‘There is an element of therapy to it’ –Colm Tóibín on the power of literature and how he works hard to harness it

With a new collection of essays out, the author spoke about the pain of losing his father, living through the happy period in gay life before AIDS, and going back to the ‘day job’ after losing out on the Booker

Novelist, playwright and poet Colm Tóibín in Wexford Town. Photo: Steve Humphreys

Dónal Lynch

There is a passage in Colm Tóibín’s essay on John McGahern in which Tóibín quotes from a letter McGahern wrote to the literary editor Charles Monteith. In it McGahern describes the reaction to his 1963 novel The Barracks in his family and the Leitrim hinterland.

“The priest in Ballinamore has had the book removed from the local library,” McGahern writes. “The local bumpkins say they’ll ‘dip’ me if I ever show my face in Cootehall again.” For Tóibín, this menacing and faintly agricultural-sounding threat was “an amazing detail”. And it seems to represent a very distant world from the one he himself moves about in.