he knew he had caused it.<\/p>\n

\u201cAli made him smoked mackerel. I can still see him sitting there \u2013 he was not given to happiness \u2013 looking like the most contented man in Ireland … When Donal died part of me died, and I had to resurrect myself as a novelist.\u201d<\/p>\n

McCann\u2019s death, in 1999, together with a crisis in Guy\u2019s life, triggered a breakdown. Barry had suffered one after the Dublin bombing, and again in Paris in 1981.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe cure was running. I\u2019m so glad people talk about these things<\/a> now, because in 1999, when I was utterly unable to function and so anxious, my agent told me not to say it to anyone, because you might be considered disabled. But all the excitement of the novels was yet to come. It wasn\u2019t disabling in any way. So that\u2019s my message to people when they are suffering.<\/p>\n

\u201cIvor Browne, who was my friend but also substitute father, after my breakdown after [The Steward of Christendom], said, \u2018Your trouble is, having climbed the mountain, you have to go\u202fback to supply camp and start again.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

\"SebastianSebastian Barry with his dogs. Photograph: Nick Bradshaw <\/p>\n

There is a carpenter\u2019s pencil on his writing desk, a sturdy tool whose lead looks unbreakable. Two poodles come bounding in, not the fluffy toy variety but muscular standard poodles, as big as Labradors. Originally they were hunting dogs, duck hounds. Similarly, you sense body armour beneath Barry\u2019s velvet jacket.<\/p>\n

His work is adorned with saving graces, life\u2019s small joys and mercies. His friend Viv Roche made a seaweed sculpture of a line from The Secret Scripture: \u201cThe world is indeed beautiful.\u201d Barry spontaneously finishes the sentence: \u201cAnd if we were another creature than man we might be continuously happy in it.\u201d<\/p>\n

He doesn\u2019t see his family saga as a national project. \u201cYou\u2019d have to be some mighty healer to heal history, wouldn\u2019t you?\u201d<\/p>\n

Tom Kettle, the \u201cold policeman with a buckled heart\u201d in Old God\u2019s Time, reminded me of Thomas Dunne. \u201cI didn\u2019t think of that until very recently,\u201d he says. \u201cIt is almost a carbon copy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kettle is named after the poet whose line gave The Secret Scripture its title. The real-life Kettle, an Irish patriot who died a British soldier in the first World War, with his conflicted allegiances and tragic fate, could be a Barry character. <\/p>\n

A Long, Long Way was almost titled The Secret Scripture, but Barry felt it a bit grandiose for Willie Dunne, so he saved it. \u201cThen it just seemed quite natural for a novel about a lady putting stuff under floorboards.\u201d<\/p>\n

[\u00a0Sebastian Barry: \u2018Part of me when I was young would have poisoned the soup of every other writer\u2019Opens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

\u201cThe quote for Whereabouts is, \u2018He who is not written into the book of life shall be cast into the lake of fire.\u2019 I have had\u202fthat anxiety. Roseanne says, if you don\u2019t have anecdotes associated with your name then you are destined to be just a cipher in a family Bible. <\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a reluctance on my part to allow Aunt Annie to pass away with nothing. I\u2019ve thought about them every day. There is something in them of almost infinite value, the person no one will give credit to. I\u2019m interested in writing them into the book of life. That is not high-art ambition, more an anxiety that they not be lost.<\/p>\n

\u201cOnce you get to the point of waiting for Roseanne or Annie or Winona, then you\u2019ve got to get yourself out of the picture. It\u2019s not a conversation; they are going to talk. I have to be their amanuensis. <\/p>\n

\u201cMy grandfather would put a hubcap in the garden for the birds, to draw them. You have to sit as still as you can or they will fly out of the garden.\u201d<\/p>\n

Interviewers, too, need to know when to shut up, to sit back and listen.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe unprompted things that arise naturally in the mind are not the same as things prompted by questions. It\u2019s the private mind, not the prompted mind. <\/p>\n

\u201cTo reach into the private mind of someone who never technically existed is so outrageous it\u2019s worth doing. You\u2019re going back to the 1850s to find a private mind. What could be more elusive? <\/p>\n

\u201cI fished for salmon in the Moy for 50 years. Don\u2019t for a minute think I am not immensely proud that I was granted time to know how to stand under dripping leaves.\u201d<\/p>\n

Barry told me before that he had visited Joseph Conrad\u2019s grave and that Axel Heyst, from Conrad\u2019s novel Victory, was his favourite character. <\/p>\n

\u201cI thought it was in me to write with a recognisable signature like Conrad,\u202fwhereas the tradition at the time was a different sort of absence, language unadorned, impersonal, neutral. <\/p>\n

\u201cI was never interested in that. I loved archaic language. The reason I can exult in the broken language of Days Without End is I can see it as archaic language worth retrieving. <\/p>\n

\u201cIt is an undertaking towards music. If writing hadn\u2019t been invented I\u2019d have to put it out on the air, memorise it. I don\u2019t feel like a writer. I feel like a rememberer of things that never happened.\u201d<\/p>\n

Barry is not afraid to visit dark places in his work and with his work. On Blueberry Hill is set in Mountjoy Prison, and he staged it there. \u201cTalk about going home. I had a great curiosity about the people in Mountjoy. Why have we put these people in there as a society? Is that the best answer when people are living on the clippings of tin?<\/p>\n

\u201cNext day they said to their teacher, \u2018It\u2019s obvious Sebastian was in here.\u2019 That is such an accolade to your instincts, to the very unlikely outcome of your ignorance.\u201d<\/p>\n

Again as laureate, he visited the Central Mental Hospital in Dundrum. <\/p>\n

\u201cI can never forget the feeling of discomfort and foreboding walking up that avenue. If you wanted to find a room of ostensibly lost people who were living with the radiance of an Aquinas, that was the place. It was the grateful realisation that these cancelled people were of greater value as citizens than myself.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the tectonic pressure of their lives, seemingly discounted people are the greatest poets who ever lived.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt would be hard to overestimate the incoherence of my life. When I wake up I have to talk to myself for half an hour to put myself in a place that doesn\u2019t feel uncomfortable, panicky. If I am anything, I am that: the dispeller of the enemy, the black dog. Although, of course, I own and love three black poodles.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Newer World is published by Faber<\/a> on Thursday, September 10th <\/p>\n

This is an updated version of an interview from A Hosting: Interviews with Irish Writers 1991-2026<\/a> (Lilliput Press)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"If the divided loyalties and complex identities of his forebears gave Sebastian Barry the key subject and the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":673902,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[75],"tags":[24422,84200,31872,284844,18,117,125748,19,17,36098,36093,284843,110601,64879,63,6440],"class_list":["post-673901","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-albert-einstein","tag-central-mental-hospital","tag-colm-toibin","tag-donal-mccann","tag-eire","tag-entertainment","tag-harold-pinter","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-ivor-browne","tag-john-mcgahern","tag-joseph-o-neill","tag-mountjoy-prison","tag-sebastian-barry","tag-trinity-college-dublin-tcd","tag-ulster-volunteer-force"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/117218521141339191","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/673901","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=673901"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/673901\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/673902"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=673901"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=673901"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=673901"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}