one hundred years of james joyce's ulysses

“And so I think it's something you can do with a novel because a novel is very good at dealing with private thoughts, things that you keep to yourself, if you don't talk about, you can actually put those in the novel. He was getting over it, or she's getting over. And people think you're always doing very well, he's fine. 'And anyone who's been through this loss, especially loss I think in childhood or early adulthood, where it's not what you expect to lose a parent, and nobody has a blueprint for how you should think or behave, or feel. And so you're walking on the street, and suddenly it comes back to you.

“What happens, however, is that you're trying to keep away very dark thoughts indeed, that come sweeping over you in ways that you cannot understand sometimes, and you can't predict. And so you go back to school, everyone goes back to work, everything goes back to normal. “What I was interested in, I suppose, was the idea of how ordinary life is meant to replace this shocked world of sudden loss, sudden grief. I asked him how he finds a way toward the working out of it. In his own childhood, Tóibín lost his father early on, but in 'Nora Webster,' he doesn't want us to know where the autobiography starts and fiction ends. 'And it's something I thought would be dramatic and interesting in a novel.” She does it through music, which I think is something I've seen happen.

And so it becomes a big part of, I suppose, restoring her sense of self or refining herself, that she does it. She decides to actually go and get singing lessons. So when I was thinking about Nora Webster, who's a widow, she has a singing voice she has never really done anything with. “And there's nothing worse than a bad singer. In your own work like 'Nora Webster' and 'Brooklyn,' you highlight the power of music to reorientate you, I tell him, to point you back toward yourself and toward life.

One hundred years of james joyce's ulysses