Andy Miller

you think about was like and that sort of somebody I think that I was listening to something it was actually an interview with with Angela Burke and she I think they even said Maeve was a bit like the Peggy Olsen character in except that I have to say that everything you read about it was she was incredibly she broke brilliant short pungent book reviews and

She was very witty.

She was good at put downs.

She was sort of, she was a lot sassier than I think Peggy Olsen in Mad Men is.

David.

Do you think there's something, though, Sinead, that's changed in taste?

I mean, I'm just I'm struggling to think how at any time that wouldn't seem like very, very great, very original, very distinctive writing.

And very unsentimental.

You know, you talk about Connor, but, you know, he was, you know, there's plenty of sentimentality in his stories, but not a trace of it ever in these stories of Mae Brennan's.

I just wonder what's changed that makes us now able to see them more clearly?

The artistry of it.

The artistry is exactly what I was going to say.

So many of these stories, I'm reading them and I'm thinking...

You don't often get it, actually, I find, that you think this is structured and layered in such a careful and intelligent way that I'm going to have to read the story again almost immediately to get the full resonance.

She has this extraordinary ability to say simple things that you might not pay attention to.

And maybe this is part of the problem.

Maybe people read these stories too quickly and don't...

I just wanted to, you know, I was all having a go.

I just wanted to read the beginning of the last story in the Hubert, last story chronologically in the Hubert and Rose Durden sequence.

It's called The Drowned Man.