February 17, 2011
By Staff Reporter
What is your latest book about?
On Christmas night, 1998, Maria Meyers — a New York single mother with a radical past — receives a call from the State Department. Her daughter, Pearl, who is studying abroad at Trinity College, Dublin, has chained herself to the flagpole outside the American embassy and has not eaten in six weeks. Pearl has written a statement saying that her hunger strike is an act of witness, marking the death of a young man in the aftermath of the contested Irish peace agreement — a death for which she personally responsible — and calling attention to the human will to harm. Maria, who has always congratulated herself on Pearl’s impeccable liberal upbringing, must examine her assumptions about Pearl as she boards a plane for Ireland, determined to prevent her daughter’s death.
What is your writing routine? Are there ideal conditions?
I write in the mornings, early, every morning. I can write anywhere if I’m totally alone and quiet, but I prefer my house in Rhode Island with a view of a great horse chestnut tree.
What advice to you have for aspiring writers?
If you can do anything else, do it.
Name three books that are memorable in terms of
your reading pleasure?
Ford Madox Ford’s “The Good Soldier; Virginia Woolf’s “To the Lighthouse,” and “The Collected Poems of Elizabeth Bishop.”
What book are you currently reading?
“A History of Fragrance”
Is there a book you wish you had written?
“Middlemarch” by George Elliot.
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Name a book that you were pleasantly surprised by?
J.M. Coetzee’s “Disgrace”
If you could meet one author, living or dead, who would it be?
Ford Madox Ford
What book changed your life?
“Franny and Zooey” by J.D. Salinger.
What is your favorite spot in Ireland?
The west of Mayo.
You’re Irish if . . .
You think the world is a dire place, but you’re ready for a party.