Colm Tóibín

Meaning that the story, most of it happens on the last Saturday before Trump is inaugurated.

When this Paul figure will go for a hike with his daughter and then he will leave America.

And I worked on that very Saturday.

I got up early and I worked all day in real time, with the real time of the story.

I was working on the very day the story was happening.

And my aim was I have to get this guy out of America by Monday, which is Trump's inauguration.

And I have to, therefore the story has to be finished by Monday because in the fiction I'm working with, he has to be out.

So I finished the story and within a few weeks, the New Yorker published it.

So it was the only time in my life I think I've been up to the minute.

I'm always writing about the 1950s or the 19th century or sometime in the distant past.

And people are always...

me about like why what's wrong with contemporary life that you can't deal with it like like you don't you don't you don't even have text messages or you don't have the internet or all the things people you Ryanair all the things we you know Abu Dhabi you don't put all those things into your fiction you seem to be locked in the past and so well for once I've been really modern really contemporary and up to the minute

Yeah, it was one way of seeing if I could write my way out of the horror I thought was coming.

And then the horror happened.

The thing is that in the future, to try and describe the strangeness of America now, the way in which everything is taken as normal, the way in which so much has now been normalized, the way in which you could really spend a lot of time

talking and thinking about many other things while around you.

The casual business of, you know, someone was coming to do some work in the house.

I'm in Los Angeles and just said, well, I can't go in the morning to collect the material.

And I honestly just innocently said, what's the problem?

I thought it was traffic.