PHOTOGRAPH BY SCHIFFER-FUCHS / GETTY
Your story “Solstice,” in this week’s issue, is set on December 21, 2016. Did you write it on that day?
I put together a short-story event in Dublin on December 21st, with music by the singer-songwriter Lisa O’Neill. We had a meeting at the beginning of the month and she said, “How do you write a short story?” Lisa is a young artist from County Cavan, with buckets of talent—she is the real deal—so I looked her bang in the eye and smiled. “Well,” I said, and I gave her an expansively eloquent, yet surprisingly modest answer, which failed to mention the fact that I had not written a short story in years. I had no idea how to write a short story anymore. I drove home bereft, and sat in the car outside the house for some time, thinking, The first thing that happens when I walk in the door, that is where I begin. I will take the first piece of dialogue I hear and work from there.
When I went inside, my daughter was upset about the Dakota Access Pipeline, and my son was remembering two long-dead cats. So this is what I stole. I changed their ages, their parents, the world around them, but I kept these two bits of chat. And, yes, they are getting ten per cent.
The story is very topical. Do you often write in such an up-to-the-minute way?
The swing to the right in America and Europe makes me worry about the world my children will grow into. Then, when I look at them, I think of the power of the young, and the possibility that they will make things a little better. This was certainly part of the urgency I felt while driving home that evening in early December. It has been such a frightening and upsetting time. I needed to write about hope.
The story is told from the point of view of a middle-aged man—husband, father. Why did you choose him as your protagonist?
This is clearly a case of unconscious bias. I made him a man because I think men understand the whole planet thing, which wrecks my head, no matter how many times I walk around the lamp with an orange stuck with two cocktail sticks. My husband can prove it all with one balled-up fist for the sun and the other hand playing planet Earth, saying, “Tilt, tilt, and . . . tilt. No, the other way. No, this way.”
As he’s driving home from work, a song comes on the radio that disconcerts him and triggers a whole train of thought. Did you have a particular song in mind?
I am so glad you asked. The hidden song in the story is the one Lisa O’Neill sang after I read it at that solstice event: “Seven Sisters,” from her album “Pothole in the Sky.”
In the story, the father tries to communicate with his daughter, who is busy on her phone, then fails to register what his son is trying to tell him. Later, he can’t get across to his wife a sensation he had while driving home. Do you think that all these communication failures are typical of the modern family?
Writers do not judge their characters; they only describe. They don’t psychologize, so much as make an aesthetic shape. That said, everyone in this story, apart from the mother, is on a screen all the damn time.
The winter solstice is a turning point—a point at which the Earth’s northern hemisphere reaches its most distant point from the sun. Is this also a turning point for this family?
The protagonist’s resilience to grief is making him a real pain in the ass; his son senses it, his wife sees it very clearly, and, at the end of the story, he is beginning to realize it, too. I am interested in the way that things that are latent become known. What happens with that knowledge—whether, for example, he starts being nicer to his wife and children—that is another story. Or a novel, perhaps.
As you said, it’s been years since your last short story. Do you prefer writing novels?
I write what I can. I love writing short stories. When you are really working it, every sentence in a story does many things, all at once. They are like three-dimensional crosswords. (Or am I describing a flower?) A story is always a gift.
If you had to recommend a short story to readers, which one would it be?
I keep going back to “The Sin of Jesus,” by Isaac Babel. If I could tell you why, I would be able to let it go, perhaps. The way Babel writes fragments reminds me of Grace Paley and Clarice Lispector, two amazing short-story writers who share his Ukrainian Jewish heritage, and this is all quite mysterious to me. The book I keep looking for on my shelves and failing to find (I must have lent it out) is Jayne Anne Phillips’s “Black Tickets.” I need to know if it is as good as it felt twenty-five years ago—I am pretty sure it is. As for my own, Irish tradition, I recommend them all. You can’t go wrong! Actually, a piece called “Night in Tunisia,” by Neil Jordan, comes to mind. It captures something about growing up in Ireland that I haven’t seen elsewhere.
