Colm Tóibín

And, um,

Also my mother had never, the concept of an unruly teenager did not exist.

There was nothing about it in the newspapers.

So when I began to just, the worst moments, the really shameful, shameful moment, and if my mother were here now, she'd say, I know what it is, that after my father died, one of the summers, it must've been two summers after he died, my mother decided we needed to go to County Kerry to look at the landscape and maybe learn Irish.

And there's a famous building in the West Kerry called the Galleris Oratory.

I think it's from the sixth century or the seventh.

It's very, very early.

And it's like a beehive.

And it's terribly important.

And when they were all, my sisters and my mother and my brother were getting out of the car to study it, I just said I was going to stay in the car if that was all right with them.

I mean, they shouldn't have let me.

They should have said, you're getting out now of the car.

Drag me out of the car.

But they just said, okay, if you want to stay in the car, that's fine.

But any time after that I ever mentioned some building I liked or something, there's a gallerist oratory.

You wouldn't even get out of the car.

And I went back there, you know, some years ago, almost penitentially for like, you know, what an appalling thing to do.

But the, yeah, the...

I didn't look like any of the others.

And then someone somewhere said that they thought I was an Italian.