And I honestly, I kept thinking the whole time I was reading this, is she the one that's closest to you?

Yeah, I mean, of course.

I went to 12 years of Catholic school.

I went to an all-girls Catholic school that I think, I honest to God think, I got sent to because my mother saw a couple episodes of 90210.

And I'm the oldest, and she was like, absolutely not.

And I was a little boy crazy.

And I was like a fighter.

yeah.

But just how much she did and that moms are really capable of.

Yeah, well, it's funny, when I was writing this, so this is very closely based on a family story.

The two central events in the book happened in real life, the death of my father's mother when my youngest uncle was only five weeks old, and then the running away of one of their brothers when he was around 30.

Some of my uncles say 12, some say 13.

I wasn't interested in finding out exactly because I was writing a novel.

I'd always understood it to be around 13.

But when I was researching properly, I'd been to Ireland many, many times.

Yeah.

Can you talk a little bit about this language? And did you grow up with the Irish language around you?

Yeah, I grew up, I didn't speak Irish and my parents never spoke it to me.

My mother learned Irish in school.

So she was also from a pretty rural town in the west of Ireland, but they spoke English and they learned Irish in school.

My dad was a native speaker and so it was different.

And so when my uncles were over or if he was on the phone with one of them, he was rarely on the phone, but we knew if he was on the phone, he was speaking Irish because it must be one of his brothers or a cousin or something like that.

And when he spoke English, sometimes the construction of his sentences was strange, as we would call it.

And her daughters just couldn't fathom how she could stomach that.

favorite irish speakers per the book experience emotions in a certain way how do you experience your emotions

I think that's true for all languages, right? The way that we learn how to articulate the world, I think has a big impact on how we feel it.

How do I, I have big emotions.

I think that's why I became a writer.

I find myself moved by things that not everyone is moved by.

And I think I try to focus that in my writing.

I think that's really, I wasn't seeing a lot of what I find moving represented in books.

How are you reminding yourself of these things?