In other words, she thinks and notices and reflects with considerable force, but then she doesn’t act on her intelligence. Why did a character like that appeal to you when writing about someone moving from a small Irish town to Brooklyn?Ī: Because there would be a dramatic gap between her inner life and how she behaves which the reader would fill. Q: Eilis is for the most part very reticent, and lets others determine the course of her life. And finally, I taught a few courses, which included Jane Austen and I began to think about a novel, which used her method of examining a single psychology, using an introspective, sensitive heroine, some comic characters and some romance. Also, outsiders-especially Poles, Nigerians, Chinese- to Ireland and I used to watch them and think about them. The first was that I began to spend time in the United States and I began to feel (albeit from a privileged position) the funny mixtures of loneliness and need and occasional happiness that emigrants feel. What about that memory made you want to expand this story?Ī: I put what I heard into a short story which I wrote in 2000, but five or six years later, I think three things had changed which made it possible (or even made it an imperative) for me to work on the story for longer. Q: You’ve said that this novel came to you from remembering, as a child, overhearing a woman talk about her young daughter who had moved to Brooklyn from Enniscorthy.
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