Colm Tóibín on Stories of Exile (Part Two)

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**Mia Sorrenti** (0:41)
Welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm Senior Producer Mia Sorrenti.
In this episode, we'll return for part two of our live event with award-winning novelist Colm Tóibín. Tóibín joined us recently at Union Chapel to discuss fiction, memory and mark the publication of his new short story collection, The News From Dublin. He was in conversation with journalist and author Emma Brockes. If you haven't heard part one, we recommend jumping back an episode to catch up. But now let's return to the conversation live at Union Chapel in London.

**Emma Brockes** (1:14)
Just a last note on the Irish bars. Learning to go home on a Saturday night, how long did that take you?

**Colm Tóibín** (1:27)
I suppose I don't drink alcohol anymore. I had cancer and I didn't go back after chemo. I didn't want any funny liquids going into me that would change my mood. I just never went back and I feel good about it and I'm very puritan, and I preach to everybody else drinking. Do you know what an idiot you are after two glasses of wine? Do you know what you sound like? It's a really boring person to be me.
But I suppose I became really interested in writing for the London Review of Books. I had to read a lot of books. I had to compensate a lot for not having a PhD. Generally, in my life, I teach in the university, in the English department, I'm the only one who doesn't have a PhD. Therefore, I have to overcompensate by preparing too much classes. I just became interested in burying myself in an idea and reading a lot of books about that idea.
I think there are two ways you can go in a way if you're a fiction writer. You can go permanently into just drinking and touring and generally just going on. But I found it was another way I could work. It was that Saturday night thing of walking up through Dublin and looking at everyone outside bars on a Friday evening after work, big pints of lager, so lovely. I'm walking by them looking dreary, about to go home and write some melancholy story.
Why didn't I get a nice job in the bank or a nice job in the civil service? I'm standing with my friends just really guzzling lager.

**Emma Brockes** (2:59)
But in those moments, do you have a flash of the road not taken? Would it ever have been a possibility that you didn't leave?

**Colm Tóibín** (3:09)
Yeah, it would have been a good thing to have gone to, instead of going to university, have taken a job, which I could have easily done in the civil service and become a civil servant and gone into work every day and tried to. Also, you always wonder what it'd be like if you weren't a queer.

**Emma Brockes** (3:23)
Right.

**Colm Tóibín** (3:23)
You could have a wife and things. Sure.

**SPEAKER_6** (3:25)
I mean, it could be as simple as that.

**Colm Tóibín** (3:32)
Obviously, those things.

**Emma Brockes** (3:34)
On which subject? Last time I saw you, you had a partner in LA who you were, I think the phrase that I used when I wrote the piece about you in The Guardian was you were reluctant to share too many details.

**Colm Tóibín** (3:50)
Oh, really?

**Emma Brockes** (3:50)
Well, except then you explained that you had been quite cranky around him while writing House of Names or quite demanding. I wondered generally what you're like to be around when you are in the throws.

**Colm Tóibín** (4:02)
Oh, it seems that I'm really quiet and moody and I'm just, yeah, I don't think about it. But I mean, living with someone, you learn that you're not exactly a bundle of laughs all day or anything like that. I'm quite deliberate and yeah, it's good, it's good.

**Emma Brockes** (4:19)
Does he tell you if you get too heavy?