/ April , 2014
Colm Tóibín
Last Thursday, Tóibín read from his ninth novel, The Testament of Mary (2012), as part of the President's Reading Series. The novel tells the story of Jesus' mother Mary, who, according to the book, does not believe her child is the son of God. Testament, then, according to one reviewer at The Atlantic, is a fictional attempt "to turn to Christ's mother to get the story straight." In 2013, Testament had a brief run on Broadway, for which it earned a Tony nomination for Best Play.
We recently spoke with Tóibín about literature and the writing process. The conversation had all the candor—and quiet humor—of his acclaimed writing.
You've said before that you don't like being called a "storyteller." Why?
I have a friend called Howard Hodgkin, an English painter, and Hodgkin hates being called a colorist. If they're calling you a colorist as a painter, then they're not quite taking you seriously: they feel that your work is merely decorative in some way or other, and that it doesn't have any sort of proper structure. Part of the idea of being a storyteller suggests that somehow or other the source of your inspiration is oral and natural. That's a particular problem with English people: they seem to think that everyone in Ireland is a writer, and very few of us are writers. And that somehow or other writing comes naturally to us, which it doesn't. So people love saying to you, "Oh, you Irish—you're such MAR-velous storytellers, all of you!" And the answer is, "I work quite hard on structuring what I do, or on putting shape on things." That isn't really a way to say, "Oh, you're a marvelous storyteller"— but "You're not a great writer." In other words, you can say, "Oh, the Native Americans were great storytellers," but they were none of them novelists. Or, "Up in Harlem, they're all marvelous storytellers!"
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