Anne Enright In Conversation

much energy and again for that warm welcome I am don't have a watch so you can all jump up and leave I suppose is that what you do you just walk out and I'll know I'm finished and I I'm gonna start with the small reading from this book The Forgotten waltz and called the first chapter is called there will be peace in the valley each chapter as you know is named after a popular song this was song was by Christy Moore so it wasn't that popular anyway I met him in my sister's garden in Anna scary that is where I saw him first there was nothing fated about it though I add in the late summer light and the view I put him at the bottom of my sister's garden in the afternoon at the moment the day begins to turn half 5 maybe it is half-past five on a Wicklow summer Sunday when I see Shawn for the first time there he is where the end of my sister's garden becomes uncertain he's about to turn around but he doesn't know this yet he's looking at the view and I am looking at him the Sun is low and lovely he's standing where the hillside begins its slow run down to the coast and the light as at his back and it is just that time of day when all the colors come into their own it's some years ago now the house is new and this is my sister's house warming party or first party a few months after they moved in the first thing they did was take down the wooden fence to get their glimpse of the sea so the back of the house sits like a missing tooth in the row of new homes exposed to easterly winds and to curious cows a little stage set for this afternoon of happiness they have new neighbors in and old pals and me in a few cases of wine and the barbecue they put on their wedding lists pretended of buying themselves it sits on the party or a green thing with a swiveling bucket of a lid and my brother-in-law Shay I think he even wore the apron waves wooden tongs over lamb steaks and chicken drumsticks while cracking cans of beer high in the air with his free and Fiona keeps expecting me to help because I am her sister she passes with armfuls of plates and shoots me a dark look then she remembers that I'm a guest and offers me some Chardonnay yes I say yes I'd love some thanks and we chat like grown-ups the glass she fills me is the size of a swimming pool it makes me want to cry to think of it it must have been 2002 there I was just back from three weeks in Australia and mad just not into Chardonnay my niece Megan must wait for my nephew merely to fantastic messy little items who look at me like they're waiting for the joke they have friends into it's hard to tell how many kids there are running around the place I think they're being cloned in the downstairs bar from a woman goes in there with one toddler she always comes out fussing over - I sit beside the glass wall between the kitchen and garden it really is a lovely house and I watched my sister's life the mothers hover around the chill table where the kids food is set while I was in the open air the men sipped their drinks and glanced skywards as though for rain I end up talking to a woman who's sitting beside a plate of chocolate rice krispies cakes while working her way through them in a forgetful sort of way they have mini marshmallows on the top she goes to pop one in her mouth and pulls back and surprised Oh pink she says I don't know what I was waiting for my boyfriend Connor must have been dropping someone off or picking them up I can't remember why he wasn't back he would have been driving he usually drove so I could have a few drinks which is one of the good things about I have to say these days it's me who drives that that's an improvement too and I don't know why I remember the chocolate rice krispies except that Oh pink seemed like the funniest thing I'd ever heard and we ended up week with laughter myself and this nameless neighbor of my sister's she in particular so crippled by mirth you couldn't tell if it was appendicitis or hilarity had hurt so bent over in the middle of which she had to or she seemed to keel off her chair a little she rolled to the side while I just kept looking at her and laughing then she hit the ground running and began a low charge out through the glass door and towards my brother-in-law the jet lag hit I remember the strangeness of this woman lumbering straightish a while he cooked on the hissing meet the flames me thinking is it nighttime what time is it anyway the chocolate rice krispies cake died on my lips the woman stooped as it as though to tackle che by the shins but when she rose it was with a small suddenly buoyant child in her arms and she was saying I wasn't there all right I wasn't there the child looked around him indifferent more or less to this abrupt change of scene three maybe four years old she set him down in the grass and went to him at least I thought so she raised a harm to him and then suddenly back at herself as there to clear a wasp from in front of her face how many times do I have to tell you she lifted an arm to crack a beer and the child ran off and the woman just stood there running her rope or her wayward hand through her hair okay there's a bit more sorry that okay that was one thing there were others there was Fiona her cheeks a hectic pink her eyes suddenly wet from the sheer lalala of pouring wine and laughing gaily on being a beautiful mother forward-slash hostess in her beautiful new house and there was Connor my love who was late it's 2002 and already none of these people smoked I sit on my own at the kitchen table and look for some to talk to the man in the garden seemed no more interesting than they did when I arrived in their short sleeve shirts and something about their casual trousers that still screams slacks I'm just back from Australia I remember the guys you see a long Sydney Harbour front at lunchtime an endless line of them running man times and fit man you could turn around and follow without knowing that you were following them the same way you might pick up a goddamn rice krispies cake and not know that you were eating it until you spotted the marshmallow on the top Oh pink I really want a cigarette No Fiona's children have never seen one she told me Megan burst into tears when an electrician lit up in the house I pulled my bag from the back of the chair and idyll my way across the threshold past Shay who waves a piece of meat at me through rain bleached tricycles and cheerful suburban hides down to where Fiona's little Rowan tree stands tethered to its square stake and the garden turns to mountainside there's a little log house down here for the kids made of out of brown plastic a bit disgusting actually the logs look so fake they might as well be molded out of chocolate or rubberized i lurk behind this yoga and I'm so busy making this seem a respectful thing to do leaning into the fence smoothing my skirt furtively rooting him ice bag for smokes that I do not see him until I light up so my first sight of Shawn in this the story I tell myself about Shawn takes place at the beginning of my first exhalation his body the figure he makes against the view made hazy by the smoke of a long-delayed Marlboro light sure he is for a moment completely himself he's about to turn around but he doesn't know this yet he will look around and see me as I see him an art of this nothing will happen for many years there's no reason why it should it really feels like nighttime the life is wonderful and wrong it's like I have to pull the whole planet around in my head to get to this garden and this part of the afternoon and to this man who is the stranger I sleep beside now okay I haven't read that in a long time so you get 5 euros if you recognize the Yvan Poland reference in the garden there's another 5 euros she gets five years okay thank you very much so we've given you a list of what the students wanted to ask you in advance so a deal or do you want to work through them I can read them out as we go yeah hey Chloe yeah well I read desire to do it yeah as an aspiring writer this is Chloe no not embarrassing at all nothing I write this is embarrassing as oil I'm always conscious of the development of my style many aspects of your style appeal to me I would like to know if your deliberate in your wording or whether you let your words flow naturally in other words do you focus on the accessibility of your work the appeal or the genre do you write to fit a genre or just the genre fit your writing does everyone know where John or fiction is hey look it up okay okay this is more or less literary fiction or popular literary fiction as Claire Kilroy says as a literary page-turner so a piece of literary fiction that owes something to romantic fiction or a place of the ideas of romantic fiction so Chloe you're interested in style and how you get I mean some people call it voice and how do you get to a particular voice this is a very close third person or it's a first-person narrator narration this is this is Gina and this is her voice so she dictates the style to an extent one of the things that I'm that some people find difficult or some people find nice about the way I write is that I tend to shift tone from paragraph to paragraph from sentence from sentence and even sometimes on either side of a comma from the first clause to the second clause you get a kind of ironic shift or lift or you realize that something was a bit of a joke but you're not quite sure what the joke was and Gina is full of that we know with the joke that it's not quite complicity with the reader but she's full of jokes which isn't quite a sense of lightness it's almost like a sense of hurt expressed as lightness which is one thing you know irony being a kind of distance you have from yourself or from the situation and that removed that disconnect is not always a joyful one it's but it is it's quite a powerful one so am i delivered to my wording or do I let mine where its flow naturally when you're this is a question to an extent not just about style or voice but also about process what happens when you write and what happens when you make things up and unfortunately that was that the state of flow that is the creative sort of act is not self-conscious it's not accessible to your when you're writing and it's well you have no idea how you did it it's very hard to explain our turds you said in the moment and you're working and and it's working and that's fantastic and that's one of the reasons people really really want to write so they yes I let the words flow naturally but as you should know everything in writing is about rewriting so the first natural flow you then stand back from us in an editorial or an ironic or you work as you work it sentence by sentence line by line paragraph by paragraph you work your Cadence's your cuffs you throw things out I started saying you know now that I rewrite everything except the bits that are left in the book that I rewrite things 50 times and then throw them out and a lot of what's left in the book was actually a merely a first draft but that's after 30 years of sorrow and labor do I focus on the accessibility of my work or the P the appeal or the genre do you write to fit a genre or just the genre feature writing and there's a bit of a conversation going when you're making a book with all the other books that have been made something at 17,000 words long so you're thinking about other things there were 70,000 words long more or less literally factually physically in the world a book it makes you think about other books how do you do that thing a book so there is a conversation about genre in this book but also a conversation about what informs the genre what it is from Jane Austen onwards that makes for a happy or from Tolstoy onwards or even before Tolstoy that makes for the adultery novel or a love story or a book about marriage or a book about romance I was really interested in the difference between romance and love and the difference between being in love and loving someone which is complete yeah you know there's a connection but it's not the same thing design answer your questions do I focus on the accessibility my work I want to be talking directly to the reader I do yeah you know in some ways I I was gonna say I don't try to be admired but I think all writers are just boasters one way or the other and do nothing else but write to be admired but they but what what one thing you could identify is that a difference between high and low culture a difference between and so where the writer when you're reading a book where do you feel the writer is in relation to you the reader do you feel they're up here in a cloud delivering wisdom and look is that the angle what what is the angle through through the text to the writer and what I want the angle to be is that I want to be sitting right there with the reader that there's no hierarchy hierarchy of attention put it that way and also that the writer doesn't know in a very um Nishant and high-minded and sometimes noble sense a huge amount more than the reader we're all just blundering around in the same space as far as I'm concerned so that's to answer the question about accessibility okay Joyce Dignam great Joycean name hi Joyce well I read that your question often female characters in literature can be underdeveloped stereotypes are just a pursuit for the male character I thought that the portrayal of Geena in the Forgotten walls was honest unapologetic and had many different layers do you think that there's a pressure to write women in a certain way if so how do you combat this I was reminded when I read this question of the Bechdel rule does everyone know the Bechdel rule from Alison Bechdel lose she's a graphic novelist and like anyway she wrote fun home and anyway the Bechdel rule is which when today she's gay she went to the cinema and if there she was looking for two women having a conversation about something that wasn't the male lead okay so you go every Hollywood picture you say do are there two women in this in this piece piece of work who are have a conversation about something that isn't the male lead and it's really incredibly hard to find characters who break the back turn rule before like five years ago so I'm 50 years old I'm on a plane I'm looking at bridesmaids and I'm thinking I had to wait this long for a really stupid movie with women in it that's how long I had to wait because there were endless decades as to movies and you just think well that's just a stupid movie but no what you're saying is it's nothing to do with me one way or the other and that women should be you know as usefully or uselessly stupid as men within a narrative and have the same freedoms to be ahead to refer to a further question flawed I mean the definition of a character is perhaps someone who does something wrong you should be looking at the page they know talk to touch it with many of the characters that you come across in fiction they're often mistake and they're often wrongheaded and so way you have to someone ever believe in there it's gonna say goodness but I don't know if you have to believe in Gina's goodness you can think about that is she good okay so another problem about the characterization of women historically is that they owe so much to stereotypes but but but also to archetypes and to mythic ideas of of women as being you know virgins or and blah blah blah blah this is old oh trap now I don't have to explain this from all over again r2i okay so my aim in life was to have female characters that were just like characters and that gender although it is a play within these kind of romantic situations it doesn't dictate how they are either to themselves or in the world and we don't know much about hygena is in the world it's possible actually that she's a real high heel chick it's possible that she lashes on the fake term on a regular basis we don't I I don't put a mirror in my books so you rarely know how the character presents themselves you wouldn't necessarily be able to describe Gina in the pub on a Saturday except you know that she looked really great I think it know that wouldn't you so she doesn't name the handbag but you know she's got the handbag you know the handbag is important to her somehow but I'm not writing social satire so I'm not making the handbag Prada there's a very few labels chardonnays of is is rare in them they're very few it's not a social satire it's not about Commerce there's a lot about money in it but it's not necessarily just about Commerce it's not enthralled to what Gina is it may be in thrall to on that level okay and oh yeah so go you see in the in a movie or on the stage the thing I never saw was a girl like the girl I knew at school seemed looking at the women as they're represented in various sections and they they they make sense to you but only on a mythic level they're not like Sharon from fifth class okay they're like something so that added hum that goes to the characterization of women that is that that world of projections and that is what we make women to be in our fictions or what historically they have made to be in any fictions I mean there are now a series of movies where it is pretty much like the chicks you went to school with but they're just people they're not humming in some way sexy reassuring dangerous it's not about your response to their femaleness they're just agents within the world they're just going about their business okay and James Farley hey James in an interview with The Believer magazine well researched in January 2014 you stated that the interview was called Conan and I was quite interested in whether it came from Conan the Barbarian and I was going to ask her and she didn't want to be asked I mean Conan thank you my parents just liked it okay in the interview believe a magazine in January 2014 news stated that a story is something that's looking for insight I think where as you plot a book to have an effect what other qualities such as insight do you think a writer should have that or maybe sometimes overlooked or not given enough credit and did the model that I was using up they in that interview we were talking about the difference between plot and story and say in a trailer a plot a novelist full of cause and effect right she sees him on page nine she shanks him on page age 59 she leaves them or he leaves her on page 79 cause-and-effect I mean or is that why does she shot him why does she leave him what are actually because so in a novel you're both using by putting things side by side you're implying that one causes the other but you're also asking whether just what causes it why did she do that what was the what was the true origin of those actions so the novel is always interrogating ideas of cause and effect and of consequence so the novel is kind of a game of consequences if you do this then that happens but the novel also undoes that sense of consequence if you do this why does that happen as opposed to anything else okay so I have an at this idea of a plot as a big machine so you put in little usually ping-pong balls like a lottery machine you put it in a ping pong world character a gorge it's all done in a steampunk sort of rant and pop side and intersects here and meets there and there's a coincidence there's a consequence that makes that lever go that makes that Road and then BOOM end of the book that works very strongly in something like a thriller whether revelation is who say there's a murderer as there always do say it's a dead woman which usually is who killed the girl he strangled her with her own tights okay okay which guy strangled her with her own tights and so you say is it that guy the other guy or the third guy and first of all you think it's the first guy anything it's the other guy then you're sure it's the third guy but actually it's the second guy after all twist right so you get that thing twist and you've also got revelation da da there's the revelation and the detective as he is putting together the clues that lead us through a B see and back to be again is you know putting a puzzle together or a machine together the Machine of the plot who was where when and what did they do in a story the revelation isn't like Dada he did it it's more like okay it's like something's kind of sort of bothering you and you don't know what it is yeah maybe it was that so a story is a bit more like life I mean there could be rare I mean insights can come like in they she never liked today there isn't in such okay they can't come big and strong but they can also become very very subtle and liminal and like the sky is that color blue again as if that holds some sort of inside taste of a plum or something so that sense of click is one of the things that I'd be looking for in a story Gina doesn't really have a lot of insights she's not a very insightful character she's not hugely self-aware okay Samantha Hayward would hi Samantha it's about three questions and when we couldn't answer to them and I might have to say why I can't answer the middle one yeah what inspires you to write do you require a specific sort of backdrop or ambiance while you're writing or you just set a time okay this is another question about process to which there are like 700 answers and no answer really writers are very anxious about their ambience right every wall couldn't write if he heard his children in the same wing of the house so what was it about his children's voices that undid his creative moment and just left us all in tatters on the floor he could not write if the children were within 50 feet of them other writers cannot write unless they have a pen a space Alice Monroe one of the great writers used to at one stage was laying at her manuscript on the ironing board that's where she was doing her writing and her infant daughter was cross that she was busy doing her writing and not looking after her infant daughter and I just wondered whether she would be less cause if she was doing the ironing it's dangerous sport ironing much more dangerous than writing anyway so where do you write how do you write how do you manage to form a properly bounded sense of solitude in which you feel safe enough to create and the answer is I don't and I write anywhere because I know that that's what I need is a safely banded space so I can do I can write in the airport only to show all of them only if it's family with a group of writers and say hang on [Laughter] okay what are some habits or tropes you find to be particularly darling or I suppose Dom level in popular literature today how would you just suggest doing away with the morrow dressing I read that's too big a question Samantha have you anything in mind know what really annoys our pores ooh in the agency I've a story coming out I'm doing a Q&A for a magazine called The New Yorker about and I've written a story that's coming out next week and it's quite a political short story and I've never written politically before but yeah and I mean they're saying why are you writing politically now and the answer of course is is Donald Trump and the short story is small enough and sharp enough to to respond quickly but the books that are going to come out of the rise of the right wing in Europe and America are only now being just stated and won't be read for another 5 10 or 20 years so the short story is a very mobile little item that you can actually you can you can shift and change within that within that genre quicker than you can within the novel but now there is a trend for fiction to become very like nonfiction very like memoir and to rinse old sense of story or narrative for it you know stupid stuff fairy tale folk tale myth out of the story and with it it has also become a very a political object just just in the last 5 or 10 years so the story that people reached for this year was a Handmaid's Tale which was written in 1985 by Margaret Hospital it was it was sort of it was it was a book just stated in the 1970s in the feminine in the feminism of 1970s and that's what we needed at that moment was a handmade tale we needed a big stupid fairy tale science fiction fairy tale because anyway so the moment calls out different narrative responses ok does anyone understand that I'm not sure I do myself I have to finish that Q&A okay with the Forgotten walls what inspired you to research and apply epilepsy within your story and has there been any particular meaning behind it besides bringing awareness to the condition itself that's a really excellent question Samantha because I it's very rarely asked I did a lot of research into Evie's condition and was very interested in writing Evie and children are very hard a very rarely used in fiction they often have an uncanny effect like the cash you don't know how to kill child sees when childhood situation and so in 19th century fiction they're used a lot in ghost stories and in you know Henry James it's like don't you leave insert again okay I can't remember turn of the screw I can't remember the 19th century it's like so they have this on but I'm interested in children as characters and personalities of all security interests in fact they change from the age of trees the age of ten and it's like wow they're the same person they are the same there is some fantastic essence of them there but they are completely different things you know so evey in the story changes from four through to fourteen I think she is at the end she's sort of there she's in an adult sense she's fully morally sensible I mean sensitive by the end of the book and she goes through this journey I wanted to describe and it's a kind of off story I wanted to describe something that I had noticed which is if children have series seer more serious problems than evey the marriage often splits up and not off not always but that is one of the reasons that marriages can split up or difficulties within the marriage in some cases because the husband didn't that wasn't what he signed up for and that the wife has no option but to stay with the child and difficulty so that that's one dynamic that I was intrigued by when I saw in my own sort of life and I was listening to stories as we're at the bus stop that's one story here the other thing that I noticed when I had kids myself is because you become a astonishingly anxious about them they're amazing they weren't alive a year ago and then here they are on the planet and they're being alive seems for not really quite a long time a fragile and tenuous thing they arrived and they therefore might just as easily go there is that magical thing literally magical thing idea of keeping children alive and that there might be something wrong with them the other thing you are convinced by in early Parenthood is that you're wrecking your children that they arrived perfect and you're just messing them up so all of these anxieties I needed something that would be that would make make a mother especially extraordinarily anxious but that would not but and that was somehow there are many different epilepsy is just a symptom of many different illnesses or difficulties so it's literally like a headache headache could be a brain tumor or it could be you know dehydration epilepsy is similarly a symptom and it's hard to diagnose what the cause is and sometimes they grow out of it and they're so epilepsy was in marital terms the right thing for me to choose is that enough okay time okay Laura Laura Kenney Laura Kenney I haven't seen that spelling of Laura before it's go to any father or a Kenny why did you pick this time of onset the novel and because of the boom so I should really talk more about the novel and the boom the boom and the bust and some of you are too remember but you might remember there were three years of snow during those three years of snow Ireland went down the tubes the economy just absolutely tanked and the snow is gorgeous so I was looking at the snow one day and I realized that Jeannie was looking out at the snow and I have my story the country was totally and on a micro as well as a macro level it wasn't it wasn't just in the news it was your neighbor it was people in difficulty everywhere everywhere in the local train station and braver I was the football between em - between 2007 and 2008 went from twelve and a half thousand per day to two and a half thousand you didn't know where everybody went they went home they went on blind they went to Australia they just had no jobs it was an amazing moment and it had been also amazing to live through the boom where among other things literature and story makers where somehow pushed to the side and and the idea that as an Irish writer you would somehow now explain the country to itself but that you would be involved in a tradition that that somehow brought us further on that was pushed aside it was like never mind all that we have the handbags you can off that right so it was a very hectic it was also very difficult to write fictions in a country that was a fiction it was very interesting to see an economy as fiction the house prices were going up like crazy and the idea was if you said that's crazy then it would be your fault if they crashed it was a confidence trick so it was a trick of denial it was a trick of fiction it felt like money it was dead okay so that was all this otama shrink that was all completely astonishing and that happened when you were seven right nine I can't remember what year it was but a February the 6th I looked out at the snow and said ok an affair I had been looking at boom literature in the states particularly after World War two I was looking at Richard Yates I was looking at John Updike I wasn't particularly looking at the Hampstead novels of the 60s well when money comes into a country divorce also comes into the country it's like Ireland had no sex until we had a few shillings right and then we got a bit more money and people started divorcing as well my goodness so that thought that that connection between sex money denial fiction how better to do it than an affair because an affair must be enormous ly great fun in a high state of denial this isn't happening let's keep going yeah we're not doing this let's do it and that felt very like the house housing market in 2005 that's why I picked that time okay Anthony do you think Gina would be measured with more or less appreciation if she was a male character appreciation appreciation game Hillard I'm just thinking through the options would Shawn like her better and I mean he's sort of appreciation okay if she was male I mean Gina is what might be called a contingent character she is made to a certain extent by the circumstances around her if she was male she just wouldn't be Gina I don't know there was another thing that I used to like sort of knowing about from a distance and that was women who only slept at and to an extent some of them needs them to stay married him Gina needs them to him to stay married for quite a long time and it is in Gina's case something to do with her rivalry with her sister I mean you could you could psychoanalyze Jean and say okay that's all about Fiona and the sister and rival and getting her out of the way or whatever so it's important that the wife would be there for Gina in order for Gina to win all the time repeatedly with the wife and her middle class know her middle-aged paralyzed lipstick I think the book is reviewed by a middle-aged woman which is just actually just what what is a middle-aged woman which is an interesting description for a person but it was reviewed in the newspaper by a woman who might be called middle-aged doesn't eat I might be myself and she didn't get it she thought that you know I was being really mean to the wife but Jean has been really mean to the life it's not her anyway Krillin knee Vera Cooney whale hello how did you where are you Kaylin after all of that okay how did you begin your career as the writer I just I ran a wrote bad poetry in school that's a but that's not a career and I'd have to tell you that another time calm or Riordan you're an come I come do you share any characteristics with Gina or any other of your characters yes I do they're all me keep it saying did you put so-and-so in your book and I said now I put me me and well they can't be anyone else because I can't be anyone else I mean it's not written by a new house so yeah I mean when I was writing short stories I used because there were so many different styles of female characters and short stories I thought of them as abandoned lives are I didn't lead or things that choices I haven't made or you know the road not taken' basically they're all forks in the road so all these characters are shed skins like a snake sheds its skin says not me not me but actually Gina is kind of more distant from me than a number of the other female characters I've written I often write women characters with the kind of energy that somehow is liberating but Gina is already liberated in a way she needs to be sort of unliberated a bit she's just been more confined not less and you said in an interview with sean o'hagan and The Guardian The Observer actually put on the Guardian website that I am drawed drawn to flawed female characters why is this well I think the floor as I'm sure you know from your Leaving Cert it's all about the floor it's all about the floor for Macbeth it's all about the floor for King Lear it's all about the flow of Romeo and does Juliet have a floor so that's that's I mean does do God on Regan and floors they've nothing but this could Delia have a flow of course not they do to the women Armano in the in King Lear they only have one aspect to them inter in moral terms whereas King Lear is flawed so floors veritas floor means human floor means complex contradictory some that you can sympathize with who annoys you at the same time any questions from the floor I should talk more about Gina I shouldn't know or is that enough yes because you said talk about the difference between falling in love and love and last week we were talking about a novel that's supposed to be about which man you sleep with okay but an awful lot of it in the end in the end if there is that moment where she gets it did you talk about the inside is about her mother and this child who isn't her daughter that somehow that's a bit disconcerting best of all disconcert you did it and is that what is that the comparison between those two sets the relationships it is you know that she falls in love with the men but the really hard stuff the really hard love is somewhere in that space between the mother and and Evie yeah I'm always interested in romance or sexual love and genetic love you have your brothers and sisters you have your mother or father you have your children and you love them why do you like my gosh even if they annoy the outta here I still love them and you can't choose not to love them and they still always seem to be quite unfair of course you love your parents no option unless you're English and they said I hate my parents and that I'm and that you know and that doesn't and that means something where is he now I don't you say that just because it's Tuesday and on you go you still love them so with romantic love buying it's completely different you you love somebody because you have in some way you or you think you have chosen them but you know the Greeks have many many more words for love them than we have have you know there's I kept a carriage house and various words for that these very positive and romantic feelings towards other people the love the Gina hers women love right is like teenage love in that is hugely egotistical in a way it's like I'm in love and therefore DM he must love me you remember that thing where if you fancy something they didn't fancy back that didn't make sense why happy but I love you right so I'm quite interested in it's not love as tantrum Gina but it is love as strong person feeling independent of what the world thinks okay independent of the actions of the other one way or the other now the other thing I was just a love their attitude like knowledge like they have sex every Friday there is no limit on my color description in the book and I did that deliberately because of quite a liberal critic of it criticized my previous book as having too many anatomical descriptions of it and I wondered why she thought that was wrong how can you write about sex I could just write why should that woman be invested in that but what actually absolutely carries great sex it's like oh I saw at the bus stop right so so it's it's it any rate it's elevated I'm losing my train of thought here and but love you to come especially if you also look there's a there's a theological problem in the second letter of Saint James which led to much difficulty in the centuries our words whether you are saved by faith or by deeds whether God will take you into heaven if you just say I love you God I really love you or you will go to heaven because you're nice to the beggar in the street and Protestantism and all kinds of difficulties came out of that argument is it enough to feel hugely or should you also act and that is the root problem in in this book perhaps it is you know to love actually why not our actions are limited but perhaps we should also act

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Length: 48min 31sec (2911 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 26 2017