Small Moments: A Guest Post by Colm Tóibín
We were so, so pleased when we heard that Colm Tóibín was writing a sequel to his beloved novel, Brooklyn. Family secrets and complicated choices drive this exhilarating story that we won’t forget. Read on for an exclusive essay from Colm on writing Our Monthly Pick, Long Island.
Paperback $18.99
Long Island (B&N Exclusive Edition)
Long Island (B&N Exclusive Edition)
By Colm Tóibín
In Stock Online
Paperback $18.99
From the beloved, critically acclaimed, bestselling author comes a spectacularly moving novel featuring Eilis Lacey, the complex and enigmatic heroine of Brooklyn, Tóibín’s most popular work in twenty years.
From the beloved, critically acclaimed, bestselling author comes a spectacularly moving novel featuring Eilis Lacey, the complex and enigmatic heroine of Brooklyn, Tóibín’s most popular work in twenty years.
I began ‘Long Island’, which is a kind of sequel to ‘Brooklyn’, at the beginning of the pandemic. I had a choice in those early days of lockdown. I could have been miserable all day, resenting the restrictions, checking the news. Instead, I decided to sit at my desk and concentrate and make new work. Over that first year of the pandemic, I wrote about thirty poems that I subsequently published as a book. And I wrote the first part of a novel that dealt with the characters from ‘Brooklyn’. I called the novel ‘Long Island.’
In the new book, Eilis and Tony are married and living on Long Island. It is what he had promised her in ‘Brooklyn’ – his family would build four houses. Eilis and Tony have two children. On the surface, their lives have worked out. Eilis has put her life into building her family.
From the movie of ‘Brooklyn’, I learned a great deal from the performance of Domhnall Gleeson, who played the part of Jim. Domhnall made Jim seem stable, decent, tolerant, loving and dependable without making him appear worthy or dull. Once it occurred to me that, more than twenty years after ‘Brooklyn’, he might still not be married, then I began to imagine the allure that Eilis would carry with her if she returned from America and what it might do to Jim.
All I needed was a romance for Jim, something that seemed natural, part of the town’s life. And then have Eilis come home to Ireland and, without meaning any harm, disrupting the peace with her glamor.
A novel comes into place scene by scene, character by character. One day, I realized that, since this is 1976, Eilis’s mother could still be alive. In fact, she could be eighty. Her birthday would be a good excuse for Eilis to come home.
Like the homecoming in ‘Brooklyn’, it has to be the summer, thus allowing for scenes on the beach, for the freedom of long days with no rain.
It was strange when ‘Long Island’ came out to see how much the figure of Eilis had come to matter to readers. She is not especially brave or brilliant, she does not strive to control her own life, run the show. Things happen to her; she goes with the flow. People like her, trust her, want to be with her. I tried to give her as much mystery and complexity as I could. Sometimes she is someone who merely watches and says little. But she is also able to assert herself. She feels things deeply.
What began for me slowly, tentatively, had, by the time ‘Long Island’ came out, taken on a life of its own. Readers saw Eilis clearly and had views on what she should do, how she should respond to life. That was my ambition, but I tried not to think too much about the grand picture as I worked. Instead, I concentrated on detail, on the small moments. I tried to guide them towards a pattern, an overall shape. And it was heartening and encouraging to find that readers had responded to this. Some of them even wanted more.