Um.

So at the center of Dinner Party, there's kind of a formidable Irish mother or Irish matriarch, um, who provides much of the tension in the book, but also, um, I think anyway, a few laughs along the way.

This scene is, uh, from Christmas.

Uh, Kate is going home from college.

She's in her 20s.

It's in the noughties.

And, uh, her father died a couple of years beforehand, um, so Christmases have been quite difficult for the family as a whole.

[laughs]

[laughs]

Um, so I read an awful lot of rugby au- biographies for his life, but he was somebody who in his very early years, so in his teenage years and in his college years, had the potential to be an absolute star, and had been marked out for that.

And then early in his career, in his 20s, he had this really bad injury, which ultimately he recovered from and went on to have, you know, a kind of a solid, but not the starry career that people had pinned for him.

And he told himself that he was okay with that.

You know, he, he got on with his life.

He got on with, you know, he, he was happy that he was able to still play the sport and got all the perks from that.

But since he's had this chronic illness, which is what he's had for about a year and a half before we meet him, all of that has kind of faded and he's now no- he's now not just dealing with the chronic illness part of it, he's also dealing with the fact of the stuff he didn't deal with 20 years before of, you know, not becoming, not fulfilling his potential, basically.

Mm.