I write anywhere – when I have an idea, it’s hard not to write. I used to be kind of precious about where I wrote. Everything had to be quiet and I couldn’t be disturbed; it really filled my day.
And what amazes me as I hit the motorway is not the fact that everyone loses someone, but that everyone loves someone. It seems like such a massive waste of energy – and we all do it, all the people beetling along between the white lines, merging, converging, overtaking. We each love someone, even though they will die. And we keep loving them, even when they are not there to love any more. And there is no logic or use to any of this, that I can see.
I am sorry. I can not invite you home for Christmas because I am Irish and my family is mad.
Because that is what your babies do, when they grow. They turn around and say it is all your fault.
I have been falling for months. I have been falling into my own life, for months. And I am about to hit it now.
Writing is mostly a case of mood management. The emotion you have is not absolute, it is temporary. It may be useful, but it is not the truth. It is not you.
All children are beautiful: the thing they do with their eyes that seems so dazzling when they take you all in, or seem to take you all in; it’s like being looked at by an alien, or a cat – who knows what they see?
He slept like a shout.
I wait for the kind of sense that dawn makes, when you have not slept.
But was talking aloud allowed?
We are very happy. Or, no. We are not happy, exactly. But we love each other very much, and this charges our lives with shape and light.
Up and down’ is Irish for anything at all – from crying into the dishes to full-blown psychosis. Though, now that I think about, a psychotic is more usually ‘not quite herself’.
I took my bag, and the suitcase of clothes, and I took the thing he wanted most – a little boy, maybe, as yet unmade; a sturdy little runaround fella, for sitting on his shoulders, and video games down the arcade, and football in the park.
It is not that the Hegartys don’t know what they want, it is that they don’t know HOW to want. Something about their wanting went catastrophically astray.
Far below were the limestone flats they called the Flaggy Shore; grey rocks under a grey sky, and there were days when the sea was a glittering grey and your eyes could not tell if it was dusk or dawn, your eyes were always adjusting. It was like the rocks took the light and hid it away. And that was the thing about Boolavaun, it was a place that made itself hard to see.
There were eleven months between me and Liam. We came out of her on each other’s tails; one after the other, as fast as a gang-bang, as fast as an infidelity.
It was a delicate business, being the Not Wife.
Of course I am bland, she thought. You too would be bland if you grew up with one gas pump in front of the house and nothing else except a view that stretched over half the world. Landscape made me bland, bears poking in the garbage can stunted my individuality, as did plagues of horseflies, permafrost, wild-fire, and the sun setting like a bomb. So much sky makes one bewildered – which is the proper way to be.
They sat in the upstairs living room, a place furnished, one way or another, from the stages of Dublin, so you were always sitting in character, you were just not sure which one.
Professionally, sexually. In those days, when a woman hit thirty she went home and shut the door. So it is to her great credit that my mother refused to lie down and die.