Colm Toibin in The Guardian:
In the early years of this century, I worked for a semester at various American universities in cities where I will not live again. Thus, in a story called Barton Springs, I could conjure up Austin in Texas, and in Five Bridges, the city of San Francisco. In Sleep, I could venture into an apartment I sublet near Columbia University in 2012 and 2013. I could put my hero in my bed. I could have him watch from the same window as I watched from, with a view of the George Washington Bridge. When I take him back to Dublin, I have him spend time in the long living room in Ranelagh that belonged to the feminist writer June Levine and her husband the psychiatrist Ivor Browne. The bar in Barcelona in A Free Man is a place I once knew well. The story The News from Dublin opens in the back room of the house where I was raised, a house that has long been sold. I won’t go back there.
By the time I wrote those stories, those spaces could only be visited in my memory or in my imagination. Other spaces, such as the room where I am now in New York, have not been written about. Not yet. They have not been lost yet. I do not regret them or miss them. They are not part of a world that I can imagine, a world that has somehow been completed and is ready to be framed or entered stealthily, as a ghost might come and haunt a story.
In the future, if I live long enough, I will be able to see this room as though framed, as though completed. It will be part of memory, part of history. I will be able to write about it. This is the room where I learned first‑hand not only what evil is like but how evil is tolerated. What is strange about being in America in the time of Trump is how ordinary it is, how what was unimaginable just over a year ago is suddenly, shockingly no longer a surprise.
More here.
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