Gabriel Byrne, Walking With Ghosts | Moms Don't Have Time To Read Books

welcome gabriel thank you so much for coming on moms don't have time to read books to discuss your beautiful memoir walking with ghosts thank you so much olivia it's uh it's it's lovely to talk to you thank you your memoir was absolutely gorgeous i loved every word you're a phenomenal writer um how did you even know when did you even realize you could write in addition to act and everything else that you do my mother was the one who encouraged me to read she would read out loud to us at nighttime and uh she would also tell us the stories about so i knew oliver twist and pip and all those dickens characters long before um i came to read the books but she read um she read jane hair to us over over six months and then rebecca she was really reading them for herself we just happened to be sitting there listening in on it but um so i was introduced to the world of gothic uh gothic victorian romance at a very uh very early age and then she read as little women which was a really interesting uh experience for me because little women there was a time when people who say who's your favorite beatle well uh i used to say who's my favorite of the little women and it turned out to be beth i i fell in love and was devastated when she died of a fever at 10 years of age tell me a little bit about how your love of reading turned into a love of writing well um the the writing was something i had always admired uh writers and it always seemed to me to be in an excess an inaccessible magical kind of process and the few writers that i had known i asked them you know how did they how did they go about writing and most of them were unable to describe how away it seemed to be some kind of strange alchemy that happened between the brain and the page and i had written little bits of things here and there you know um i wrote a little book of uh love poems to my first girlfriend which would make me shiver if i looked at them now but um in fact i think i remember one small little one um there was a place where we went to um i can't believe i remember this and secondly i can't believe i'm telling you this but anyway look i was 18 or 19 at the time uh it's a place called delgany on delgany's day with my dear when i lay glad to be near one who loved me well and would not tell that i had loved her once with all the innocence my guilt could know oh i love that i and i i i thought well you know and then i stopped um after that and then i went to university and i wrote kind of um you know academic kind of stuff but i'd always read and my taste in literature became uh wider after i left i have to ireland in the beginning i think like a lot of people i was looking in literature for myself i was looking for answers to who i was looking for answers to what the world was about and that's why i began you know with irish literature because it was a world i felt i could understand but nobody was writing about the kind of place that i came from and so i broadened out into british and american literature after that so when it came to the writing of this i thought um i i would just experiment a little bit and see how it went because finding a voice if there's a goat in the background here a goat is just chopped up on the back of the car you're kidding oh my god no i'm i'm not kidding and they they they they're crazy girls if they'd like to get in and do whatever you're doing but i'm just saying if a goat is that can you see oh yes i can see the vague outline of the goat okay and now it's gone right okay so um to experiment and just um see because finding a voice is is difficult um and trying when you're writing a memoir especially trying to find a voice that's authentic to you um and and so i i did about 10 or 15 pages and then i sent them to a friend and i said look have a look at this and see what you think and he said i think you should do more and then i did about 40 pages and i sent it to an agent not expecting very much and she said look i think i can do something with this and it was a total shock to me because i didn't expect this to happen at all i had written something years ago um an experimental kind of memoir but i wrote it in three weeks so i didn't really put much store by that but um i suppose it was a combination of trying to find my writing voice and not being intimidated by all the great writers that i had read wow well the thing about your memoir is that not only do you go into the most painful areas of your life which is just which immediately connects the reader to you right you reveal so much and so much pain over the years in in all these different ways from losing your your childhood friend to your parents to your addiction to like alcoholism the abuse i mean you you it's a gift to the reader to share all of this but also it's the form in which you did it at even um you know even the dashes instead of quote marks and the lyrical quality of writing um just the format i don't know it combines to make a very intimate powerful memoir and i i feel like celebrities might be for celebrity memoir it's like oh you have to overcome the fact that you're a celebrity it's almost like um people's expectations might not be for literature but this is true literature this is a work of art versus you know this is how i got into acting or and you of course include that but um i don't know it's almost like you have to work against what people might think did you feel that when you started writing it like did you feel like you had to sort of overcome maybe what people might think or was this just like a natural thing what do you think about that that's interesting yeah well the first thing is that i don't think of myself as a celebrity in any shape or form i don't um some people might think so but i didn't want to write one of those things of you know i did this movie and i did that movie and then i if there's a movie mentioned it's for a reason if there's an actor mentioned and they're very very few it's for a specific reason i didn't want to write a kiss and tell an intimate you'll never you know eat lunch in this town again i could have done one of those because i do know the bodies are buried so just but that didn't interest me what interested me is i think what almost everybody can do it's an exercise to look at oneself and to say what were the influences that formed the person i am today what were they familial of course cycle of course cultural of course geographical of course um religious all these things go to combine um a kind of a huge influence that determines the kind of person you're going to be and i wanted to look at that and see how much uh i was the result of it and i think anybody can can trace their development in that way the next biggest thing i think in terms of writing a memoir is that you can't dissemble you you can't you you're faced on every page with is this the truth and do i tell it and uh fiction on the other hand if you're writing a novel you you can farm out all these characters and ideas and their fictional characters and you can hide all your perspectives behind them and memoir requires the truth because it's a disservice to the reader if you're bullshitting and you're not telling the truth because the point you make there is that we are all uh fragile creatures and we all hunger for the same things we all fear uh the same thing some of us are better equipped psychologically or emotionally to deal with them but um what unites us and i think what makes us empathize with a great uh novel or poem or a painting is that we feel that it's speaking to us about us and um and so i thought two things if if i can write the truth about myself then somebody else will read this and say that rings true to me and i can perhaps learn something from this not that i was able to teach anything i was just saying i i would just like you to to hear this and uh what you think about it is up to you and the second thing i thought was that by telling my own story i was also telling the story of a particular time and a particular place um so rather than do a book of essays or a novel i found that this was the most potent way to see it through the lens of my own emotion and there were many times when i thought i don't want to put this down i don't want to i don't want to be going around having to answer questions about this but that's the very thing that keeps us trapped silence and shame are fellows and the things that we're most ashamed of are uh and the things that we're the most silent about are the things that need to be brought out into the open and by doing that we we we find freedom there's no freedom in silence and there's certainly no freedom in in in shame but the liberation of the self through um through revealing having the courage to reveal oneself honestly it's not that there's a resolution where there's a big orchestra playing and everybody gives each other a big hug and that that was that problem life goes on life goes on being tough and unpredictable and uh joyful and beautiful but also unexpectedly sorrowful that is life and my biggest battle i found is that i find it hard to stay in the reality of now this there's always a thing in me that wants to do something else to get out of the is-ness of the moment whether it's um you know whether it's alcohol or or drugs or you know i don't shop but you know all the cigarettes food all those things that we think will this will take me out of the moment and the moment doesn't have to be particularly um traumatic it can be just the boringness the grainness the predictability of now that seems um that seems like a weight and we need to we need to escape from it and that's the biggest battle i have is remaining in the present and not wanting or wishing to be anywhere else to be with anybody else to to have some kind of other career to accept the way it is now um and out of that comes a kind of a contentment because um i don't believe in happiness as a permanent state i think it's huge delusion and there's a footballer who died a few days ago an italian footballer called paulo rossi a great footballer and i was watching a little interview with him and he talked about winning the world cup in 1982 the summit of his childhood dreams beyond beyond telling and he said it made me think as i held that cop up before the world is this happiness is this what it is and he said because if it is it was gone in two seconds because happiness is only glimpsed it's it it's like something you see wrong in between trees you see it then it's gone and then it's then you see a little bit of it again what's much more um i think um worth striving for is contentment and and contentment comes out of an acceptance of the way life is that's you know that's why in the memoir i just said this is the way it was and this is the way it is um you know people would love you to say well everything's great now and it's wonderful you've got all these problems behind you that isn't life um and i don't regard myself as being courageous i'm lucky that i survived i'm very lucky that people who loved me said stop this you gotta take care of yourself but i didn't listen to them for a long time um and i don't um i don't drink anymore and i don't like one of the things i wanted to take on in the book was the notion of fame success what is success it's actually very like the notion of happiness and i've been around enough people who have mega mega fame that you can't they can't even go out the door for a coffee but there's an avalanche of people saying the same things that they've been told for 20 years and it's really difficult for those people um people think oh well if i got to be that famous everything would be cool i'd have loads of money out of loads of friends and and so forth and um the little bit that i've had um has allowed me to see that i don't want any more of it and that it's actually not something that i want to pursue in any serious way at all i'd like to do my work of course but i i don't want anything more than beyond that and um i think the things that we are led to believe like i was talking to somebody yesterday um it was a woman who was saying to me oh god the covert thing i put on i put on so much weight she said feel that and she offered her little watch to be failed and i gave it a bit of a squeeze and i said that's nothing and she said i don't know what he is i'm forced to know these jeans so i said listen i've worked with some of the greatest most beautiful actresses of the last 30 years every single one of them has a problem with their body every one of them so i thought to myself what is that it's because there's some ideal out there like happiness that if you get to that ideal place and you get that ideal uh body of it there's no such thing it's it's it's a delusion so men get caught up in it and men think oh that's what women should look like because that's what she looks like on the cover of a magazine women don't look like that for the most part um why is it that those beautiful women adored by millions and millions and millions of people still look in the mirror and say yeah but you know one of my knees is a bit kind of knobbly and you say i i would never even notice that so uh this ideal that we're all kind of culturally impelled towards of what beauty is of what success is of what happiness is these are things that we really have to look at for ourselves and answer honestly what they mean to us because none of these things are the answer to contentment wow that was amazing you're like you have such wisdom and that was incredibly inspiring although i'm not sure if that makes me feel better about the watch i could have you poke but anyway i'll just leave be you know when you said you were um you were lucky i feel like that's what i kept thinking reading this book like wow how did he turn this whole thing around when you were washing dishes and you were getting fired from every job and i was thinking how how is this story going to turn itself around how you know just because you were sitting wearing a leather jacket one day in a restaurant did your and someone spotted you and put you on a soap opera and all this stuff like it would have been so easy for you to have remained sort of you know in the state of trying to find yourself and trying to figure out your path when your dream of your childhood dream of being a priest or fell apart and you were trying to pick up the pieces and then again when you were you know passed out in a doorway with your tooth hanging out and that's when i heard you at dental work i'm like well maybe it's because of that tooth i don't know anyway like how did you keep the faith inside yourself to keep going and to keep waiting for the turnaround whether it came internally or externally that's a good question too and i would say that nothing it doesn't come externally everything has to come from inside because there were all the signs around saying don't do this don't do that you don't pay any attention to things like that it has to come from inside and um eventually you get sick and tired of being sick and tired and you say i wa is a better life possible for me and what does a better life mean and uh in my case i traced it back to the fact that um i i was drinking you know just way too much i never liked the taste of it you could hand me a bottle of budweiser or a 3000 bottle of dollar bottle of wine with dust on it it wouldn't make any difference to me that wasn't the point the point was oblivion the point was escape removal from uh from the present um the simplest thing stuck in my brain i had read this thing once again i'd leave through a buddhist kind of book looking for some kind of hole of something and one of the things that stuck with me was every journey begins with a step a journey of a thousand miles begins with a step my problem was that i had been trying to go to the thousand miles i said how do i get there what what can i do to be in that place what i didn't realize is that you have to take the first step and the second step and two steps is better no steps and ten steps is much better than one and bit by bit by bit i i i built and i've used that in many ways like for example with children the the the fact about it is that the children leaving is a terribly traumatic thing when when children decide to to go and but the signs are there all along i remember when my daughter was very young and she used to be in a car seat and every morning i would put her in the car seat and one day she said to me dad i don't need the car seat anymore i can buckle myself in and i looked in the garage and i saw the car seat and i said th this is this is one of these invisible markers and this is the end of a time in my life and in her life and life is full of those invisible little markers and going back to this buddhist thing of a step at a time one of the things i'm not a buddhist by the way but i'll steal from you know any place i can get it uh the buddhists say that a child's first step is a step away from you that's a tremendously powerful notion to contemplate um because they are going to leave it's inevitable that they will leave us behind and how do we cope with that with the sadness of of that well that little um that little piece of buddhism helps me deal with that too and one last one which is um the the um the idea that your lot is harder than somebody else's and this has happened to me and it's not fair and why why etc and and it was the story of two monks walking along and one of them had a big bag of rocks on his back and he said you know what if you had to carry these honestly god i'm worn out carrying these things and now we have to go up the mountain with and now we have to cross the bridge and the helmet going to get across the river with this bag of rocks and they get to the other side and the the first monk says to him why don't you just leave down the bag of rocks and it sounds like it's it's a it's a kind of a um you know that it's not really um a powerful thing but it is sometimes to just say you know what i don't want to do that anymore i'm tired carrying around this baggage and i'm not going to do it and i try to do that with stuff now i just said do i really need to be thinking about this or dealing with this crap i just want to put it down and um you know to go to seneca the roman philosopher who said life is short but the days if you live them properly are long and so um they're my little bits of wisdom that i hang on to and try to make part of my part of my life so when i came to write the memoir i said okay i'm going to be honest i'm going to be truthful in this and if people you know run away from me and you know say god almighty what do you i'm going to say okay you know what uh that was my choice because in the book i talk about like where people think that people act all you know that actors are always acting and they're not truthful well that's a stereotype and it's a false idea because the job of the actors to tell the truth the job of the writer is to tell the truth the job of the artist full stop is to be the dog that barks before the earthquake he's the one that says this is happening here's the truth i'm holding up the mirror look into it that's what the function of an artist is and so um by telling the truth in performance and and on the page you're helping somebody else to look into a mirror and by me saying where i went wrong in my life hopefully there'll be some guy sitting on a chair somewhere who'll say well i'm not making that mistake i'm sure there will be a lot of people on chairs um nodding their head and be being inspired um there are a lot of theories about trauma and the way it affects our development and i feel like you had so much trauma and especially growing up and i mean i go back to losing your friend jimmy i mean that alone could have set somebody off on a different page or your relationship with your sister marion and what ended up happening to her and um just all these things that you had to go through the the the priest and when you called him back oh my gosh that was like insane that moment what do you think about sort of the presence of trauma and how carrying that through your life affects you i mean some people get tons of therapy for things like this i didn't get the sense that that's the way you you approached you had that that you didn't approach it that way like what do you do with all this trauma that collectively builds up i mean how do you come to a point where you're sitting in a car at your age looking back and having such wisdom about everything how do you go from there to here um i i don't honestly know the answer in relation to myself because i don't know if trauma ever leaves the system um the idea that you deal with the trauma and move on move on is a word that i i i anytime somebody says to me and and move on i don't trust that um i think it's always there in some form or another the thing about um abuse it's not just about sexual abuse it's domestic violence it's emotional abuse it's it's it's any time somebody abuses their power over another person um i had to do i had to to work a lot to get trust back because trust is broken uh in you know with with abuse i i still find trust a difficult thing i trust the people i love of course but you know i have areas where i i think to myself why do i distrust that there's absolutely no reason to distrust that particular thing so i don't know that it ever goes away i don't know that you ever completely resolve it it's like um the idea of of forgiveness um what what is forgiveness forgiving yourself and you know those things that have passed into the common kind of culture to i remember meeting a jewish couple in new york she had survived auschwitz with her mother that alone is a story that you know it's hard to comprehend how somebody and and and the father was the man who had met her in the transit camp in marseille in 1945 for 46 and um i said to the to the woman do you believe in forgiveness and she said i've i forgive the german people um uh i i forgive the people uh that um were the cause of the holocaust i forgive them because i have no choice except to forgive them because if i don't forgive them i'll be eaten up with incredible anger nonstop but i have forgiven the german people and her husband hit the table so hard that the crockery jumped up into the air and he said there is no such thing as forgiveness and right there is the is the is is is the dichotomy it is it's it's a it's a dilemma that i still can't solve do can you absolutely forgive can you absolutely rid yourself of trauma i think the answer is no i think that there's um i i'm suspicious of absolutism i believe in i believe in the relative examination of things i can forgive but i don't i i i've dealt with the trauma but i really don't know whether i have um i i've given up alcohol i haven't drank for 24 23 23 or 4 years but i could start again in five minutes and i could be dead tomorrow so um have i given that up absolutely i like to think so but there's vestiges of all the experiences of our life in who we are that's why i wanted to look at that what bits are left inside me from them and and how did they go to make me the man and that i am today i don't regard myself as wise or anything like that i just felt that i had to hunt around for scraps of things that made sense to me and taken one step at a time and that i've gotten to this place where um not that terribly much impresses me anymore to be honest wow um i feel like i could listen to you talk all day i feel like you have a way of putting things into perspective and um you know in my own little life knowing your theory it makes it easier to forgive and to put down the bag of of bricks knowing that you've done so before me whatever everybody's bag of bricks on their back happens to be at this at this very time so your words are inspiring to me and i loved your book and um i'm so impressed with your ability to put it out there and be open and help other people and i mean that's the most human thing you could you could do it's really that's that's it it's connecting to other people it's just um that's the most beautiful thing someone can do to somebody for somebody else so anyway i just wanted to thank you for that and i truly loved your book and uh um thank you for talking to me today thank you so much it was it was a pleasure to talk to you and um i i thought we were going to be talking about literature and dostoyevsky and philip roth and everything and it ended up more like um more like uh i i sounded a bit more like a oprah than uh than somebody who was um going on to talk about it um but i think it's all connected in literature it's it's all connected it's it's um and and uh we got going on that uh jag and it was a good one oh good well i'm sure you could have talked the whole time about dostoevsky and maybe we'll pick that up next time i need a good dose of dostoyevsky i'll try to get in touch with you but this was much more interesting to me thank you take care okay [Music] you

Channel: Zibby Owens

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Keywords: writing, books, podcast, arts, moms, reading, Oprah's book club, hello sunshine, Zibby owens, best new books

Id: mk_fmAIMlOY

Length: 32min 34sec (1954 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 12 2021