The writing of Lewis and Barnes and Oates about grief is deeply personal, precise and particular. The feeling they describe is unique because the person grieved over was unique. The loss happened only once. But the writing is also public; it does not come in diary form with many cryptic references. Its source is perhaps the very source of fiction itself – the mysterious and compulsive need to find a rhythm and an artful tone to suggest and communicate the most private feelings and imaginings and facts to someone else, to make sentences which will move from mirroring the writer to allowing the reader to catch a more intense glimpse of the world.

All this is so cleverly braided into the widowhood of Nora Webster and her two boys, Conor and the stuttering, damaged Donal, that Tóibín’s considerable narrative gifts successfully navigate the bumpy intersection of the private and the public. Through the slow personal reawakening of Webster, he finds a subtle way to reflect on Ireland’s need to put its own grief into a larger context. The novelists have become characters in their own books. By the urgency of the tone, they make clear, however, that, in the aftermath of loss, nothing they can invent compares to it. And that, since they are writers, what happened needs to be written down so that it can be known and shared and understood, so that it can lose its incoherence. And so that they, in their powerlessness and helplessness, can at least still do this, can at least write down what it was like.

Nora Webster

Unlike Eilis Lacey, Nora does not cross the Atlantic, she learns to sing. The discovery of music in her life gives her “a line towards brightness, or some beginning”, writes Tóibín, a master of less is more. At the same time, because he is also exploring Ireland at a crossroads, an infinitely fascinating web of allusion, taut with nuance and subtlety, and because no Irish writer returning to his or her homeland can ever quite step out of Joyce’s shadow, Nora Webster carries a burden of detail missing from Brooklyn. Put simply, Tóibín’s novel contains an awful lot of its author and his resonant sonority. This cuts both ways, good and bad. For a decade I thought about the book at some point every day. I worked out a structure. Slowly, the character of Nora Webster herself began to emerge for me more clearly. I wanted her to be both brave and difficult, to be someone fiercely loyal to her children when there was a crisis, but oddly nonchalant in the ordinary course of events. Her sisters were afraid of her. There is a sense of her as trapped by her circumstances, in a small town. Sussler, Betsy (3 November 2014). "Awards: Irish Book; Banff Mountain". Shelf Awareness . Retrieved 7 January 2022. I thought at first of writing the book from my own perspective, rather than my mother's, but when I tried to set some of that down, I found there was nothing, or not enough for a novel. It was as though the experience had hollowed me out and was, from my perspective, too filled with silence and distance for me to be able to harness it for a novel's purposes. Kirkus called Nora Webster "[a] novel of mourning, healing and awakening," noting that "its plainspoken eloquence never succumbs to the sentimentality its heroine would reject." [1]

I enjoyed this quiet and unassuming novel, watching Nora and the boys change as Nora learns to live her own life. I loved the moment, three years later, when she realizes she can do what she wants now, that there is no one who can tell her she can't. In this case, it was about redecorating her home. I loved the two boys, they too change in many ways, but the youngest watches closely everything that goes on. It takes great skill as a writer to make the most common events interesting and for me this author did just that.Ott, Bill (6 April 2015). "Shortlist Announced for the 2015 Andrew Carnegie Medals for Fiction and Nonfiction". Booklist . Retrieved 7 January 2022.

I began my novel Nora Webster in the spring of 2000. Even though I wrote other books over the next thirteen and a half years, I added to Nora Webster every year, or deleted something from it. I thought about it almost every day. Although some of the details are invented, including the details of the place where Nora goes to work, there is nothing invented about the atmosphere in the house in the small town where myself and my younger brother lived with my mother in the years after my father died. The loss is complex, or it comes in a complex guise. People think she wants to talk about her dead husband, or be reminded of what she has lost. "They thought she hugged tight every memory she had of him. What did they know about memory?" She hopes for a time when she had "forgotten him for a minute". It is clear that the grief does not have to be named as "grief", or brought out for inspection. All she knows is that how she feels is not stable, it cannot be trusted. It is wayward.In Lavin's stories about solitude and widowhood, her characters live in a twilight time. They barely manage. One of her stories about grief and its aftermath, controlled grief, is "In the Middle of the Fields". In the first sentence, she establishes that her heroine is alone in an isolated rural place. And then the next sentence reads: "And yet she was less lonely for him here in Meath than elsewhere."

This idea of the personality as suddenly protean under the pressure of loss belongs fundamentally to the literature of grief because, of course, it belongs to the experience. In Joyce Carol Oates's A Widow's Story, written after the death of her husband, she describes the efforts of her friend C. to throw an enormous dinner party for her, inviting many of her friends, to help ease the pain. "I envision," Oates writes, "a thirty-foot dining room table and at the farther end the widow placed like a leper, as far from the lovely C. as possible." Despite Oates's asking for a smaller event, C. persists, only to find of course that the friends are not free on any of the suggested nights. Oates writes: "I am beginning to realise that though C. has said that she and her husband are 'eager' to see me they are in fact dreading to see me." verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ I noticed that there was very little fiction written from the point of view of a widow. I found two short stories about being a widow – “Happiness” and “In the Middle of the Fields” – by the Irish writer Mary Lavin, whom I had known when I was a student in Dublin, helpful, enabling. I found something also in the last section of Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks that interested me – the use of music as a way to inhabit loss, or to allow loss to have its full weight. I remembered my mother, who had very little money, getting a stereo and gradually buying classical LPs. There was one record that she played over and over – a recording of Beethoven’s Archduke Trio with Jacqueline du Pré, Daniel Barenboim and Pinchas Zukerman. I remember the sleeve of the album with a photograph of all three players. I found a recording of it and began to play it.Brown, Mark (23 March 2015). "Akhil Sharma wins Folio prize for fiction". the Guardian . Retrieved 7 January 2022. I wrote the first chapter of my novel Nora Webster in the spring of 2000, in the same season as I wrote the first chapter of The Master, my novel about Henry James. Both books dealt with a protagonist over four or five years. Alone in the world, both James and Nora Webster attempted to find a way out of failure or grief or loss. Although The Master required a great deal of research and Nora Webster almost none, I found The Master easier to work on, and easier to finish. Brown, Mark (18 November 2014). "Costa 2014 book awards shortlist includes first novel by ex-Mormon". the Guardian . Retrieved 7 January 2022.