“Colm Tóibín is the kindest person in the world.” Don’t take my word for it. That’s a quote. The speaker was my six-year-old daughter, Georgia; the time almost exactly twenty years ago. Colm and I were attending the Parati Literary Festival, in Brazil. Among the other participants that year were many writers who have received The Medal of Honor for Achievement in Literature, including Martin Amis, Margaret Atwood, and Paul Auster. They were all down there, apparently being less kind than Colm. Because one night as I tucked Georgia into her hotel bed, she looked up and gave her of assessment of tonight’s honoree. I can hear her voice now, saying, “Colm is the kindest person in the world.” And I can hear Colm’s voice every night during the rest of the festival, saying, “Jeff, tell everyone what Georgia said about me.” Well, it’s true. He is the kindest. And the form his kindness often takes is that, when you run into Colm, he’ll tell you what you’re like. Last month, at the The Paris Review Revel, Colm came up to me with a grin on his face and, without preliminaries, began telling me stories about myself. According to Colm, he’d once encouraged the people at the Stanford University to invite me to give a reading. When I did so, during my opening remarks, I happened to mention that, when I’d been a grad student at Stanford, I’d dated a woman who turned out to be allergic to my semen. I had no memory of saying such a thing I public. I couldn’t believe I’d ever said something like that. I can’t believe I’m repeating it now. And I’m only doing it to give you a sense of what a repository of fact, incident and embarrassing anecdote this man is. Running into him is like finding an old diary and reading through it with astonishment. Did I really do that? Say that? Is that what I’m like? Henry James said that a novelist should be “someone on whom nothing is lost.” Fittingly, the person I know who best fits […]
Click here to view original page at Jeffrey Eugenides on Colm Tóibín, “The Kindest Person in the World”
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