Sinéad Gleeson

Mrs Baggett had lived in the house for 15 years, ever since her marriage.

Her three children had been born there, in the upstairs front bedroom, and she was glad of that, because her first child, her son, was dead.

And it comforted her to think that she was still familiar with what had been his one glimpse of earth.

He had died at three days.

At the time he died, she said to herself that she would never get used to it.

And what she meant by that was as long as she lived, she would never accept what had happened in the mechanical subdued way that the rest of them accepted it.

They carried on.

They talked and moved about her room as though when they tidied the baby away, they had really tidied him away.

and it seemed to her that more than anything else they expressed the hope that nothing more would be said about him.

They behaved as though what had happened was finished, as though some ordinary event had taken place and come to an end in a natural way.

There had not been an ordinary event, and it had not come to an end.

It's pretty devastating.

I think in Brendan's case, I mean, she's very I think of her not just as an Irish writer, but intrinsically a Dublin writer.

And I think of Joyce like that.

I think of I think of Beckett like that as well in that, you know, not just because it because it's so specific to the addresses and the spaces in the house and the garden.

And I think in a way that there's a there's a line where I think herself and Maxwell didn't they were falling over the fact that she wouldn't read Elizabeth's Bowen.

And she said that she had a fear of the bog and thunder variety of Irish writing that was voiced abroad in the name of Irish writing.

And I think she desperately tried to stay out of that.

So you don't, while you do find priests, you don't find the traditional kind of priests you do in her stories.

And, you know, there aren't farms.