Colm Tóibín is an award-winning Irish writer of fiction, nonfiction and poetry. His latest book is Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know: The Fathers of Wilde, Yeats and Joyce.From the author's Q&A with Lisa O’Kelly for the Guardian:
When did you get the idea to write a book about the fathers of Joyce, Yeats and Wilde?--Marshal Zeringue
It began with an invite from Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, to give the 2017 Ellmann lectures, which are in honour of Richard Ellmann, the great American critic and biographer of Joyce, Yeats and Wilde. I started to think about all three writers and because I had loved that book of Yeats’s father’s letters [Letters to His Son WB Yeats and Others, 1869-1922 by John Butler Yeats]. I started to think of them in relation to their fathers and decided that would be my subject. By the time I had written the lectures, I found myself having nearly written a book.
Fathers and mothers are often at the heart of your work...
I am interested in families and what family does. It’s not as though I make a deliberate decision to write about it, it just comes up in book after book. Even in the novel I am writing, it’s...[read on]