Una McCormack

The sheer truthfulness of it.

And the beauty of it.

Speaking it is just joy.

I wonder what the book that Frances writes would be.

Would it be the comic novel that she hints at in the text?

I think it's this book.

But remember, she's funny.

And she's bewildered and confused and doesn't understand his motives.

And possibly he has not been the man that she has fantasized or imagined.

The romantic hero that's always run through the Bruckner novels.

Little orphan Fanny.

Do you think it's meant to evoke Fanny Price from Mansfield Park, I wonder?

These things are not carelessly done by Brooklyn, I think.

That I get things wrong is so... It's heartbreaking, isn't it?

I think it is, in all senses, a harrowing book.

And that chapter 11, that penultimate chapter... It's the sort of breakdown chapter.

Yeah, she says, descent into hell.

Oh, the long walk home.

It's one of the great set pieces I've read.

Although, do you think it's from the rash act or do you think the tragedy, back to Greek tragedy again, do you think the tragedy in her heroines is that they don't act out of character enough?