ENNISCORTHY NOVELIST Colm Tóibín opened up about his childhood and dealing with the death of his father on RTE’s The Meaning of Life with Gay Byrne on Sunday night.
The 57-year-old told Mr. Byrne that he wasn’t the happiest growing up in Enniscorthy, with “nothing in particular to be unhappy about”, but that he disliked being told what to do: “I suppose there was a lot of regimentation, and I found that quite difficult.”
He added that he enjoyed his time as an altar boy in St. Aidan’s Cathedral, “as you were left alone and your job was to ring a bell at a certain moment.”
However, he told Mr. Byrne that his entire life was flipped upside down with the sickness of his father, Michael Tóibín, when he was 8-years-old. His father was a well-known local historian and writer with The Echo newsgroup.
His sickness resulted in his death when Mr. Tóibín was the young age of 12.
He only fully came to terms with his father’s death following a conversation with fellow writer June Levine’s husband Ivor Browne, a controversial psychiatrist.
When asked how his father’s death at a young age affected him, Mr. Tóibín replied: “I was going into secondary school and he was teaching there and I was so worried about it, so when he died it was really a great relief.”
This was the realisation that he did not grieve properly which lead him to attend a seminar session of Dr. Browne’s which caused him “almost violent” pain, with a feeling that “something inside was trying to get out”.
[Full story in this week’s Echo]