More than two decades after Colm Tóibín published his beloved novel Brooklyn, he has surprised fans (and himself) by writing Long Island, a follow-up featuring many of the same characters. Brooklyn, which was made into a film starring Saoirse Ronan in 2015,followed Eilis Lacey, a young Irish woman who emigrated to America in the 1950s.
Flash-forward to Long Island. It is now the 1970s, and Eilis is settled in a quiet, suburban cul-de-sac with two teenage children, her husband, Tony, and her in-laws. Her life is radically disrupted when an Irish man comes to her door. The man tells Eilis that Tony has had an affair with his wife, and she is now pregnant. His family won’t keep the child, and he will drop the new baby on Eilis’s doorstep. This proclamation—and her family’s response—sets the plot of Long Island in motion as it fractures Eilis’s previously happy life and leads her to return to Ireland for the first time in two decades.
In July, I interviewed Colm Tóibín over Zoom about Brooklyn, Long Island, the writing life and more. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
What brought you back to the character of Eilis Lacey?
I wish I knew. It never occurred to me I would do that. The only image I ever had in my head—and I had it quite strongly over a number of years—was sometime in the future after the novel Brooklyn. Eilis’s brother would be walking on the beach at Ballincollig, the beach in Ireland that’s mentioned in both novels. There would be two teenagers with him, and they’re clearly in some obvious way not Irish, probably of Italian origin. They’re tall, and they’re good-looking. It’s not just that they’re good-looking, as much as confident.
Someone from the town would ask, “Who are these?” And he would say, “Oh, they’re Eilis’s kids. They’re just back for the summer to see their granny.” And the person from the town would just say, “Hmm.” That’s all I had. And I, in fact, ended up writing that scene and then taking it out of Long Island. It’s not actually in Long Island, but it was in the draft for a good while.
Just before the pandemic, the idea of the opening of the book occurred to me. Normally, I wouldn’t entertain an idea like this because it’s too plot-led. Normally, I would have left it, but for some reason, it stayed with me. I didn’t write notes or anything. It just stayed in my mind, and then I began to work on the book.
Do you feel any of the characters have changed in significant ways since Brooklyn? If so, which ones?
This novel is dialogue-led. The main person who does the talking is Eilis. She’s become more articulate. She has a forensic way of examining things, and I didn’t want to overdo that. Looking at her character in Brooklyn, she’s someone who was hesitant in speech. She’s become less hesitant as time goes on. That’s the big change in Long Island.
Eilis’s mother is performing [at] being quite unpleasant, and she’s performing [at] being very pleasant. She’s been so lonely that, no matter what she does, it’s going to be inauthentic. Jim seems very much the same, although we get much more of him. Nancy is very much the same too.
With Tony, a lot of readers have come up with one way of looking at this. They believe the novel makes clear what a beast Tony is. This is not how I see things. These things happen and they’re not ideal, but it’s not as if Eilis is suddenly living with this monstrous figure. Some readers don’t buy this. Some readers think it’s horrible, it’s disappointing, and how could you do this?
The flippant answer is that God made adultery so we could have novels. This is one of the things the world knows, and if it’s in the world, it’s part of creation. It’s not as though I have decided to bring this into the world.
I don’t think Tony changes. This is one of those things that gives rise to the drama of the novel. Without it, there is no novel. I get quite a lot of emails about this through my website. Readers are so upset.
That’s interesting. I didn’t interpret Tony as a beast.When Eilis goes back to Ireland in Brooklyn, she has an emotional affair, at least, with Jim. It’s not unbelievable Tony could have had a similar experience 20 years on.
Exactly. This is what happens in novels.
One thing that always stands out to me about your writing is the rich internal life of the characters. How do you bring that onto the page?
This comes first when you’re aware that you’re dealing with someone whose silences matter, whose interiority matters, and they’re constantly moving away from a dialogue not into monologue but into a sort of reverie or silence.
You have to do this all the time as a writer. If you’re not doing it, then you’re just getting an adventure novel. “The dragon came toward him. He put a sword in the dragon.” You can do that, but you have to write what the dragon was doing that morning when the dragon was alone remembering a funny moment about some strange thing that happened.
That’s first. Before anything, you’ve got to give characters a rich interior life.
You followed three different people closely throughout the book.How did you decide when to follow Jim, when to follow Nancy, and when to follow Eilis?
It’s really crude. The general idea was I’d write 5,000 words and then switch perspectives. I broke that a few times, but the general idea was the blocks of words would be equal in length.
You need these people who have stayed in Ireland. They know more than Eilis does about some things. The only way you can give this knowledge to the reader is through other characters’ inner lives.
The first rule was the length. The second rule was as soon as I begin each section, without saying the name of the person, I go straight into something dramatic happening to them. That’s to avoid a moment where the reader says, “I wish I knew which of them this is.” When there’s a fire in the chip shop, you know it’s going to Nancy. With Jim, the bar is his thing. The reader doesn’t even notice the perspective shift because it’s total immersion within a few sentences.
Which scene in the novel was the most challenging to write?
I had real difficulty—I mean, real difficulty—with the scene where Eilis goes to the Montrose Hotel to meet Jim. The first time around I had a little moment where you realize she did go—with nothing descriptive, nothing dramatic. I thought that was enough.
My editor said to me, “Did she or did she not go to the Montrose Hotel? We need to know what happened. It’s too big a thing.”
It’s always been a struggle, the whole matter of writing about sex. The general agreement is you can write anything you want in any frank way you want. I didn’t want to describe this for an artistic reason. The moderators were both Jim and Eilis. They would have been so shy, so nervous, so reticent that they themselves would never have, even in their own interior [monologues], gone through it with words. I just feel it’s not something they themselves would describe.
I didn’t want to write that whole scene, but I did go beyond the three sentences I wrote initially. There’s still a paragraph missing, almost. I feel the reader can work out pretty easily that this was very sweet for both of them. It took a lot of back and forth and writing.
Do you think anyone really wins in this novel?
Eilis’s mother wins.
I agree, and I loved seeing her win.
All along, from the moment she appears, you just presume she’s going to be horribly abandoned. This business of the grandchildren will be such a great memory for her. How will she live after they’re gone? And of course, she has got other plans.
She’s become even more shrewd since Brooklyn. She couldn’t find anything to do but just go up to her room and not come down in the end. Now, in Long Island, she’s found her ticket to America.
She got her ticket. She got her passport. She got everything ready.
This happened to a friend of mine. She had three tickets for the World Cup in Italy in 1990, a massive stadium in Rome. Her Irish mother in Dublin said, “I’d like to come.” She said, “You’re 80 years old. You’ve never been to a football match. It is impossible to get you to Rome.” The mother said, “I’ve got an airplane ticket, and I’ll go with you to the match.” My friend insisted, “But you’ve never been at a soccer match.” She said, “I know, but I watched them on television.”
It ended up with this woman, aged 80 from Dublin, going to the match. It was always on my mind: the idea that she must have woken up one morning and thought this would be such a great thing to do, and so she did.
The Rev. Flood is central to Eilis’s journey and integration in Brooklyn. There’s not a religious figure in Long Island who seems quite as involved in anyone’s life. Does that reflect a change in the characters, in their religiosity, or a change in Irish culture from the 1950s to the ’70s?
Father Flood is very much an immigrant priest. This type of priest had a spiritual dimension, but actually what the priest was doing was looking after people. Now that Eilis is settled in America, she doesn’t have those needs.
In Ireland, it’s like that saying, “There are no camels mentioned in the Quran.” The reason there are no camels mentioned is because there’s so many camels it is presumed that they are there. In the same way, the cathedral is at the very center of everyone’s life, but it only gets mentioned a few times in the book. The church is fundamentally there to such an extent you don’t need to mention it all the time. I’m trying to dramatize a church that I understand and that I saw.
At the end of both Brooklyn and Long Island, we know Eilis is going back to America, but don’t witness her return. Why did you end both novels where you did?
There was a big debate in the 19th century about how to end a novel. With Middlemarch, George Eliot wrote this massive book, a sort of panorama of society. How do you end it? How do you end it on a single image, when there are so many different strands in the book? So what she does is tell you what happens to the characters over the next 20 to 30 years. That’s satisfying, but it is also as though you’re moving out of the circular realm of the novel into a straight line.
Henry James, about eight years later, ended ThePortrait of a Lady with Isabel Archer going back to her husband. And it’s done. You turn the page, and there’s no pages, nothing. That’s it. She’s gone back to her husband, and people just put the book down and start blaming Henry James.
I felt if I gave all the characters an afterlife it would ruin the integrity of the books. Long Island is a single story that is over when summer ends at the end of August. If I go into too much detail, I would be telling you something you know already. I can’t give you her arrival home because you already know what it’s like when she goes back. It’s the same with Brooklyn.
In the last pages of both books, I am telling you something you do not know. If I go on, I am telling you something you already know. It’s no use.
Are you done with Eilis?
It takes me ages to come up with new ideas. I have absolutely no ideas. At the moment, I’m doing nothing much but reading, and that’s lovely.
I understand that Costco is now carrying Long Island, and your publisher recently released an Instagram clip that chronicled your first visit there. What do you like best about Costco?
When I was growing up in Ireland, chicken was really a luxury. You didn’t have a whole chicken every week. I’m still a sucker for that pre-cooked, hot chicken.
It was something you could take out from a supermarket in Spain in the summer. It’s a wonderful thing on a summer Sunday. At Costco, the chicken is $4.99! And it’s not just a bony thing. I did think that chicken was pretty impressive. This seemed to me to be a big, big chicken.
Writers do readings all the time. I thought [in that video] that maybe instead of reading a bit of my book on video, I would tell people about Costco chickens. To make myself more useful.
