Speaker 1: Hey there, it's Ruby Jones and as always I'm back
Speaker 1: to share another episode of Read This, Schwartz Media's weekly
Speaker 1: books podcast. It's hosted by editor of The Monthly Michael
Speaker 1: Williams and features conversations with some of the most talented
Speaker 1: writers from Australia and around the world. This episode features
Speaker 1: a live conversation between Michael and Irish writer Nile Williams,
Speaker 1: which was recorded back in March at the State Library
Speaker 1: of Victoria. As usual, I'm joined by Michael to tell
Speaker 1: me a little bit more about the episode.
Speaker 2: Hi, Michael, Ruby Jones.
Speaker 1: So, Michael, on this week's episode of Read This, you're
Speaker 1: in conversation with yet another Irish author, Noah Williams, and
Speaker 1: looking back at the show's archive, I think it is
Speaker 1: fair to say that there is a very healthy representation
Speaker 1: of Irish writers in general. Would you agree?
Speaker 2: Yes. Look, I don't want to say that it's because
Speaker 2: I have Irish an's history or anything, but at this
Speaker 2: point it does feel a little bit like Read This
Speaker 2: is the country's pre eminent podcast for Irish authors being interviewed.
Speaker 2: If you look at our archives, some of the great
Speaker 2: contemporary Irish writers are there. Kilan Hughes, Colintoy Bin, the
Speaker 2: Two Pauls, Paul Maray and Paul Lynch, and Enright. I mean,
Speaker 2: it's pretty bonkers, and frankly, any dream list I have
Speaker 2: for future guests has another half dozen writers in the mix,
Speaker 2: Claire Keegan, Sally Rooney, Kevin, Barry Bliss. There is something
Speaker 2: to be said for the breadth and depth and general
Speaker 2: robustness of contemporary Irish literature. Part of it, I think,
Speaker 2: is smart government policies that support the arts well and
Speaker 2: writers in particular. But also it's to do with the
Speaker 2: strength of the literary tradition that's well read and well understood.
Speaker 2: And I don't want to suggest these things are racially predetermined,
Speaker 2: but culturally there is something about the way the Irish
Speaker 2: tells stories, a joy and a sense of place and play,
Speaker 2: and a willingness to meander and digress. All of it
Speaker 2: comes together to make for wonderful literature, and Nile Williams
Speaker 2: is definitely part of that conversation.
Speaker 1: So Nil has written more than twenty books at this point,
Speaker 1: both novels on his own and works of nonfiction with
Speaker 1: his wife, Christine Breen, but in this episode you are
Speaker 1: focusing on his latest book Time of the Child, tell
Speaker 1: Me a little Bit about It.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Time of the Child is the latest in what
Speaker 2: is shaping up to be a series from Nile Williams.
Speaker 2: He was longlisted for the twenty fourteen Booker for his
Speaker 2: book History of the Rain, which was an account of
Speaker 2: a woman kind of lying in bed contemplating her life.
Speaker 2: But outside the windows of her room was the town
Speaker 2: of Faha, a fictional town that he had created that
Speaker 2: is in that book only sketchily drawn, but intriguingly so.
Speaker 2: So perhaps it was unsurprising when his follow up book,
Speaker 2: This Is Happiness, put far half front and sent her.
Speaker 2: In that book he tells the story of the nineteen
Speaker 2: fifty eight introduction of electricity to the town, and the
Speaker 2: book attracted rapturous reviews. The word enchanting gets thrown around
Speaker 2: a lot. Upon finishing it, Niall Williams realized he wasn't
Speaker 2: done with the people of Faha, or maybe, to put
Speaker 2: it more accurately, they weren't done with him. And so
Speaker 2: his latest book is another far hard book. It's called
Speaker 2: Time of the Child. It's said in the early sixties,
Speaker 2: and the focus has shifted to the town Doctor Jack
Speaker 2: Troy and his oldest daughter, Ronnie, and it follows what
Speaker 2: happens when an abandoned baby girl is brought into their home.
Speaker 2: It's really lovely.
Speaker 1: Coming up in just a moment the imaginary village of
Speaker 1: Niall Williams.
Speaker 2: Thank you now. I did apologize when we're doing the
Speaker 2: sound check because it feels somehow disrespectful that Melbourne, of
Speaker 2: all cities, couldn't turn on the rain for the poet
Speaker 2: laureate of rain. This man can write a description of
Speaker 2: rain that rivals no other. Is that your natural weather mode?
Speaker 2: Are you most comfortable writing above that?
Speaker 3: Hello everybody. Chris and I have lived in County Claire
Speaker 3: for forty years. In that time, we've had to come
Speaker 3: to an accommodation with the rain, and because it rains
Speaker 3: a lot, I have to come to a place where
Speaker 3: I could see the rain not as the enemy, not
Speaker 3: as something against me in some way. I finally came
Speaker 3: to grips with it when I wrote History of the Rain,
Speaker 3: where I began to understand the idea that the rain
Speaker 3: comes from the sky, goes into the river, which goes
Speaker 3: to the sea, which goes back into the sky, and
Speaker 3: that circular motion that happens that traffic of rain and
Speaker 3: transitoriness seemed to me to become sort of some kind
Speaker 3: of metaphor for our own existence. And because that novel
Speaker 3: deals with Ruth Swain trying to find out where her
Speaker 3: dead father has gone, and so the rain became part
Speaker 3: of that circularity as she searched for him.
Speaker 2: I'm very glad you brought up History of the Rain
Speaker 2: because it seems it's an appropriate book maybe for us
Speaker 2: to start out a conversation tonight. It's our first glimpse
Speaker 2: of Faha in your work. Even if it's through a
Speaker 2: window barely scene, it's out there. But it is also
Speaker 2: a book very much concerned with the business of books,
Speaker 2: and given the building way in at the moment. Yes,
Speaker 2: I wonder if you could expand on Ruth's quest to
Speaker 2: find her father through books.
Speaker 3: Yes. So I never know where a book comes from
Speaker 3: until after I've written it. I have no plan. When
Speaker 3: I'm writing a book. I'm literally following one sentence and
Speaker 3: seeing what that sentence implies with the next sentence. It's
Speaker 3: only after I've written a book that I look back
Speaker 3: and see what was happening in my life at the
Speaker 3: time that I can trace back some things in my
Speaker 3: or our lives that have influenced the shaping and making
Speaker 3: of the book. When I look back at history of
Speaker 3: the Reign, I remember that my father had died, and,
Speaker 3: as is the common way I think among Irish fathers
Speaker 3: and sons, if there was emotional material happening in your life,
Speaker 3: you didn't really speak to your father about it. So
Speaker 3: my father knew that I had written a novel called
Speaker 3: Four Letters of Love, so we definitely weren't going to
Speaker 3: talk about that. And so when I wrote the novels,
Speaker 3: I would bring them and give them to my father
Speaker 3: and he'd say sign that to me, and I would
Speaker 3: sign it to him, and he would take it and
Speaker 3: put on the shelf. And that was throughout the course
Speaker 3: of his life. Each book would go on a shelf
Speaker 3: and we would never ever speak about it. But when
Speaker 3: my father died, he left a handwritten will, and in
Speaker 3: that will, the only mention that I get in that
Speaker 3: will is for nihle my books, just that, and it
Speaker 3: was like a acknowledgment back to my life choice. And
Speaker 3: in turn, it was also an acknowledgment of the fact
Speaker 3: that my writing life began with my reading life, and
Speaker 3: that was that every two weeks my father brought us
Speaker 3: to the library, so he would come home from work
Speaker 3: and in the evening, and on Wednesday evenings the library
Speaker 3: stayed open until nine, and so by six thirty half
Speaker 3: past six, we would get in the car and drive
Speaker 3: to Ballsbridge in Dublin to the Pembroke Library. And when
Speaker 3: he let you in the doors of that library at night,
Speaker 3: he went to his section and you could go anywhere
Speaker 3: and you didn't have to gather back again until half
Speaker 3: past eight and sign out your books with him, and
Speaker 3: he would just look at your books, and I'd carry
Speaker 3: out my stack of books, he'd carry out his, and
Speaker 3: that was it. And then two weeks later we'd be
Speaker 3: back again in that situation. And it was my first
Speaker 3: experience of the idea that you can choose your own books,
Speaker 3: and what a freeing idea that was, because in school
Speaker 3: they said this is the textbook, everyone read this. But
Speaker 3: when you walt in the doors library, go anywhere and
Speaker 3: the books that you were picking become part of your
Speaker 3: own definition as to who you are. And for me,
Speaker 3: at age twelve, that was a sort of extraordinary free thing.
Speaker 3: You could pick anything. So when he died and I
Speaker 3: drove to Dublin from County Claire, so across the country
Speaker 3: to the nursing home where he had died to collect
Speaker 3: his books, and I brought them home, something extraordinarly powerful
Speaker 3: happened to me, and that was the sense that even
Speaker 3: though these were not the books that I would have
Speaker 3: chosen myself, they were the books that my father had read.
Speaker 3: So his hands had held them, his hands had turned
Speaker 3: the pages, his eyes had been on each page, and
Speaker 3: so in some way that became the life spring of
Speaker 3: the book that became History of the Reign. Where Root's father,
Speaker 3: the poet, has died, and he has route is ill
Speaker 3: and doesn't leave the house, and she is in the
Speaker 3: room in the attic where all her father's books have
Speaker 3: been left, and she begins to read those books to
Speaker 3: find her father Nile.
Speaker 2: With that in mind, I can't let you rush past
Speaker 2: Pembroke Library. As a twelve year old, in the books
Speaker 2: that you were choosing, what was defining you in what
Speaker 2: did you read?
Speaker 3: Almost nothing that was Irish based, because you were using
Speaker 3: books as a sort of doorway to the world, and
Speaker 3: you were very aware as a twelve year old that
Speaker 3: Ireland was a small place out on the edge of
Speaker 3: the Atlantic and that the rest of the world will
Speaker 3: where all the adventures took place, even in England. That so,
Speaker 3: there was no Irish reading at that time. It wasn't
Speaker 3: until I was maybe thirteen and fourteen fifteen started reading
Speaker 3: short Irish short story writers Frank O'Connor and Daniel Corkory
Speaker 3: and people like that transformative moment for me. In the
Speaker 3: moment I think that is the book that made me
Speaker 3: want to be a writer was Charles Dickens's Great Expectations,
Speaker 3: which we had to read at age fourteen. Everyone in
Speaker 3: the country had to read it for your intersert exam,
Speaker 3: which is extraordinary to think of nowadays, having every fourteen
Speaker 3: year old in the country reading Great Expectations, not abridged
Speaker 3: Great Explanations, to full Great Expectations. So the significant thing
Speaker 3: I've told you before was that mister Mason, our English teacher,
Speaker 3: he sat at the desk at the top and you
Speaker 3: opened Great Expectations, and the four long windows were steamed
Speaker 3: up with condensation, so you're inside a closed space, and
Speaker 3: he would say your name. He'd call out a name
Speaker 3: and that person would begin reading on the page, and
Speaker 3: everybody else in the classroom thirty two boys had to
Speaker 3: pay really close attention to what line, what the person
Speaker 3: reading aloud was on, because at any moment, even halfway
Speaker 3: through a sentence, mister Mason could call out your name,
Speaker 3: and then you would have to carry on from exactly
Speaker 3: where the person had stopped. And if you failed to
Speaker 3: carry on, you got to write out the page of
Speaker 3: Great Expectations that night, which seemed a lot of writing out.
Speaker 3: It was a better idea than giving lines, but it
Speaker 3: was intense. So as a result of that, we read
Speaker 3: Great Expectations attached by the Finger, and so I was
Speaker 3: inside the book through that finger portal and through what
Speaker 3: it so carefully. So when Pip fell in love with Estella,
Speaker 3: I fell in love with Di Stella. When she rejected him,
Speaker 3: she rejected me, and so that was the reason that
Speaker 3: I entered. I entered the book first fully, I think, Dan.
Speaker 2: It's a moment you give to know from memory, and
Speaker 2: this is happiness where he's trying to conjure up a
Speaker 2: havishm figure in his mind, and that connection with that
Speaker 2: novel is a really important one to him there and
Speaker 2: we'll come to it in a moment. But in Time
Speaker 2: of the Child, you have a character who is clearly
Speaker 2: doomed to be a writer. You make it clear that
Speaker 2: that's her fate and her future. Is that a curs
Speaker 2: through a blessing you're giving Ronnie in that book.
Speaker 3: Well, for me, it's a blessing. I make most sense
Speaker 3: to the world by being a writer. I'm a better
Speaker 3: person when I'm writing. I understand the world better when
Speaker 3: I'm writing, and I can live better as a person writing.
Speaker 3: So I think for Ronnie in Time of the Child,
Speaker 3: it will be a kind of salvation as a writer.
Speaker 3: In writing, same as in reading, I think, is a
Speaker 3: way to conquer loneliness, and it's also that extraordinary thing.
Speaker 3: I think James Wood, the critic, spoke about it in
Speaker 3: his book The Nearest Thing to Life, and he talks
Speaker 3: about this idea that when you're reading a novel, there's
Speaker 3: a kind of communion that happens. Your own loneliness is banished,
Speaker 3: and you move towards the other, the person that is
Speaker 3: inside the pages, and that in turn comes back to
Speaker 3: deepen your own humanity. It's kind of circular gift. It's
Speaker 3: given out and comes back to you through the experience
Speaker 3: of reading. So I think for Ronnie, especially as a
Speaker 3: woman writer, in nineteen sixties Ireland. Difficult, difficult, difficult. That
Speaker 3: will be her salvation and how she comes to accept
Speaker 3: who she is and how she is.
Speaker 2: That strength and that community given by the experience of rating,
Speaker 2: I think is a really important thing and evident in
Speaker 2: your work. But you know, as you say you have
Speaker 2: the line about Ronnie, that added to this reserve was
Speaker 2: not only the screened lives of all the women in
Speaker 2: the parish at the time, but the marginal nature of
Speaker 2: all writers, that idea that a writer is inevitably outside
Speaker 2: the community that they're writing about. Do you feel that.
Speaker 3: I do, absolutely. I think probably I was a marginal
Speaker 3: person before I was a writer, but then found that
Speaker 3: that was a good place for a writer to be.
Speaker 3: So the writer should be in the margins and not
Speaker 3: in the center. And so I believe that profoundly that
Speaker 3: I'm trying to put another person on the page. It's
Speaker 3: not about me, it's other people, and other people are
Speaker 3: sort of endlessly fascinating because of this bizarre thing that
Speaker 3: everybody thinks they're normal. And how bizarre that is when
Speaker 3: you think about it, that actually there's not two people
Speaker 3: on the planet who are the same, but each one
Speaker 3: thinks that they are normal, and that's just fantastic for
Speaker 3: a fiction writer, because people keep revealing their oddity and
Speaker 3: their quirks in which they think is this is a
Speaker 3: normal thing to do.
Speaker 2: I think that's true in a sense, in an individual
Speaker 2: and human sense. It's also true of a place. You're
Speaker 2: right early in this is happiness. Farha was no more
Speaker 2: nor less than any other like place. If you could
Speaker 2: find it, you'd be on your way somewhere else. The
Speaker 2: country is filled with places of more blatant beauty. Good
Speaker 2: luck to them. Farha doesn't care. It has long since
Speaker 2: accepted the by dint of personality and geography, its destiny
Speaker 2: was to be a place passed over and gently wholly forgotten.
Speaker 2: Tell me about that place called Farha out the window
Speaker 2: of Ruth Swain's house where she doesn't go so far.
Speaker 3: How would be embarrassed that we're actually talking about it?
Speaker 3: And say, talk about somewhere else, and the more beautiful places.
Speaker 3: There are more noticable places, and you shouldn't if you're
Speaker 3: stopping in fail you're asking the way somewhere else. Part
Speaker 3: of the attraction for me in the place, for how
Speaker 3: I think in the making of it was ordinariness, because
Speaker 3: the longer I've lived, the more I've come to appreciate
Speaker 3: the extraordinary thing about ordinariness, and the same thing that
Speaker 3: I just said about people feeling that they are normal
Speaker 3: and they are actually quite extraordinary. So sometime during the
Speaker 3: writing of This Is Happiness, something happened to me that
Speaker 3: hadn't happened before when I was writing a novel, And
Speaker 3: that is maybe two thirds of the way through, I
Speaker 3: realized I didn't want the book to end, that I
Speaker 3: want to stay in this world and with these people,
Speaker 3: and I was actually had fallen in love. I'd fallen
Speaker 3: in love with Christy and Noel and those people and
Speaker 3: the whole world of it. And I found that the
Speaker 3: more I wrote, more characters were appearing and that was
Speaker 3: an interesting character. And at this person pause a minute
Speaker 3: on the street, going here, and this is an interesting
Speaker 3: So I was becoming larger the more I was in it.
Speaker 3: And so before I finished This Is Happiness, I knew
Speaker 3: that I was going to write another fan novel. I
Speaker 3: wanted to stay there, and the hard thing would be
Speaker 3: that it wasn't going to be a first person novel.
Speaker 3: I wanted to make each novel stand alone and not
Speaker 3: be not be a sequel as such, but still to
Speaker 3: create a series of novels that would be a continuum.
Speaker 3: And I think before even before I started Time of
Speaker 3: the Child, I realized that my aim would be to
Speaker 3: try to write a series of novels in the time
Speaker 3: between the coming of electricity and the coming of the Internet.
Speaker 3: I'll plot the second half of the twentieth century in
Speaker 3: one community, and what happens to church and community, and
Speaker 3: what happens to people, families, and all the change that
Speaker 3: occurs as the television comes and so on and so forth,
Speaker 3: as things change in a community over that period of time.
Speaker 2: When they were ten, Nihall and I discuss why a
Speaker 2: doctor makes sense for the main character of Time of
Speaker 2: the Child, and he also shares why there's only one
Speaker 2: reader of his work that really matters. We'll be right back.
Speaker 2: So now you've undertaken or you've been taken over by
Speaker 2: this project of her, there must have been a certain
Speaker 2: satisfaction in seeing the paths that you'd opened up to yourselves.
Speaker 2: And in particular, I'm thinking about doctor Troy as the
Speaker 2: central character of Time of the Child, because, as you
Speaker 2: make very clear, a doctor and a place like Faha
Speaker 2: is privy to everything.
Speaker 3: Yes, when I was writing this is Happiness for the
Speaker 3: doctor first appears, I didn't think he would be the
Speaker 3: next major character of Time of the Child. But I
Speaker 3: think there were a few things that informed that decision
Speaker 3: as to how they came about, again only in kindsight.
Speaker 3: So first of all, there was an extraordinary moment, and
Speaker 3: this was a moment that we all lived through when
Speaker 3: COVID first began, And there came a moment when everybody
Speaker 3: was asked at a certain time to go outside and
Speaker 3: applaud healthcare workers bang pots and pans if you were
Speaker 3: in cities, and applaud them a specific moment in time,
Speaker 3: like six o'clock, and everybody did it. And so that
Speaker 3: sense of what it was to be in healthcare and
Speaker 3: going out and dealing with ill people all the time
Speaker 3: made me think in my MicroC fictional world of the
Speaker 3: doctor in a village where every single person is his patient.
Speaker 3: So I thought it was an extraordinary thing that first
Speaker 3: of all about doctors, and then this idea in a
Speaker 3: community where he knows all the secrets of everybody, the
Speaker 3: corporal secrets of everybody, and what would it be like
Speaker 3: if he had a secret he can't tell any of
Speaker 3: those people, and that has created that dynamic of that character.
Speaker 2: One of the crucial things you reveal about him, though,
Speaker 2: is that he has been thwarted in He has lost,
Speaker 2: as he says it, the opportunity for love a second
Speaker 2: time in his life, and for the second far hard
Speaker 2: book in a row. You have a man who's in
Speaker 2: love with any Money.
Speaker 3: Yes, we're all. We're all in love with any Mooney.
Speaker 2: So I'm curious about this. Is any Mooney going to
Speaker 2: be the kind of stob that goes across decades in
Speaker 2: this town.
Speaker 3: Yeah, maybe go back to us stelling graspectations. I don't
Speaker 3: know to any Mooney. Yes, is the Doctor was in
Speaker 3: love with any Mooney, but it was an undeclared love
Speaker 3: and just as he was about to declare it, we
Speaker 3: find out in this novel, was when Christian this his
Speaker 3: happiness had arrived back who was her first love. So
Speaker 3: the thing about the doctor is, to start the novel
Speaker 3: his love didn't happen, and he has fallen out of
Speaker 3: love with the human race, and he has a profound
Speaker 3: melancholy and he doesn't believe anything in this life is
Speaker 3: going to shift it. So we have to over the
Speaker 3: course of the novel move the doctor back into humanity,
Speaker 3: and it comes in a most shocking way to him,
Speaker 3: which is that he witnesses his daughter fall in love
Speaker 3: with a baby, and that was not something he could
Speaker 3: have expected, but that in turn becomes the bridge to
Speaker 3: get him back into humanity.
Speaker 2: Could you have written Time of the Child without having
Speaker 2: become a grandfather yourself?
Speaker 3: No, certainly not so. Our daughter Deirdre gave birth to
Speaker 3: Esme Willow during the time when I was writing this,
Speaker 3: and it was an extraordinary thing. When I first held
Speaker 3: Esme in my arms. Nothing had quite prepared me for that.
Speaker 3: It was a shock to feel how much feeling I
Speaker 3: felt rushed through me in that moment, and for my daughter,
Speaker 3: and seeing my daughter in a completely different light as
Speaker 3: a mother. Suddenly, in an instant she was a mother,
Speaker 3: and that was just so profoundly moving, and I was
Speaker 3: sort of, I think, surprised by joy. As Wordsworth, I
Speaker 3: was surprised by love pulsed through me. And it seemed
Speaker 3: to me that when writing the novel, you know, maybe
Speaker 3: because in our life, in christ and ized life, we
Speaker 3: have the chosen family. As such, we chose to adopt
Speaker 3: the children and that, and there's a burden of responsibility
Speaker 3: that comes with that, but also the thing of loving
Speaker 3: a stranger, you know, that is one of the central
Speaker 3: tenements of Christianity, I think, but actually of humanity to
Speaker 3: love the other person who is not connected to you
Speaker 3: in any way, who's put into your arms. And the
Speaker 3: measure of what it would be to have a child
Speaker 3: to put in your arms that was not connected to you,
Speaker 3: That the child in this novel is not connected to
Speaker 3: Ronnie or doctor Troy, but is put into their arms,
Speaker 3: and how you respond to that at that moment.
Speaker 2: I understand you write one sentence at a time, which
Speaker 2: seems like a stupid phrase now I say it out loud,
Speaker 2: but you let it pull you along like read.
Speaker 3: Yes, I write one sentence out of time. So no
Speaker 3: so because I don't plan out anything and I just
Speaker 3: get a first sentence. I can only start a book
Speaker 3: when I have a first sentence. I get a first sentence,
Speaker 3: and I then try to figure out what is the
Speaker 3: next sentence. I have no idea where it's going, but
Speaker 3: I have a maybe foolish belief, but a belief nonetheless
Speaker 3: that has stood me is that the book exists out
Speaker 3: there and it's coming towards me if I calle towards it,
Speaker 3: and I mustn't force it. So I've described it as
Speaker 3: my sense is that when I get a first sentence,
Speaker 3: it's like the tip of an invisible thread of which
Speaker 3: only the tip is visible. And that's that first sentence.
Speaker 3: And if I tease it out a little more all
Speaker 3: the time, it'll keep coming. Don't yank it, don't force it,
Speaker 3: don't look at it too carefully. Just follow the sentence.
Speaker 3: Follow the sentence, and at the end over here is
Speaker 3: a coat, in this case, a book that has been
Speaker 3: always there, implied by that first sentence. So it's coming
Speaker 3: towards me. I'm just trying to pay attention to what's
Speaker 3: happening on the page. So that's how I write. I
Speaker 3: write each sentence out loud, and I say it out
Speaker 3: to myself because I'm sorry to tell you, but I'm
Speaker 3: just writing the book for myself. You're an added bonus,
Speaker 3: But really I would be doing it for myself because
Speaker 3: it's the writing is gives me the greatest pleasure and
Speaker 3: profound joy. Beauty of language, rhythm, cadence, music, these things,
Speaker 3: and I feel in some again maybe invented way, that
Speaker 3: I'm connected in some way to artist traditions of oral storytelling.
Speaker 3: And so when Chris and I first moved to County
Speaker 3: Claire in nineteen eighty five, all our neighbors were older people,
Speaker 3: and the entertainment was we went to their houses in
Speaker 3: the evening. You'd go in the back door. You didn't
Speaker 3: need to be invited. You would just go in and
Speaker 3: sit down and have tea and they would ask you
Speaker 3: about your day and so on. And we were there
Speaker 3: in entertainment because we were trying to manage four cows
Speaker 3: and we didn't know anything about cows and finding out
Speaker 3: how to live in a place, and so story was
Speaker 3: a way to pass the evening and no television was on.
Speaker 3: There might be a radio on the background of some music,
Speaker 3: but basically story was a way to pass the evening,
Speaker 3: past the time. And therefore the point of a story
Speaker 3: was not to get to the end of a story.
Speaker 3: The point was not to get to the point. The
Speaker 3: point is to pass the time.
Speaker 2: How long did it take you to have the faith
Speaker 2: in that process in your books? You know, between you,
Speaker 2: you and Chris have written twenty books in the forty
Speaker 2: years since you moved to Ireland. How long did it
Speaker 2: take you to have the faith in your skills as
Speaker 2: a writer to say I'm going to delicately pull this
Speaker 2: thread and enjoy the process.
Speaker 3: Okay, So the truth is, I don't have any faith
Speaker 3: in my skills as a writer, and I'm still a
Speaker 3: person who is constantly asking the question is this any good?
Speaker 3: And what seemed good today it seem good tomorrow. So
Speaker 3: you're constantly working with doubt, and I think that's necessary. Actually,
Speaker 3: I've come not to resist it or worry about it.
Speaker 3: And if there are any writers listening anywhere, don't be
Speaker 3: afraid of doush. Don't be afraid of thinking it's terrible
Speaker 3: today and it was good yesterday. I think that's a
Speaker 3: sort of necessary part of the creation.
Speaker 2: I just wanted to briefly touch on how much for
Speaker 2: you your writing career, your creative, imaginative life is inseparable
Speaker 2: from your marriage, from the life that you live in,
Speaker 2: the life that you and Chris have made for yourselves.
Speaker 2: And I read an interview with you where you said
Speaker 2: to the interviewer, I feel like the word wife doesn't
Speaker 2: say enough. It doesn't get to what I'm trying to
Speaker 2: describe about Chris. I guess I'd say she's my first reader.
Speaker 2: That the first reader is above all else. You write together,
Speaker 2: your garden together, You've built this life together. Yes, do
Speaker 2: you have a sense of that as an extraordinary creative
Speaker 2: collaboration rather than because that's not normal. Just to be clear,
Speaker 2: my partner loves me, but she's irritated when I come
Speaker 2: in the kitchen when she's there.
Speaker 3: No, I never think of christ as my wife. I
Speaker 3: never think of that word. It seems very limiting. I
Speaker 3: think of Chris is the other half of my soul.
Speaker 3: And so we made that decision to be together from
Speaker 3: the moment we met each other, and the decision to
Speaker 3: get off the commuter train in Manhattan and go to
Speaker 3: this four room cottage in County Clare was a joint
Speaker 3: decision to see did we have any talent? And we
Speaker 3: make each other's talents. She makes me a better person,
Speaker 3: and I hope I make her a better person. And
Speaker 3: that's how it's been. And when we adopted the two children,
Speaker 3: that was part of that same thing. So to say,
Speaker 3: Chris is my first reader, Chris is the only reader
Speaker 3: that counts. I'm sorry, everybody, She's the reader that counts.
Speaker 3: And the last thing I'll say, is just quickly. So
Speaker 3: when I finish, when I'm working on a novel, and
Speaker 3: she knows I'm working on a novel. In that time,
Speaker 3: there's no other income, so our savings are diminishing. And
Speaker 3: for two years that's happening. And everything depends therefore on
Speaker 3: us being able to sell that novel at the end,
Speaker 3: and that gives us another two years to live and
Speaker 3: carry on like that. So it goes like this, So
Speaker 3: everything depends upon it. But at no time during that
Speaker 3: does Chris say, show me some pages. I want to know,
Speaker 3: is this any good? So for two years I'll write
Speaker 3: the novel and she'll know I'm writing the novel, and
Speaker 3: at the end I'll give it to her and I'll
Speaker 3: get it printed out. It's a full manuscript, and it's
Speaker 3: there on the table, and I see then after about
Speaker 3: two or three days, this many pages have turned over
Speaker 3: and they're like that on the table. But she doesn't
Speaker 3: say anything. And then a few more pages go over
Speaker 3: each day, and so on so forth, and for maybe
Speaker 3: a week she's reading the novel, but she's not mentioning it,
Speaker 3: and I'm not asking her. And that's how it is.
Speaker 3: But everything depends upon it, and we garden together, we
Speaker 3: work together, cook dinner or she cooks dinner, and whatever,
Speaker 3: and that's how it is. And now the last page
Speaker 3: is over and the manuscript is upside down, and that
Speaker 3: was the case with the Time of the Child. And
Speaker 3: she finished it, turned the last page over, and she
Speaker 3: said nothing at all, nothing nothing, not out of cruelty,
Speaker 3: because she wants to be honest. She has a compulsion
Speaker 3: to be honest and true, and she wants to exactly
Speaker 3: think what it is that she wanted to say.
Speaker 2: So I waited.
Speaker 3: And normally the writer is waiting for the person that
Speaker 3: wants the person to say, oh, it's wonderful, and then
Speaker 3: the writer goes, yeah, but how wonderful, and they got
Speaker 3: really wonderful or really really wonderful and so on, and
Speaker 3: she's too honest to do any of that. And she
Speaker 3: didn't do any of that. And what she did in
Speaker 3: the end was she turned to me and said, well,
Speaker 3: it's pure Nile Williams. And at the time you go, oh, okay,
Speaker 3: is it wonderful Nile Williams or bad Nile Williams. And
Speaker 3: in the end I realized that actually that was the
Speaker 3: best thing any writer can ever hear, because what all
Speaker 3: writers are trying to do is essentially just make their signature.
Speaker 2: That's it.
Speaker 3: It's that same moment that I began this discussion with
Speaker 3: when I said, you go and what are the books
Speaker 3: that you choose in the library? Because they are actually you,
Speaker 3: They're telling you who you are because they are the
Speaker 3: books you choose. So in the same way when she
Speaker 3: said it's pure Nile Williams, that actually is better than
Speaker 3: it's wonderful, because that's the goal, to create something that
Speaker 3: is actually your own spirit that has now come outside
Speaker 3: you and is now in the physical binding of a book.
Speaker 2: Please join me in thanking the very Nile Wilderness.
Speaker 3: Thank you, Thank you so much.
Speaker 2: Noile Williams's latest novel, Time of the Child, is available
Speaker 2: at all Good bookstores now. This conversation was recorded in
Speaker 2: March at the State Library of Victoria. It was part
Speaker 2: of the Beyond the Page literary series. And if you're
Speaker 2: in Melbourne, the State Library of Victoria's exhibition Make Believe
Speaker 2: Encounters with Misinformation is open and free to visit until
Speaker 2: the sixteenth of April. It's a terrific exhibition. It's all
Speaker 2: about the ways in which misinformation has shaped life and culture.
Speaker 2: It's playful and curious and well worth a visit.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much for listening to another special episode
Speaker 1: of Read This. We'll have another episode to share with
Speaker 1: you next Sunday. As always, if you want to dive
Speaker 1: further into the show, you can search for it wherever
Speaker 1: you listen to podcasts. There are more than eighty episodes
Speaker 1: in the Read This archive for you to enjoy. See
Speaker 1: you next week.