April 9, 2025 • 32 mins
Over four decades Niall Williams has made a name for himself as one of Ireland’s leading novelists. In his latest novel, Time of the Child, Niall returns to the fictional village of Faha, in west Ireland, the setting of his previous book, This Is Happiness. Time of the Child centres on the notion of familial love, and as he explains to Michael in this week’s episode, Niall couldn’t have written it without becoming a grandfather himself.
Reading list:
Four Letters Of Love, Niall Williams, 1997
As It Is In Heaven, Niall Williams, 1999
History of the Rain, Niall Williams, 2015
This Is Happiness, Niall Williams, 2019
Time of the Child, Niall Williams, 2024
Unsettled, Kate Grenville, 2025
You can find these books and all the others we mentioned at your favourite independent book store.
Socials: Stay in touch with Read This on Instagram
Guest: Niall Williams
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to read this arguably Australia's pre eminent podcast for
interviewing Irish authors seriously. At some point I look back
over our archive and amongst our brilliant cavalcade of guests,
there is very healthy representation from the country of my grandparents,
Kilan Hughes, Kolm Toybin, the two Pauls, Mariy and Lynch
(00:22):
and Enwright, and our dream guest list for future episodes
probably has another half dozen Irish writers. At least Kevin
Barry or Claire Keegan would be a dream just for starters,
and that's not even to mention Sally Rooney. The list
is lengthy. There's something to be said for the breadth
and depth and general robustness of contemporary Irish literature, smart
(00:43):
government policies to support the arts and writers in particular,
and a strong literary tradition that's well read and well understood,
and maybe something mysterious about the way that country tells stories.
A joy and a sense of play and play, a
willingness to meander and digress, but to hone in with
precision and clarity when required. Our guest this week is
(01:07):
another Irishman who is indisputably part of that conversation. Niall
Williams was studying in a university in New York when
he and Christine Breen fell in love and made the
decision to leave the Manhattan rat race and move into
a two hundred year old cottage on the west coast
of Ireland in a place called kil Tumpa in West Claire.
(01:29):
As they put it, they wanted to find out if
they had the creative talent to make their lives there.
That was forty years ago this month, and spoiler alert,
they had the creative talent. They co authored books together,
they wrote books separately. They made art and gardened and
raised a family and built four decades of life. And
(01:49):
amongst those books, Nile's novels started to build this reputation
for a skillfully deployed mix of warmth and joy. His
first novel, Four Letters of Love, was celebrated as a
modern Irish classic, and after years of development and speculation,
later this year, will be made into a film starring
Pierce Brosnan and Helena Bottom Carter. But his three most
(02:12):
recent novels have seen his acclaim rise and rise further.
In A History of the Rain, which was long listed
for the twenty fourteen Booker. He introduced a fictional town
as its backdrop. It was called Faha, and his subsequent book,
This Is Happiness puts far Harf front and center. In
that book, he tells the story of the nineteen fifty
(02:34):
eight introduction of electricity to the town. The book attracted
rapturous reviews. The word enchanting gets thrown around a lot,
and upon finishing it, Niall Williams realized he wasn't done
with the people of Faha, or perhaps more accurately, they
weren't done with him. He visited Australia last month and
(02:54):
as lucky enough to interview him at the State Library
of Victoria. Before we started our conversation, he and christ
And got a tour from staff through the building and
the archives. His love of books and of the community
of people that had devoted to them was palpable. We
sat down in front of a devoted Melbourne audience to
discuss his latest book, the latest Faha book, Time of
(03:16):
the Child. It's now the early sixties and the focus
has shifted to the town doctor Jack Troy and his
oldest daughter Ronnie, and what happens when an abandoned baby
girl is brought into their home. I'm Michael Williams and
this is read. This a show about the books we
love and the stories behind me.
Speaker 2 (03:46):
Thank you all.
Speaker 1 (03:52):
I did apologize when we're doing the sound check because
it feels somehow disrespectful that Melbourne, of all cities, couldn't
turn on the rain for the poet laureate of rain.
This man can write a description of rain that rivals
no other. Is that your natural weather mode? Are you
most comfortable writing about it?
Speaker 2 (04:11):
Hello, everybody. Chris and I have lived in County Claire
for forty years. In that time, we've had to come
to an accommodation with the rain, and because it rains
a lot, I have to come to a place where
I could see the rain not as the enemy, not
as something against me in some way. I finally came
(04:32):
to grips with it when I wrote History of the Rain,
where I began to understand the idea that the rain
comes from the sky, goes into the river, which goes
to the sea, which goes back into the sky, and
that circular motion that happens. That traffic of rain and
transitory noess seemed to me to become sort of some
(04:53):
kind of metaphor for our own existence. And because that
novel deals with Ruth Swain trying to find out where
her dead father has gone, and so the Rain became
part of that circularity as she searched for him.
Speaker 1 (05:07):
I'm very glad you brought up History of the Rain
because it seems an appropriate book maybe for us to
start out a conversation tonight. It's our first glimpse of
Faha in your work, even if it's through a window
barely scene, it's out there. But it is also a
book very much concerned with the business of books, and
given the building way in at the moment. Yes, I
(05:29):
wonder if you could expand on Ruth's quest to find
her father through books.
Speaker 2 (05:34):
Yes. So I never know where a book comes from
until after I've written it. I have no plan. When
I'm writing a book. I'm literally following one sentence and
seeing what that sentence implies with the next sentence. It's
only after I've written a book that I look back
and see what was happening in my life at the
time that I can trace back some things in my
(05:54):
or our lives that have influenced the shaping and making
of the book. When I look back at history of
the Reign, I remember that my father had died, and
as is the common way I think among Irish fathers
and sons, if there was emotional material happening in your life,
you didn't really speak to your father about it. So
(06:15):
my father knew that I had written a novel called
Four Letters of Love, so we definitely weren't going to
talk about that. And so when I wrote the novels,
I would bring them and give them to my father
and he'd say sign that to me, and I would
sign it to him, and he would take it and
put on the shelf. And that was throughout the course
of his life. Each book would go on a shelf,
(06:38):
and we would never ever speak about it. But when
my father died, he left a handwritten will, and in
that will, the only mention that I get in that
will is for nihle my books just that, and it
was like a acknowledgment back to my life choice. And
(06:58):
in turn, it was also in acknowledgment of the fact
that my writing life began with my reading life, and
that was that every two weeks my father brought us
to the library, so he would come home from work
and in the evening, and on Wednesday evenings the library
stayed open until nine, and so by six thirty half
past six, we would get in the car and drive
(07:20):
to Ballsbridge in Dublin to the Pembroke Library. And when
he let you in the doors of that library at night,
he went to his section and you could go anywhere
and you didn't have to gather back again until half
past eight and sign out your books with him, and
he would just look at your books, and I'd carry
out my stack of books, he'd carry out his, and
that was it. And then two weeks later we'd be
back again in that situation. And it was my first
(07:42):
experience of the idea that you can choose your own books,
and what a freeing idea that was, because in school
they said this is the textbook, everyone read this. But
when you walked in the doors library, go anywhere and
the books that you were picking become part of your
own definition as to who you are. And for me,
(08:05):
at age twelve, that was a sort of extraordinary free thing.
You could pick anything. So when he died and I
drove to Dublin from County Clare, so across the country
to the nursing home, where he had died to collect
his books, and I brought them home, something extraordinarly powerful
happened to me, and that was the sense that even
(08:25):
though these were not the books that I would have
chosen myself, they were the books that my father had read.
So his hands had held them, his hands had turned
the pages, his eyes had been on each page. And
so in some way that became the life spring of
the book that became History of the Reign. Where Root's father,
the poet has died, and he has routed his ill
(08:47):
and doesn't leave the house, and she is in the
room in the attic where all her father's books have
been left, and she begins to read those books to
find her father Nile.
Speaker 1 (08:57):
With that in mind, I can't let you rush past
Pembroke Library. As a twelve year old, in the books
that you were choosing, what was defining you then?
Speaker 3 (09:06):
What did you read?
Speaker 2 (09:08):
Almost nothing that was Irish based, because you were using
books as a sort of doorway to the world, and
you were very aware as a twelve year old that
Ireland was a small place out on the edge of
the Atlantic, and that the rest of the world will
where all the adventures took place even in England. That
(09:28):
so there was no Irish reading at that time. It
wasn't until I was maybe thirteen and fourteen fifteen started
reading short Irish short story writers Frank O'Connor and Daniel
Corkory and of people like that transformative moment for me.
In the moment, I think that is the book that
made me want to be a writer was Charles Dickens's
(09:48):
Great Expectations, which we had to read at age fourteen.
Everyone in the country had to read it for your
intersert exam, which is extraordinary to think of nowadays have
every fourteen year old in the country reading Great Expectations,
not abridged Great Explanations, to full Expectations. So the significant
thing I've told it before was that mister Mason, our
(10:10):
English teacher, he sat at the desk at the top
and you opened Great Expectations, and the four long windows
were steamed up with condensation, so you're inside a closed space,
and he would say your name. He'd call out a
name and that person would begin reading on the page,
and everybody else in the classroom thirty two boys had
(10:32):
to pay really close attention to what line what the
person reading was allowed was on, because at any moment,
even halfway through a sentence, mister Mason could call out
your name, and then you would have to carry on
from exactly where the person had stopped. And if you
failed to carry on, you got to write out the
page of Great Expectations that night, which seemed a lot
(10:54):
of writing out. It was a better idea than giving lines,
but it was intense. So as a result of that,
we read Great Expectations attached by the Finger, and so
I was inside the book through that finger portal and
through watching it so carefully. So when Pip fell in
love with Di Stella, I fell in love with di Stella.
(11:15):
When she rejected him, she rejected me, and so that
was the reason that I entered. I entered the book
first fully. I think, then.
Speaker 1 (11:25):
It's a moment you give to know from memory, and
this is happiness where he's trying to conjure up a
havishm figure in his mind, and that connection with that
novel is a really important one to.
Speaker 3 (11:36):
Him there and we'll come to it in a moment.
Speaker 1 (11:38):
But in the time of the Child, you have a
character who is clearly doomed to be a writer. You
make it clear that that's her fate and her future.
Is that a cur through a blessing you're giving Ronnie
in that book.
Speaker 2 (11:53):
Well, for me, it's a blessing. I make most sense
to the world by being a writer. I'm a better
person when i'm writing, unerstand the world better when i'm writing,
and I can live better as a person writing. So
I think for Ronnie in Time of the Child, it
will be a kind of salvation as a writer. In writing,
same as in reading, I think, is a way to
(12:14):
conquer loneliness, and it's also that extraordinary thing. I think
James Wood the Critic, spoke about it in his book
The Nearest Thing to Life, and he talks about this
idea that when you're reading a novel, there's a kind
of communion that happens. Your own loneliness is banished, and
(12:34):
you move towards the other, the person that is inside
the pages, and that in turn comes back to deepen
your own humanity. It's kind of circular gift that's given
out and comes back to you through the experience of reading.
So I think for Ronnie, especially as a woman writer
in nineteen sixties Ireland, difficult, difficult, difficult, that will be
(12:56):
her salvation and how she comes to accept who she
is and how she is That.
Speaker 1 (13:02):
Strength and that community given by the experience of rating,
I think is a really important thing and evident in
your work that you do as you say you have
the line about Ronnie. That added to this reserve was
not only the screened lives of all the women in
the parish at the time, but the marginal nature of
all writers, that idea that a writer is inevitably outside
(13:26):
the community that they're writing about.
Speaker 3 (13:28):
Do you feel that.
Speaker 2 (13:29):
I do, absolutely. I think probably I was a marginal
person before I was a writer, but then found that
that was a good place for a writer to be.
So the writer should be in the margins and not
in the center. And so I believe that profoundly that
I'm trying to put another person on the page. It's
not about me, it's other people, and other people are
(13:50):
sort of endlessly fascinating because of this bizarre thing that
everybody thinks they're normal. And how how bizarre that is
when you think about it, that actually there's not two
people on the planet who are the same, but each
one thinks that they are normal. And that's just fantastic
(14:12):
for a fiction writer. Because people keep revealing their oddity
and their quirks in which they think is this is
a normal thing to do.
Speaker 1 (14:22):
I think that's true in a sense, in an individual
and human sense. It's also true of a place. You're
right early in This is happiness. Farha was no more
nor less than any other like place. If you could
find it, you'd be on your way somewhere else. The
country is filled with places of more blatant beauty. Good
luck to them. Farha doesn't care. It has long since
(14:43):
accepted the by dint of personality and geography, its destiny
was to be a place passed over and gently wholly forgotten.
Tell me about that place called far out the window
of Ruth Swain's house, where she doesn't go.
Speaker 2 (15:00):
So Fao would be embarrassed that we're actually talking about it,
and they talk about somewhere else, and the more beautiful places.
There are more notable places, and you shouldn't if you're
stopping in Fa, you're asking the way somewhere else. Part
of the attraction for me in the place, for how
I think in the making of it was ordinariness. Because
(15:21):
the longer I've lived, the more I've come to appreciate
the extraordinary thing about ordinariness and the same thing that
I just said about people feeling that they are normal
and they are actually quite extraordinary. So sometime during the
writing of This Is Happiness, something happened to me that
hadn't happened before when I was writing a novel, And
(15:44):
that is maybe two thirds of the way through, I
realized I didn't want the book to end, that I
want to stay in this world and with these people,
and I was actually had fallen in love. I'd fallen
in love with Christy and Noel and those people and
the whole world of it. And I found that the
more I wrote, more characters were appearing and that was
(16:05):
an interesting character. And at this person pause a minute
on the street and go in here, and this is
an interesting So it was becoming larger the more I
was in it. And so before I finished This Is Happiness,
I knew that I was going to write another fan novel.
I wanted to stay there, and the hard thing would
be that it wasn't going to be a first person novel.
I wanted to make each novel stand alone and not
(16:27):
be not be a sequel as such, but still to
create a series of novels that would be a continuum.
And I think before even before I started Time of
the Child, I realized that my aim would be to
try to write a series of novels in the time
between the coming of electricity and the coming of the Internet.
(16:47):
I'll plot the second half of the twentieth century in
one community, and what happens to church and community, and
what happens to people, families, and all the change that
occurs as to tell division comms and so on and so
forth as things change in a community over that period
of time.
Speaker 1 (17:09):
When we return, Nialla and I discuss why a doctor
makes sense for the main character of Kind of the Child,
and he also shares why there's only one reader of
his work that really matters.
Speaker 3 (17:21):
We'll be right back.
Speaker 1 (17:23):
So now you've undertaken, or you've been taken over by
this project of her. There must have been a certain
satisfaction in seeing the paths that you'd opened up to yourselves.
(17:46):
And in particular, I'm thinking about doctor Troy as the
central character of Time of the Child, because, as you
make very clear, a doctor and a place like Faha
is privy to everything.
Speaker 2 (17:57):
Yes, when I was writing this is howiness where the
doctor first appears. I didn't think he would be the
next major character of time of the Child, But I
think there were a few things that informed that decision
as to how that came about, again only in hindsight.
So first of all, there was an extraordinary moment, and
this was a moment that we all lived through when
COVID first began, And there came a moment when everybody
(18:22):
was asked at a certain time to go outside and
applaud healthcare workers bang pots and pans if you were
in cities, and applaud them a specific moment in time,
like it was six o'clock and everybody did it. And
so that sense of what it was to be in
healthcare and going out and dealing with ill people all
(18:45):
the time made me think in my microcos fictional world
of the doctor in a village where every single person
is his patient. So I thought it was an extraordinary
thing that first of all about doctors, and then this
idea in a community where he knows all the secrets
of everybody, the corporal secrets of everybody, and what would
(19:08):
it be like if he had a secret, because he
can't tell any of those people. And that has created
that dynamic of that character.
Speaker 1 (19:16):
One of the crucial things you reveal about him, though,
is that he has been thwarted in He has lost,
as he says it, the opportunity for love a second
time in his life, and for the second far hard
book in a row. You have a man who's in
love with any Money.
Speaker 2 (19:35):
Yes, we're all. We're all in love with any Mooney.
Speaker 3 (19:38):
So I'm curious about this.
Speaker 1 (19:39):
Is any Mooney going to be the kind of stob
that goes across decades in this town.
Speaker 2 (19:45):
Yeah, maybe go back to us selling gra victations. I
don't know to any Mooney. Yes, is the doctor was
in love with any Mooney, but it was undeclared love.
And just as he was about to declare it, we
find out in this novel, was when Christian this his
happiness had arrived back who was her first love. So
the thing about the doctor is at the start of
the novel his love didn't happen, and he has fallen
(20:08):
out of love with the human race, and he has
a profound melancholy and he doesn't believe anything in this
life is going to shift it. So we have to,
over the course of the novel move the doctor back
into humanity, and it comes in a most shocking way
to him, which is that he witnesses his daughter fall
in love with a baby, and that was not something
(20:32):
he could have expected, but that in turn becomes the
bridge to get him back into humanity.
Speaker 1 (20:38):
Could you have written Time of the Child without having
become a grandfather yourself?
Speaker 2 (20:43):
No, certainly not so. Our daughter Jirdre gave birth to
Esme Willow during the time when I was writing this,
and it was an extraordinary thing. When I first held
Esme in my arms. Nothing had quite prepared me for that.
It was a shock to feel how much feeling I
felt rushed through me in that moment, and for my daughter,
(21:06):
and seeing my daughter in a completely different light as
a mother. Suddenly, in an instant she was a mother,
and that was just so profoundly moving. And I was
sort of, I think, surprised by joyous Wordsworth. I was
surprised by love pulls through me. And it seemed to
me that when writing the novel, you know, maybe because
(21:29):
in our life, and for Christ and I life, we
have the chosen family. As such, we chose to adopt
the children and that and there was a burden of
responsibility that comes with that, but also the thing of
loving a stranger. You know, that is one of the
central tenements of Christianity, I think, but actually of humanity
to love the other person who is not connected to
(21:50):
you in any way, who's put into your arms. And
the measure of what it would be to have a
child to put in your arms that was not connected
to you, That the child in this novel is not
connected to or doctor Troy, but it's put into their arms,
and how you respond to that at that moment.
Speaker 1 (22:05):
I understand you write one sentence at a time, which
seems like a stupid phrase now I say it out loud, but.
Speaker 3 (22:12):
You let it pull you along.
Speaker 2 (22:14):
Liked. Yes, I write one sentence out of time. So
no so because I don't plan out anything and I
just get a first sentence. I can only start a
book when I have a first sentence. I get a
first sentence, and I then try to figure out what
is the next sentence. I have no idea where it's going,
but I have a maybe foolish belief, but a belief
(22:34):
nonetheless that has stood me is that the book exists
out there and it's coming towards me. If I call
towards it and I mustn't force it. So I've described
it as my sense is that when I get a
first sentence, it's like the tip of an invisible thread
of which only the tip is visible. And that's that
first sentence. And if I tease it out a little
(22:57):
more all the time, it'll keep coming. Don't yank it,
don't force it, don't look at it too carefully. Just
follow the sentence, follow the sentence, and at the end
over here is a coat, in this case, a book
that has been always there, implied by that first sentence.
So it's coming towards me. I'm just trying to pay
attention to what's happening on the page. So that's how
(23:19):
I write. I write each sentence out loud, and I
say it out to myself because I'm sorry to tell you,
but I'm just writing the book for myself. You're an
added bonus, but really I would be doing it for
myself because it's the writing gives me the greatest pleasure
and profound joy. Beauty of language, rhythm, cadence, music, these things.
(23:43):
And I feel, in some again maybe invented way, that
I'm connected in some way to artist traditions of oral
storytelling and so when Chris and I first moved to
County Claire in nineteen eighty five, all our neighbors were
older people, and the entertainment was we went to their
houses in the evening. You'd go in the back door.
(24:03):
You didn't need to be invited. You would just go
in and sit down and have tea and they would
ask you about your day and so on. And we
were there in entertainment because we were trying to manage
four cows and we didn't know anything about cows and
finding out how to live in a place, and so
story was a way to pass the evening and no
television was on. There might be a radio on the
background of some music. But basically story was a way
(24:26):
to pass the evening, past the time. And therefore the
point of a story was not to get to the
end of a story. The point was not to get
to the point. The point is to pass the time.
Speaker 1 (24:37):
How long did it take you to have the faith
in that process in your books? You know, between you,
you and Chris have written twenty books in the forty
years since you moved to Ireland. How long did it
take you to have the faith in your skills as
a writer? To say, I'm going to delicately pull this
thread and enjoy the process.
Speaker 2 (24:58):
Okay, So the truth is I don't have any faith
in my skills as a writer, and I'm still a
person who is constantly asking the question is this any good?
And what seemed good today may not seem good tomorrow.
So you're constantly working with doubt. And I think that's necessary. Actually,
(25:18):
I've come not to resist it or worry about it.
And if there are any writers listening anywhere, don't be
afraid of doubt. Don't be afraid of thinking it's terrible
today and it was good yesterday. I think that's a
sort of necessary part of the creation.
Speaker 1 (25:30):
I just wanted to briefly touch on how much for
you your writing career, your creative, imaginative life is inseparable
from your marriage, from the life that you live in,
the life that you and Chris have made for yourselves.
Speaker 3 (25:46):
And I've read an interview with you where.
Speaker 1 (25:51):
You said to the interviewer, I feel like the word
wife doesn't say enough. It doesn't get to what I'm
trying to describe about Chris. I guess i'd say she's
my first rader, that the first rader is above all else.
You're right together, your garden together, You've built this life together. Yes,
(26:12):
do you have a sense of that as an extraordinary
creative collaboration rather than because that's not normal. Just to
be clear, my partner loves me, but she's irritated when
I come in the kitchen when she's there.
Speaker 2 (26:27):
No, I never think of Christmas, my wife. I never
think of that word. It seems very limiting. I think
of Chris is the other half of my soul. And
so we made that decision to be together from the
moment we met each other, and the decision to get
off the commuter train in Manhattan and go to this
(26:48):
four room cottage in County Clare was a joint decision
to see did we have any talent? And we make
each other's talents. She makes me a better person, and
I hope I make her a better person. That's how
it's beIN And when we adopted the two children, that
was part of that same thing. So to say, Chris
is my first reader. Chris is the only reader that counts.
(27:11):
I'm sorry everybody, She's the reader that counts. And the
last thing I'll say is just quickly, so when I finish,
when I'm working on a novel, and she knows I'm
working on a novel. In that time, there's no other income,
so our savings are diminishing. And for two years that's happening.
And everything depends therefore on us being able to sell
that novel at the end, and that gives us another
(27:32):
two years to live and carry on like that. So
it goes like this, So everything depends upon it. But
at no time during that does Chris say, show me
some pages. I want to know, is this any good?
So for two years I'll write the novel and she'll
know I'm writing the novel, and at the end, I'll
give it to her and I'll get it printed out.
It's a full manuscript, and it's there on the table
and I see then after about two or three days,
(27:52):
this many pages have turned over and they're like that
on the table. But she doesn't say anything. And then
a few more pages go over each day, and so
on and so forth, and for maybe a week she's
reading the novel, but she's not mentioning it, and I'm
not asking her. And that's how it is. But everything
depends upon it. And we gardened together, we worked together,
cooked dinner, or she cooks dinner and whatever, and that's
(28:13):
how it is. And now the last page is over
and the manuscript is upside down, and that was the
case with the Time of the Child. And she finished it,
turned the last page over, and she said nothing at all,
nothing nothing, not out of cruelty, because she wants to
be honest. She has a compulsion to be honest and true,
and she wants to exactly think what it is that
(28:35):
she wanted to say. So I waited, and normally the
writer is waiting for the person that wants the person
to say, oh, it's wonderful, and then the writer goes, yeah,
but how wonderful, and I got really wonderful or really
really wonderful and so on, and she's too honest to
do any of that. And she didn't do any of that.
And what she did in the end was she turned
to me and said, well, it's pure Nile Williams. And
(28:59):
at the time you go, oh, okay, is it wonderful
not Williams or bad not Williams. And in the end
I realized that actually that was the best thing any
writer can ever hear, because what all writers are trying
to do is essentially just make their signature. That's it.
It's that same moment that I began this discussion with
(29:20):
when I said, you go and what are the books
that you choose in the library, because they are actually you.
They're telling you who you are because they are the
books you choose. So in the same way when she
said it's pure Nile Williams, that actually is better than
it's wonderful, because that's the goal, to create something that
is actually your own spirit that has now come outside
(29:42):
you and is now in the physical binding of a book.
Speaker 3 (29:48):
Please join me in thanking the very nile wilderness.
Speaker 2 (29:53):
Thank you, Thank you for ma.
Speaker 3 (30:01):
Niall.
Speaker 1 (30:01):
Williams's latest novel, Time of the Child is available at
all good bookstores now, and if you're in Melbourne, get
along to the State Library Victoria. They have a new
exhibition that kicks off on the sixteenth of April. It's
called Make Believe Encounters with Misinformation. It's free to the
public and it's all about the many ways in which
misinformation has shaped our lives and our culture. It's playful,
(30:24):
curious and terribly terribly timely. Before we go, I wanted
to tell you what I've been reading this week, and
(30:44):
former read this guest, Kate Grenville has a new book
of nonfiction out. It's a terrific book and well worth reading,
and dives into the story behind the writing of her
classic The Secret River. It's called Unsettled, a journey through
time and place, and she grabbed with both her ancestry
and the complicated, forgotten, denied history of this country. It's
(31:06):
a terrific greed.
Speaker 3 (31:07):
You can find it and all the others.
Speaker 1 (31:09):
We mentioned at your favorite independent bookstore. That's it for
this week's show. If you enjoyed it, please tell your
friends and rate and review us. It does genuinely help.
Next week, I'm read this and another Irish writer, but
this one calls Australia home. It's Chris Flynn.
Speaker 4 (31:30):
That opening scene of the book is exactly what happened
in my dream. I live in a small regional time
and I was there on the footy ground watching it
all happen. And when I got up the next morning,
I brought it down and it's the opening scene of
the book. Almost forbid him as like as it happened
in my dream. And then over the next hour the
(31:52):
rest of it all just appeared. So the whole book
was there right to the ending, right from the beginning,
and I thought, oh, bloody hell, now I'm going to
have to write the friggin thing.
Speaker 3 (32:03):
Read.
Speaker 1 (32:03):
This is a Schwartz Media production, made possible by the
generous support of the our group.
Speaker 3 (32:08):
The show is.
Speaker 1 (32:08):
Produced and edited by Clara Ames, with mixing this week
from Zalton Fetcher, who also provides our original compositions. See
you next week.
Welcome to read this arguably Australia's pre eminent podcast for
interviewing Irish authors seriously. At some point I look back
over our archive and amongst our brilliant cavalcade of guests,
there is very healthy representation from the country of my grandparents,
Kilan Hughes, Kolm Toybin, the two Pauls, Mariy and Lynch
(00:22):
and Enwright, and our dream guest list for future episodes
probably has another half dozen Irish writers. At least Kevin
Barry or Claire Keegan would be a dream just for starters,
and that's not even to mention Sally Rooney. The list
is lengthy. There's something to be said for the breadth
and depth and general robustness of contemporary Irish literature, smart
(00:43):
government policies to support the arts and writers in particular,
and a strong literary tradition that's well read and well understood,
and maybe something mysterious about the way that country tells stories.
A joy and a sense of play and play, a
willingness to meander and digress, but to hone in with
precision and clarity when required. Our guest this week is
(01:07):
another Irishman who is indisputably part of that conversation. Niall
Williams was studying in a university in New York when
he and Christine Breen fell in love and made the
decision to leave the Manhattan rat race and move into
a two hundred year old cottage on the west coast
of Ireland in a place called kil Tumpa in West Claire.
(01:29):
As they put it, they wanted to find out if
they had the creative talent to make their lives there.
That was forty years ago this month, and spoiler alert,
they had the creative talent. They co authored books together,
they wrote books separately. They made art and gardened and
raised a family and built four decades of life. And
(01:49):
amongst those books, Nile's novels started to build this reputation
for a skillfully deployed mix of warmth and joy. His
first novel, Four Letters of Love, was celebrated as a
modern Irish classic, and after years of development and speculation,
later this year, will be made into a film starring
Pierce Brosnan and Helena Bottom Carter. But his three most
(02:12):
recent novels have seen his acclaim rise and rise further.
In A History of the Rain, which was long listed
for the twenty fourteen Booker. He introduced a fictional town
as its backdrop. It was called Faha, and his subsequent book,
This Is Happiness puts far Harf front and center. In
that book, he tells the story of the nineteen fifty
(02:34):
eight introduction of electricity to the town. The book attracted
rapturous reviews. The word enchanting gets thrown around a lot,
and upon finishing it, Niall Williams realized he wasn't done
with the people of Faha, or perhaps more accurately, they
weren't done with him. He visited Australia last month and
(02:54):
as lucky enough to interview him at the State Library
of Victoria. Before we started our conversation, he and christ
And got a tour from staff through the building and
the archives. His love of books and of the community
of people that had devoted to them was palpable. We
sat down in front of a devoted Melbourne audience to
discuss his latest book, the latest Faha book, Time of
(03:16):
the Child. It's now the early sixties and the focus
has shifted to the town doctor Jack Troy and his
oldest daughter Ronnie, and what happens when an abandoned baby
girl is brought into their home. I'm Michael Williams and
this is read. This a show about the books we
love and the stories behind me.
Speaker 2 (03:46):
Thank you all.
Speaker 1 (03:52):
I did apologize when we're doing the sound check because
it feels somehow disrespectful that Melbourne, of all cities, couldn't
turn on the rain for the poet laureate of rain.
This man can write a description of rain that rivals
no other. Is that your natural weather mode? Are you
most comfortable writing about it?
Speaker 2 (04:11):
Hello, everybody. Chris and I have lived in County Claire
for forty years. In that time, we've had to come
to an accommodation with the rain, and because it rains
a lot, I have to come to a place where
I could see the rain not as the enemy, not
as something against me in some way. I finally came
(04:32):
to grips with it when I wrote History of the Rain,
where I began to understand the idea that the rain
comes from the sky, goes into the river, which goes
to the sea, which goes back into the sky, and
that circular motion that happens. That traffic of rain and
transitory noess seemed to me to become sort of some
(04:53):
kind of metaphor for our own existence. And because that
novel deals with Ruth Swain trying to find out where
her dead father has gone, and so the Rain became
part of that circularity as she searched for him.
Speaker 1 (05:07):
I'm very glad you brought up History of the Rain
because it seems an appropriate book maybe for us to
start out a conversation tonight. It's our first glimpse of
Faha in your work, even if it's through a window
barely scene, it's out there. But it is also a
book very much concerned with the business of books, and
given the building way in at the moment. Yes, I
(05:29):
wonder if you could expand on Ruth's quest to find
her father through books.
Speaker 2 (05:34):
Yes. So I never know where a book comes from
until after I've written it. I have no plan. When
I'm writing a book. I'm literally following one sentence and
seeing what that sentence implies with the next sentence. It's
only after I've written a book that I look back
and see what was happening in my life at the
time that I can trace back some things in my
(05:54):
or our lives that have influenced the shaping and making
of the book. When I look back at history of
the Reign, I remember that my father had died, and
as is the common way I think among Irish fathers
and sons, if there was emotional material happening in your life,
you didn't really speak to your father about it. So
(06:15):
my father knew that I had written a novel called
Four Letters of Love, so we definitely weren't going to
talk about that. And so when I wrote the novels,
I would bring them and give them to my father
and he'd say sign that to me, and I would
sign it to him, and he would take it and
put on the shelf. And that was throughout the course
of his life. Each book would go on a shelf,
(06:38):
and we would never ever speak about it. But when
my father died, he left a handwritten will, and in
that will, the only mention that I get in that
will is for nihle my books just that, and it
was like a acknowledgment back to my life choice. And
(06:58):
in turn, it was also in acknowledgment of the fact
that my writing life began with my reading life, and
that was that every two weeks my father brought us
to the library, so he would come home from work
and in the evening, and on Wednesday evenings the library
stayed open until nine, and so by six thirty half
past six, we would get in the car and drive
(07:20):
to Ballsbridge in Dublin to the Pembroke Library. And when
he let you in the doors of that library at night,
he went to his section and you could go anywhere
and you didn't have to gather back again until half
past eight and sign out your books with him, and
he would just look at your books, and I'd carry
out my stack of books, he'd carry out his, and
that was it. And then two weeks later we'd be
back again in that situation. And it was my first
(07:42):
experience of the idea that you can choose your own books,
and what a freeing idea that was, because in school
they said this is the textbook, everyone read this. But
when you walked in the doors library, go anywhere and
the books that you were picking become part of your
own definition as to who you are. And for me,
(08:05):
at age twelve, that was a sort of extraordinary free thing.
You could pick anything. So when he died and I
drove to Dublin from County Clare, so across the country
to the nursing home, where he had died to collect
his books, and I brought them home, something extraordinarly powerful
happened to me, and that was the sense that even
(08:25):
though these were not the books that I would have
chosen myself, they were the books that my father had read.
So his hands had held them, his hands had turned
the pages, his eyes had been on each page. And
so in some way that became the life spring of
the book that became History of the Reign. Where Root's father,
the poet has died, and he has routed his ill
(08:47):
and doesn't leave the house, and she is in the
room in the attic where all her father's books have
been left, and she begins to read those books to
find her father Nile.
Speaker 1 (08:57):
With that in mind, I can't let you rush past
Pembroke Library. As a twelve year old, in the books
that you were choosing, what was defining you then?
Speaker 3 (09:06):
What did you read?
Speaker 2 (09:08):
Almost nothing that was Irish based, because you were using
books as a sort of doorway to the world, and
you were very aware as a twelve year old that
Ireland was a small place out on the edge of
the Atlantic, and that the rest of the world will
where all the adventures took place even in England. That
(09:28):
so there was no Irish reading at that time. It
wasn't until I was maybe thirteen and fourteen fifteen started
reading short Irish short story writers Frank O'Connor and Daniel
Corkory and of people like that transformative moment for me.
In the moment, I think that is the book that
made me want to be a writer was Charles Dickens's
(09:48):
Great Expectations, which we had to read at age fourteen.
Everyone in the country had to read it for your
intersert exam, which is extraordinary to think of nowadays have
every fourteen year old in the country reading Great Expectations,
not abridged Great Explanations, to full Expectations. So the significant
thing I've told it before was that mister Mason, our
(10:10):
English teacher, he sat at the desk at the top
and you opened Great Expectations, and the four long windows
were steamed up with condensation, so you're inside a closed space,
and he would say your name. He'd call out a
name and that person would begin reading on the page,
and everybody else in the classroom thirty two boys had
(10:32):
to pay really close attention to what line what the
person reading was allowed was on, because at any moment,
even halfway through a sentence, mister Mason could call out
your name, and then you would have to carry on
from exactly where the person had stopped. And if you
failed to carry on, you got to write out the
page of Great Expectations that night, which seemed a lot
(10:54):
of writing out. It was a better idea than giving lines,
but it was intense. So as a result of that,
we read Great Expectations attached by the Finger, and so
I was inside the book through that finger portal and
through watching it so carefully. So when Pip fell in
love with Di Stella, I fell in love with di Stella.
(11:15):
When she rejected him, she rejected me, and so that
was the reason that I entered. I entered the book
first fully. I think, then.
Speaker 1 (11:25):
It's a moment you give to know from memory, and
this is happiness where he's trying to conjure up a
havishm figure in his mind, and that connection with that
novel is a really important one to.
Speaker 3 (11:36):
Him there and we'll come to it in a moment.
Speaker 1 (11:38):
But in the time of the Child, you have a
character who is clearly doomed to be a writer. You
make it clear that that's her fate and her future.
Is that a cur through a blessing you're giving Ronnie
in that book.
Speaker 2 (11:53):
Well, for me, it's a blessing. I make most sense
to the world by being a writer. I'm a better
person when i'm writing, unerstand the world better when i'm writing,
and I can live better as a person writing. So
I think for Ronnie in Time of the Child, it
will be a kind of salvation as a writer. In writing,
same as in reading, I think, is a way to
(12:14):
conquer loneliness, and it's also that extraordinary thing. I think
James Wood the Critic, spoke about it in his book
The Nearest Thing to Life, and he talks about this
idea that when you're reading a novel, there's a kind
of communion that happens. Your own loneliness is banished, and
(12:34):
you move towards the other, the person that is inside
the pages, and that in turn comes back to deepen
your own humanity. It's kind of circular gift that's given
out and comes back to you through the experience of reading.
So I think for Ronnie, especially as a woman writer
in nineteen sixties Ireland, difficult, difficult, difficult, that will be
(12:56):
her salvation and how she comes to accept who she
is and how she is That.
Speaker 1 (13:02):
Strength and that community given by the experience of rating,
I think is a really important thing and evident in
your work that you do as you say you have
the line about Ronnie. That added to this reserve was
not only the screened lives of all the women in
the parish at the time, but the marginal nature of
all writers, that idea that a writer is inevitably outside
(13:26):
the community that they're writing about.
Speaker 3 (13:28):
Do you feel that.
Speaker 2 (13:29):
I do, absolutely. I think probably I was a marginal
person before I was a writer, but then found that
that was a good place for a writer to be.
So the writer should be in the margins and not
in the center. And so I believe that profoundly that
I'm trying to put another person on the page. It's
not about me, it's other people, and other people are
(13:50):
sort of endlessly fascinating because of this bizarre thing that
everybody thinks they're normal. And how how bizarre that is
when you think about it, that actually there's not two
people on the planet who are the same, but each
one thinks that they are normal. And that's just fantastic
(14:12):
for a fiction writer. Because people keep revealing their oddity
and their quirks in which they think is this is
a normal thing to do.
Speaker 1 (14:22):
I think that's true in a sense, in an individual
and human sense. It's also true of a place. You're
right early in This is happiness. Farha was no more
nor less than any other like place. If you could
find it, you'd be on your way somewhere else. The
country is filled with places of more blatant beauty. Good
luck to them. Farha doesn't care. It has long since
(14:43):
accepted the by dint of personality and geography, its destiny
was to be a place passed over and gently wholly forgotten.
Tell me about that place called far out the window
of Ruth Swain's house, where she doesn't go.
Speaker 2 (15:00):
So Fao would be embarrassed that we're actually talking about it,
and they talk about somewhere else, and the more beautiful places.
There are more notable places, and you shouldn't if you're
stopping in Fa, you're asking the way somewhere else. Part
of the attraction for me in the place, for how
I think in the making of it was ordinariness. Because
(15:21):
the longer I've lived, the more I've come to appreciate
the extraordinary thing about ordinariness and the same thing that
I just said about people feeling that they are normal
and they are actually quite extraordinary. So sometime during the
writing of This Is Happiness, something happened to me that
hadn't happened before when I was writing a novel, And
(15:44):
that is maybe two thirds of the way through, I
realized I didn't want the book to end, that I
want to stay in this world and with these people,
and I was actually had fallen in love. I'd fallen
in love with Christy and Noel and those people and
the whole world of it. And I found that the
more I wrote, more characters were appearing and that was
(16:05):
an interesting character. And at this person pause a minute
on the street and go in here, and this is
an interesting So it was becoming larger the more I
was in it. And so before I finished This Is Happiness,
I knew that I was going to write another fan novel.
I wanted to stay there, and the hard thing would
be that it wasn't going to be a first person novel.
I wanted to make each novel stand alone and not
(16:27):
be not be a sequel as such, but still to
create a series of novels that would be a continuum.
And I think before even before I started Time of
the Child, I realized that my aim would be to
try to write a series of novels in the time
between the coming of electricity and the coming of the Internet.
(16:47):
I'll plot the second half of the twentieth century in
one community, and what happens to church and community, and
what happens to people, families, and all the change that
occurs as to tell division comms and so on and so
forth as things change in a community over that period
of time.
Speaker 1 (17:09):
When we return, Nialla and I discuss why a doctor
makes sense for the main character of Kind of the Child,
and he also shares why there's only one reader of
his work that really matters.
Speaker 3 (17:21):
We'll be right back.
Speaker 1 (17:23):
So now you've undertaken, or you've been taken over by
this project of her. There must have been a certain
satisfaction in seeing the paths that you'd opened up to yourselves.
(17:46):
And in particular, I'm thinking about doctor Troy as the
central character of Time of the Child, because, as you
make very clear, a doctor and a place like Faha
is privy to everything.
Speaker 2 (17:57):
Yes, when I was writing this is howiness where the
doctor first appears. I didn't think he would be the
next major character of time of the Child, But I
think there were a few things that informed that decision
as to how that came about, again only in hindsight.
So first of all, there was an extraordinary moment, and
this was a moment that we all lived through when
COVID first began, And there came a moment when everybody
(18:22):
was asked at a certain time to go outside and
applaud healthcare workers bang pots and pans if you were
in cities, and applaud them a specific moment in time,
like it was six o'clock and everybody did it. And
so that sense of what it was to be in
healthcare and going out and dealing with ill people all
(18:45):
the time made me think in my microcos fictional world
of the doctor in a village where every single person
is his patient. So I thought it was an extraordinary
thing that first of all about doctors, and then this
idea in a community where he knows all the secrets
of everybody, the corporal secrets of everybody, and what would
(19:08):
it be like if he had a secret, because he
can't tell any of those people. And that has created
that dynamic of that character.
Speaker 1 (19:16):
One of the crucial things you reveal about him, though,
is that he has been thwarted in He has lost,
as he says it, the opportunity for love a second
time in his life, and for the second far hard
book in a row. You have a man who's in
love with any Money.
Speaker 2 (19:35):
Yes, we're all. We're all in love with any Mooney.
Speaker 3 (19:38):
So I'm curious about this.
Speaker 1 (19:39):
Is any Mooney going to be the kind of stob
that goes across decades in this town.
Speaker 2 (19:45):
Yeah, maybe go back to us selling gra victations. I
don't know to any Mooney. Yes, is the doctor was
in love with any Mooney, but it was undeclared love.
And just as he was about to declare it, we
find out in this novel, was when Christian this his
happiness had arrived back who was her first love. So
the thing about the doctor is at the start of
the novel his love didn't happen, and he has fallen
(20:08):
out of love with the human race, and he has
a profound melancholy and he doesn't believe anything in this
life is going to shift it. So we have to,
over the course of the novel move the doctor back
into humanity, and it comes in a most shocking way
to him, which is that he witnesses his daughter fall
in love with a baby, and that was not something
(20:32):
he could have expected, but that in turn becomes the
bridge to get him back into humanity.
Speaker 1 (20:38):
Could you have written Time of the Child without having
become a grandfather yourself?
Speaker 2 (20:43):
No, certainly not so. Our daughter Jirdre gave birth to
Esme Willow during the time when I was writing this,
and it was an extraordinary thing. When I first held
Esme in my arms. Nothing had quite prepared me for that.
It was a shock to feel how much feeling I
felt rushed through me in that moment, and for my daughter,
(21:06):
and seeing my daughter in a completely different light as
a mother. Suddenly, in an instant she was a mother,
and that was just so profoundly moving. And I was
sort of, I think, surprised by joyous Wordsworth. I was
surprised by love pulls through me. And it seemed to
me that when writing the novel, you know, maybe because
(21:29):
in our life, and for Christ and I life, we
have the chosen family. As such, we chose to adopt
the children and that and there was a burden of
responsibility that comes with that, but also the thing of
loving a stranger. You know, that is one of the
central tenements of Christianity, I think, but actually of humanity
to love the other person who is not connected to
(21:50):
you in any way, who's put into your arms. And
the measure of what it would be to have a
child to put in your arms that was not connected
to you, That the child in this novel is not
connected to or doctor Troy, but it's put into their arms,
and how you respond to that at that moment.
Speaker 1 (22:05):
I understand you write one sentence at a time, which
seems like a stupid phrase now I say it out loud, but.
Speaker 3 (22:12):
You let it pull you along.
Speaker 2 (22:14):
Liked. Yes, I write one sentence out of time. So
no so because I don't plan out anything and I
just get a first sentence. I can only start a
book when I have a first sentence. I get a
first sentence, and I then try to figure out what
is the next sentence. I have no idea where it's going,
but I have a maybe foolish belief, but a belief
(22:34):
nonetheless that has stood me is that the book exists
out there and it's coming towards me. If I call
towards it and I mustn't force it. So I've described
it as my sense is that when I get a
first sentence, it's like the tip of an invisible thread
of which only the tip is visible. And that's that
first sentence. And if I tease it out a little
(22:57):
more all the time, it'll keep coming. Don't yank it,
don't force it, don't look at it too carefully. Just
follow the sentence, follow the sentence, and at the end
over here is a coat, in this case, a book
that has been always there, implied by that first sentence.
So it's coming towards me. I'm just trying to pay
attention to what's happening on the page. So that's how
(23:19):
I write. I write each sentence out loud, and I
say it out to myself because I'm sorry to tell you,
but I'm just writing the book for myself. You're an
added bonus, but really I would be doing it for
myself because it's the writing gives me the greatest pleasure
and profound joy. Beauty of language, rhythm, cadence, music, these things.
(23:43):
And I feel, in some again maybe invented way, that
I'm connected in some way to artist traditions of oral
storytelling and so when Chris and I first moved to
County Claire in nineteen eighty five, all our neighbors were
older people, and the entertainment was we went to their
houses in the evening. You'd go in the back door.
(24:03):
You didn't need to be invited. You would just go
in and sit down and have tea and they would
ask you about your day and so on. And we
were there in entertainment because we were trying to manage
four cows and we didn't know anything about cows and
finding out how to live in a place, and so
story was a way to pass the evening and no
television was on. There might be a radio on the
background of some music. But basically story was a way
(24:26):
to pass the evening, past the time. And therefore the
point of a story was not to get to the
end of a story. The point was not to get
to the point. The point is to pass the time.
Speaker 1 (24:37):
How long did it take you to have the faith
in that process in your books? You know, between you,
you and Chris have written twenty books in the forty
years since you moved to Ireland. How long did it
take you to have the faith in your skills as
a writer? To say, I'm going to delicately pull this
thread and enjoy the process.
Speaker 2 (24:58):
Okay, So the truth is I don't have any faith
in my skills as a writer, and I'm still a
person who is constantly asking the question is this any good?
And what seemed good today may not seem good tomorrow.
So you're constantly working with doubt. And I think that's necessary. Actually,
(25:18):
I've come not to resist it or worry about it.
And if there are any writers listening anywhere, don't be
afraid of doubt. Don't be afraid of thinking it's terrible
today and it was good yesterday. I think that's a
sort of necessary part of the creation.
Speaker 1 (25:30):
I just wanted to briefly touch on how much for
you your writing career, your creative, imaginative life is inseparable
from your marriage, from the life that you live in,
the life that you and Chris have made for yourselves.
Speaker 3 (25:46):
And I've read an interview with you where.
Speaker 1 (25:51):
You said to the interviewer, I feel like the word
wife doesn't say enough. It doesn't get to what I'm
trying to describe about Chris. I guess i'd say she's
my first rader, that the first rader is above all else.
You're right together, your garden together, You've built this life together. Yes,
(26:12):
do you have a sense of that as an extraordinary
creative collaboration rather than because that's not normal. Just to
be clear, my partner loves me, but she's irritated when
I come in the kitchen when she's there.
Speaker 2 (26:27):
No, I never think of Christmas, my wife. I never
think of that word. It seems very limiting. I think
of Chris is the other half of my soul. And
so we made that decision to be together from the
moment we met each other, and the decision to get
off the commuter train in Manhattan and go to this
(26:48):
four room cottage in County Clare was a joint decision
to see did we have any talent? And we make
each other's talents. She makes me a better person, and
I hope I make her a better person. That's how
it's beIN And when we adopted the two children, that
was part of that same thing. So to say, Chris
is my first reader. Chris is the only reader that counts.
(27:11):
I'm sorry everybody, She's the reader that counts. And the
last thing I'll say is just quickly, so when I finish,
when I'm working on a novel, and she knows I'm
working on a novel. In that time, there's no other income,
so our savings are diminishing. And for two years that's happening.
And everything depends therefore on us being able to sell
that novel at the end, and that gives us another
(27:32):
two years to live and carry on like that. So
it goes like this, So everything depends upon it. But
at no time during that does Chris say, show me
some pages. I want to know, is this any good?
So for two years I'll write the novel and she'll
know I'm writing the novel, and at the end, I'll
give it to her and I'll get it printed out.
It's a full manuscript, and it's there on the table
and I see then after about two or three days,
(27:52):
this many pages have turned over and they're like that
on the table. But she doesn't say anything. And then
a few more pages go over each day, and so
on and so forth, and for maybe a week she's
reading the novel, but she's not mentioning it, and I'm
not asking her. And that's how it is. But everything
depends upon it. And we gardened together, we worked together,
cooked dinner, or she cooks dinner and whatever, and that's
(28:13):
how it is. And now the last page is over
and the manuscript is upside down, and that was the
case with the Time of the Child. And she finished it,
turned the last page over, and she said nothing at all,
nothing nothing, not out of cruelty, because she wants to
be honest. She has a compulsion to be honest and true,
and she wants to exactly think what it is that
(28:35):
she wanted to say. So I waited, and normally the
writer is waiting for the person that wants the person
to say, oh, it's wonderful, and then the writer goes, yeah,
but how wonderful, and I got really wonderful or really
really wonderful and so on, and she's too honest to
do any of that. And she didn't do any of that.
And what she did in the end was she turned
to me and said, well, it's pure Nile Williams. And
(28:59):
at the time you go, oh, okay, is it wonderful
not Williams or bad not Williams. And in the end
I realized that actually that was the best thing any
writer can ever hear, because what all writers are trying
to do is essentially just make their signature. That's it.
It's that same moment that I began this discussion with
(29:20):
when I said, you go and what are the books
that you choose in the library, because they are actually you.
They're telling you who you are because they are the
books you choose. So in the same way when she
said it's pure Nile Williams, that actually is better than
it's wonderful, because that's the goal, to create something that
is actually your own spirit that has now come outside
(29:42):
you and is now in the physical binding of a book.
Speaker 3 (29:48):
Please join me in thanking the very nile wilderness.
Speaker 2 (29:53):
Thank you, Thank you for ma.
Speaker 3 (30:01):
Niall.
Speaker 1 (30:01):
Williams's latest novel, Time of the Child is available at
all good bookstores now, and if you're in Melbourne, get
along to the State Library Victoria. They have a new
exhibition that kicks off on the sixteenth of April. It's
called Make Believe Encounters with Misinformation. It's free to the
public and it's all about the many ways in which
misinformation has shaped our lives and our culture. It's playful,
(30:24):
curious and terribly terribly timely. Before we go, I wanted
to tell you what I've been reading this week, and
(30:44):
former read this guest, Kate Grenville has a new book
of nonfiction out. It's a terrific book and well worth reading,
and dives into the story behind the writing of her
classic The Secret River. It's called Unsettled, a journey through
time and place, and she grabbed with both her ancestry
and the complicated, forgotten, denied history of this country. It's
(31:06):
a terrific greed.
Speaker 3 (31:07):
You can find it and all the others.
Speaker 1 (31:09):
We mentioned at your favorite independent bookstore. That's it for
this week's show. If you enjoyed it, please tell your
friends and rate and review us. It does genuinely help.
Next week, I'm read this and another Irish writer, but
this one calls Australia home. It's Chris Flynn.
Speaker 4 (31:30):
That opening scene of the book is exactly what happened
in my dream. I live in a small regional time
and I was there on the footy ground watching it
all happen. And when I got up the next morning,
I brought it down and it's the opening scene of
the book. Almost forbid him as like as it happened
in my dream. And then over the next hour the
(31:52):
rest of it all just appeared. So the whole book
was there right to the ending, right from the beginning,
and I thought, oh, bloody hell, now I'm going to
have to write the friggin thing.
Speaker 3 (32:03):
Read.
Speaker 1 (32:03):
This is a Schwartz Media production, made possible by the
generous support of the our group.
Speaker 3 (32:08):
The show is.
Speaker 1 (32:08):
Produced and edited by Clara Ames, with mixing this week
from Zalton Fetcher, who also provides our original compositions. See
you next week.
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.