Colm Tóibín

I mean, I think that for some reason, it's very hard to deal with death.

Even you think, surely in a country that's Catholic or...

I know no one in Ireland who managed to deal with the death of their parents as though it was some sort of natural, inevitable thing, like the seasons changing, like the day becoming night.

I know no one who dealt with that.

At the moment, I'm editing a magazine called Poetry Ireland.

You know, it falls to one person to edit it.

And then it fell to me.

And I think I'm reading a thousand poems.

I've probably read hundreds of them by Irish poets.

And so many of them are elegies for the parents.

I can't think of a historical reason as much as that it is as though maybe the rituals surrounding death that made it easier in some way were never actually real.

Were things people talked about.

I mean, I'm talking about the wake or the idea of the dead body.

But I wonder if none of that was true, if people were just devastated.

Yeah.

I mean, devastated by death.

And it's a curious thing because people would presume Irish people had a better way of dealing with death, but it's not true.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

He's fed up with me talking about the Pet Shop Boys because his taste in music is actually very serious and sophisticated.