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- [00:00]
Ryan Reynolds
Hey, I'm Ryan Reynolds. Recently I asked Mint Mobile's legal team if big wireless companies are allowed to raise prices due to inflation. They said yes. And then when I asked if raising prices technically violates those onerous two year contracts, they said, what the are you talking about, you insane Hollywood. So to recap, we're cutting the price of mint unlimited from $30 a month to just $15 a month. Give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch $45 upfront.
- [00:26]
Mint Mobile Representative
Payment equivalent to $15 per month. New customers on first three month plan only. Taxes and fees, extra speed slower above 40 gigabyte.
- [00:36]
Kate
Top of the morning to ya. It is Thursday and it is time for the bookcase. And I will not insult the Irish by trying to do an Irish accent, but there was a reason I said top of the morning to you. And I'll let my father introduce that. So here is my father and I'm the Kate part of the Kate and Charlie part. Hello.
- [00:51]
Charlie
And I'm the Charlie part. The speaker of the House, who I had a pleasure of covering for many, many years, was then Tip O'Neill. And he taught me that when somebody says to you, top of the morning to you. The proper reply is and the rest of the day to you. So the rest of the day to you, Kate.
- [01:07]
Kate
Ah. And the rest of the day to you. You responded then in kind.
- [01:11]
Charlie
This has a very Irish flavor to this podcast. We're going to talk to Niall Williams, who is one of our favorite authors. Our first author that we ever talked to on this podcast two and a half years ago was Niall Williams, who had written one of my favorite books ever, this is Happiness. And we are going to solve all of your Christmas problems right on this podcast.
- [01:33]
Kate
Isn't that nice of us?
- [01:34]
Charlie
Yes. We're playing Santa. We're playing Santa. He has got a new book out just two days now. Out. You'll find it in better bookstores everywhere. The Time of the Child. And it is a perfect present for Christmas. I have no skin in this game. I get nothing in terms of royalties. I just think this book is perfect for Christmas. And it is. It is the time of the child. A phrase that is used in the first sentence of the book and then at the end of the book. And it perfectly parallels in his fictitious tiny little town of Faja, the story of Christmas and then the story of a foundling child discovered in Faja just before Christmas. And it is. Well, it's just. It's wonderful.
- [02:19]
Kate
Yeah, it's got an. It's got a real it's got a sincere warmth to it. And although it is Christmas related and there is a foundling story, I think the story could apply to anybody. I mean, if you're celebrating, you know, Kwanzaa, you will love this book. If you're celebrating Hanukkah, you will love this book. Because more central than the story of the foundling, I think, is the cyclical and profound love we all have for our children or for, you know, the smaller people of this earth. As a mother, this book spoke to me on so many levels. It really brought to mind that moment when I met my children for the first time and instantaneously. Although it happens when they kick too, because you're like, oh, hello, you're in there. But when they come out and you're face to face with them, you realize that you've moved from the driver's seat of the car of your life to the backseat of the car of your life because you know that you would do anything for this child. It happens instantaneously. It is surprising, it is shocking, it is miraculous. And Nya Williams writes beautifully about that, both from the perspective of a parent or caregiver and from the perspective of a grandparent. This book is about the warmth of family. And so it couldn't be better suited for a time when we try to get together with our. If we're lucky enough, we try to get together with our families to enjoy the holidays.
- [03:39]
Charlie
He says, I take a risk with this book because I'm writing about human goodness. Human goodness. And there are so many sentences that reflect that. He talks about the sort of sudden, unbidden, untaught, unthought out impulse of love. And he talks about it with the love of a child. To give you a sense of the plot, there is in Faja a Christmas fair. And during the fair, a young man, I think, at the age of 12 finds a baby abandoned in the back of the church and brings it to Dr. Troi, who is the protagonist of the novel, and Dr. Troi's spinster daughter, Ronnie, and brings the child into the house, hands it to them. They think actually it's dead at the time. But Dr. Troy does something to revive the baby and the love that they feel for that baby. Instantaneous. And it's wonderful. It's wonderful, yeah.
- [04:39]
Kate
And you find yourself reading about this instantaneous love, going, yeah, yeah. Because you remember the moments, if you were lucky enough, when you met your own kids or grandkids or the special kids in your life. This book speaks to all of that.
- [04:51]
Charlie
So we asked Niall just to read a paragraph that comes just after the baby has been brought into the house. And Rani's daughter stays up with it all night, and she stays up with the baby, thinking about the plight of the mother who must have abandoned that child. And here's Niall reading a little bit of the time of the child.
- [05:13]
Niall Williams
The story was the other feature of that night. Already Faha had stepped, stumbled or fallen out the doors of public houses and wound home from the Christmas fair. Already whoever had left the baby by the back gates of the church was in and elsewhere. And for the first time since the birth, its mother was without her. That mother Ronnie thought of now, she thought of her who was without face or body, but a flesh same as the one on her breast, thought of her not with judgment or recrimination, with no avidity to know her circumstance, but with only the wellspring of human pity. For surely that mother was in pain. And she looked down at the sleeping infant. And in a voice that reason would say would not carry beyond the end of the table, towards the window, Ronnie Troy whispered, she's all right. I have her.
- [06:12]
Kate
When you listen to a passage like that, you think to yourself, boy, it'll probably be a letdown to talk to the author himself, but, boy, you could not be more wrong. He is as terrific a storyteller and speake person as he is when he writes. His sentences are. I mean, they're art. I mean, this is a sadder sentence of his, but he writes, and this is just a throwaway sentence. The whole paragraph is not about regret, but he writes the sentence, regret is the fruit of age. The longer you live, the more you know its sour taste. Both of those sentences are works of art. They're very true. And they just sort of happen to fall in the middle of a paragraph about something else. Niall Williams is not, for me anyway. When I pick up a Niel Williams, I know that every page needs attention, every sentence needs attention. He is an artist, and I have to give that. I owe him that kind of attention. I think as a reader, the same way that you would in a museum. I just.
- [07:12]
Charlie
I love reading and you don't want to miss a great sentence.
- [07:15]
Kate
Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
- [07:17]
Charlie
There are so many great sentences about Faja. Just about Faja, his little town, a place where everything was on the way and never arrived. Baja, being on the way to nowhere and getting first dibs on nothing. Now you'd think, this is going to be a boring town. His story is not boring. The people are not boring. This is Really a wonderful book. The Time of the Child, you're going to want to give it to anybody you want to impress. Here's our conversation with Niall Williams. Nile Williams, it is so good to have you back. You were the first author we had a chance to talk to for this podcast for this Is Happiness. And now back for the Time of the Child. So what's going on in faja?
- [08:04]
Niall Williams
Well, it's first of all, it's lovely to be back with you both and thank you so much for inviting me. So since we spoke last, FAH has become more populated and I've been so moved by the response that this Is Happiness got from readers all over, particularly in America, but all over. People with Irish connections and people with no Irish connections alike seem to find a kind of home in FAHA for the duration of the novel and wrote to me to say so, and I've been writing back to them. So Time of the Child is a novel that we move forward four years from this Is Happiness. So this Is Happiness took place in the summer of 1958 when electricity was finally coming to the parish of Faha. And so here we are now, it's the Christmas of 1962, and that's what's new.
- [08:58]
Kate
I like that. And it's 1962 and that's what's new. Everything is new. Exactly.
- [09:02]
Niall Williams
Everything is new. I intend to write a series of novels set in Faja, covering the time between the coming of the electricity and the coming of the Internet. So covering about a 30 year period, moving forward 5, 6, 7 years every time where a minor character in one novel becomes a major character in another. And through the course of that to graph what happens to community, to the church, to various things like that. And each of the novel, novels dealing with various elements, aspects of love. So we have very few love stories in Irish literature, I think, and there's lots of reasons for that, probably. And two, this would take too long to discuss and it needs to be in a pub of a long evening to really figure it out. But I think that's my intention. So there are seeds in this Is Happiness, but only when I start writing the new book do I figure out what those seeds are or where they're going to be fruitful. And so from there will be a I've just started the next Faha novel and so we are moving forward six years to 1968. And that's all I can tell you about at the moment. That's all I know you say in.
- [10:14]
Charlie
The history of Faha is that Nothing happens there.
- [10:16]
Niall Williams
Yes.
- [10:17]
Charlie
And then I'm thinking, well, but he's got to fill 300 pages of something that's happened in Faja. But this is a. A lovely book for the Christmas season, for any season, really, but December. You use the title of the book in the first sentence, page one. This is what happened in Faja over the Christmas of 1962 and became known in the parish as the Time of the Child. You paralleled that sentence two pages from the end. Did you know at the outset that you were going to use that parallel construction, that you would go from the first sentence to close to the last, and that it would be so similar and would tie the whole thing together?
- [10:52]
Niall Williams
So no is the answer. I'm a person who doesn't make any plan when writing a novel. So I try to find the first sentence and then see what's implied by that and find the next one. So I had no idea what was going to happen in this novel when I wrote that first sentence. But I knew it was to be about a child, but how that child came into it and how it functioned in the storyline, I had no idea. I had no idea whose story it was until gradually. I usually try now to start at Mass and have the characters arrive there and have a moment there to begin. So I gather a community and out of the community take an individual. So I knew that I was coming into the first Sunday of Advent at the beginning of the Christmas season, and I had a sense that the proper structure for that would be to finish at midnight Mass on Christmas Eve. Other than that, Charlie, no, I didn't know anything else.
- [11:43]
Kate
So what you've essentially just told us is that you make it up as you go along. Now, for some writers, that's their worst nightmare. How do you approach that with no trepidation or fear? Is it just instinct at this point that you know what you're doing?
- [11:55]
Niall Williams
Oh, no, I don't know what I'm doing. But trepidation is good. So I think that for me, the fun of it is that the pleasure is in feeling that the story is out there and it's coming toward me as I'm going toward it. I think primarily I am writing to tell myself the story. I'm writing the kind of book that I want to read, and I'm the first reader, and I'm also the first writer. So therefore there's a sort of. I'm in the world of the book completely, and I'm in the shoes of each of the characters and in their skin and Trying to be the other person. So for me, that's the joy of it. I trust that the story is there and that I just have to stay true to each sentence and try to write a good sentence each time and that I will get there. So, no, I know there is trepidation, for sure. I am constantly full of doubt. Is it any good? Is this working or not? I don't know. But I'm interested to see what happens next. And so that's how I write it.
- [12:55]
Charlie
But when you started, first of all, did you have the title in mind? You knew it would be at the time of the child?
- [13:01]
Niall Williams
I did, so I'll tell you why, Charlie. So my daughter, who lives in New York, and she was pregnant, and so we tried to be in New York. It was at the end of COVID for the birth of that baby. And by chance, completely by chance, Deirdre, our daughter, ended up going to the hospital in Mount Kisco to have this baby. And she was in the hospital in Mount Kisco having the baby. We weren't allowed in the hospital, Chris and I. So we sat outside that hospital, down outside, in the lobby. Outside the lobby. We weren't allowed in the building for six hours while she was upstairs having the baby. And she had that baby not maybe 800 meters from the house that we had left in 1985 to come to Kiltumper. So we came to kiltumper. On April 1, 1985. We adopted Deirdre. We raised her here. She went to college in Dublin. And then eventually she. She went to America and. And worked in fashion. And it just happened through series of circumstances that because of COVID and so on, that that was the hospital that she in. So I knew that I wanted to write about that experience of when I first held Esme in my hands and what that. That sort of sudden unbidden, unthought, unthought out impulse of love that just filled me completely. And that although I had understood I was going to be a grandfather, although I had rationalized it and knew this is what happens, you're going to be a grandfather and so on, I had no preparation for the overwhelming love that course through me. And I've written in the novel about the idea that love is. Is always inconvenient and surprising and dangerous and it, it's, it. But it brings us to our best self. There's something about that, the purity of it, that brings us into a higher version of ourselves, I think. And so I knew that I wanted to write about that I always write about love in one way or another, but I had never written before about this love of a child. And so that then seemed to fit with the idea that this would be a novel set around Christmas.
- [15:17]
Charlie
So having set the book in December.
- [15:19]
Niall Williams
Yes.
- [15:20]
Charlie
You then have an obvious double meaning for the title. Yes. And so, while I take your point that you spin the story as you go along, you're juxtaposing the story of Christmas and the story of Noel, who is the foundling child. Interesting choice of a name. But you juxtapose those two stories, and it's hard for me to believe, having read it, that you didn't know that it's somehow the story of Christmas and the story of a child would parallel.
- [15:48]
Niall Williams
Well, at the start, I don't know what's going to happen to this child. I don't know. I know it's going to be the time of the child. Is this the story of a child that died? Is this a story of what? I don't. I have no idea. So. But as I'm writing it, I'm following the logic of the story. I'm following the logic of the structure. I'm following the logic of the characters. And this is what seems right to happen. This fits. And so those things are immediately apparent as you're telling the story. But I didn't set out with that scheme in mind.
- [16:18]
Kate
The theme of whether or not characters believe in miracles and whether or not there is such a thing as miracles is a theme in this book. And so I'm going to ask you what I think is probably a cheap question, but I'm going to ask it anyway. Do you believe in miracles?
- [16:31]
Niall Williams
Well, the situation that I described to you in holding Esme in my hands, that seemed to me a miracle. So I think miracles are with a small m. They exist in everyday life among ordinary people all the time. Everything is an enormous chance that we get up, wake up tomorrow morning. It'd be an enormous chance and a kind of miraculous thing that we stand up and walk and breathe and carry on, that we meet people and that we love people and care for people and so on. These are all sort of miracles with a small mistake in the Fahian view of life in Faja. That's what I feel personally and what I want to write about.
- [17:11]
Charlie
There's a wonderful tenderness to your writing, particularly after the foundling is brought to Dr. Troy and his spinster daughter, Ronnie. And we had you read one of those passages when that occurred. But I kept thinking he couldn't write this without the kind of scene that you just described of holding your granddaughter for the first time. I want you to talk to me a little bit more about your memory of that moment.
- [17:39]
Niall Williams
Well, I think without, without making too big a thing of it. I think I'm very aware, Chris and I have always been aware when we adopted both of our children that there was an extra pressure on us. Pressure is maybe too strong a word, but an extra sense for us of responsibility to give these children, these two children that had come into our life, everything we could possibly give them and to be trying to bring out in them everything that was in them that was not ours, but that was in them. And so I've always been interested in the idea of the chosen family. And in the. I think in Ireland, I don't know what it is like elsewhere, but for us in Ireland, when we adopted, we were the only parents who had to pass a test to be allowed to be parents. So people had to come and look at your house and see, you know, what your, what the room was going to look like. And did you know anything about parenting? And before you could be approved that situation, which was a nerve wracking situation and a situation in which the local community here in Kiltumpa were all helpful to us. The they all knew that we were going to be. The person from the department was going to be coming to see if Williamses were going to be allowed to adopt a baby. A couple of the older women came up one evening with a doll to show Chris how to bathe the doll in front of the fireplace, a big open hearth, and said this is how you have to hold the head and this is how you do bathe it and so on. And good luck. I hope it works out for you, Chrissy. Good luck. We're all praying for you and all the rest of it. So then the department person came and we were approved to be able to adopt. And so from those moments there was a sort of special thing about wanting these children to have the best that they could be of themselves. And when Deirdre then was going to have her own baby in America, that was a sort of completion of something, of stepping into fully into her own life and her own family and her own circle.
- [19:48]
Kate
You know, it's interesting that you, that you talk about your adoption. I had two IVF children. It was very hard for me to get pregnant. It was very hard for me to stay pregnant. And one of the things that I think you write beautifully in this book is that, and I don't know if it comes from your own experience. But in some ways, I feel like there was an extra trepidation to having a child of my own after all those procedures, that somehow I had cheated nature and that nature was gonna notice and potentially take the child away because I didn't. And that level of trepidation I felt very much in Rani's story and in Dr. Troy's story.
- [20:24]
Niall Williams
Yes, absolutely, there's enormous trepidation because there's enormous responsibility. And particularly in the Ireland of that time, in the 1962, in the story that we're dealing with, and we know the shadowy and the shadows that await how this will go. So I feel that that trepidation is both natural to human beings but particularly supercharged with. With mothers. And I think Ronnie is as surprised. If you had said to Ronnie, who is Veronica Troy, the oldest daughter of Dr. Troy, if you had said to her the day before the Christmas fair, wouldn't you like to have a child? She would say, no, no, no, no, not me. No, I'm not. I'm not a mother. She would have said that. And I really wanted to get that sense that she was not longing for a child or looking to have a child and so on. And then a child is placed in her arms. And I think for all of us is that question, what would you do? What would you do if someone knocks at the door of your house and has a child in their arms and says here, what would you do?
- [21:25]
Charlie
Not only that, but when the child arrives, they think it's dead.
- [21:29]
Niall Williams
Yes.
- [21:29]
Charlie
And Dr. Troy does something to bring it back.
- [21:33]
Niall Williams
Yes.
- [21:33]
Charlie
And when she first holds it, it's alive. And even that transformation, it's almost spiritual.
- [21:42]
Kate
Mm hmm. We just talked to Ann Patchett about her annotate of bel canto, and she talked about, in bel canto, the fact that she has an omniscient point of view, that she goes from one character's voice to another, and that sometimes she found that very complicated. You do that in this book and you've done that in other books, and you seem to find it, or at least it comes across as somewhat effortless. So I wanted to ask you, how do you know to move from one character's point of view to the other? How do you say, okay, it's Mass, I want to see Mass through Jude's eyes, or I want to see Mass through Dr. Troy's eyes and then say, okay, I'm done with Dr. Troy's perspective. It's time to move on to Jude or Patrick. How do you know to get into somebody's head and how to get out of it again.
- [22:25]
Niall Williams
So unfortunately, that is only instinct and experience. How does Roger Federer know to take this one this way or that way, as the ball is in midair and he only has half a second to know? So somehow through. I've been writing for 40 years. I'm 66 years old, and I came here when I was 26. So in that time, all the time, I've been working on books, writing. And so I've developed some kind of instinct that is true to me, my way of telling it. And I know my way in that sense, the same way you know the strengths and weaknesses of your own body. You know, you have good elbows or bad ankles or whatever. So you sort of know. So I know in my writing, the things that I can do and the things I can't do. I'm not good at dialogue. So I don't write very much dialogue. And I know lots of things that you know that are just instinctual to me now and how I approach the story. But again, back to that thing I said at the start. I'm writing it for myself, so I'm telling it the way I like to tell it to me.
- [23:29]
Charlie
So how do you revise and when do you revise? To my mind, there are so many incredibly beautifully crafted sentences in this book. And I keep wondering, do these just pop out of Niall Williams, or do you go back and think, I can write that sentence more expressively?
- [23:45]
Niall Williams
No, no, the sentences that you're talking about, Charlie, no, they're just written from inside the, inside the writing of it. And I write about two pages when I'm writing it, about two pages. I start in the morning, I finish by about noon or half past 12, and then that's all I do for today. But I'm always in the story for the rest of the day. So when I'm in the garden or we drive out to the beach, it's about eight miles away. I'm still in the world of story, and I'm looking forward to getting back to it the next day.
- [24:13]
Charlie
Let me just take one sentence, one sentence. You know, you could, you could talk about the fact that the day had dragged on, that it had been a long day, that it was exhausting day. No, no, you write the day had already been so long, it had escaped the containment of clocks. Now, that's a different way to saying it had been a long day. And, and I, I, I kept thinking, does he, does that come off the top of his head? Or has he massaged that sentence.
- [24:41]
Niall Williams
I assure you, I have not massaged it. That just comes off the end of my fingers. But the thing is, Charlie, that sentence is inside a style which is set up so it's like an orchestral piece. You say, well, in this orchestral piece, these are the movements, and then these are the instruments that you're going to use. And this is, you know, so it's like that. So that sentence in another book would just stick out and be so, you know, showing off. But whereas I think the goal for me is to have it all of the one voice. So even though it switches from different points of view, the texture of the storytelling is all the same. So those kind of sentences are, I think, throughout. And, yes, they just come from being in the voice of the writing.
- [25:28]
Charlie
Niall, you take a risk. As I was reading it, I thought, he takes a risk with this novel.
- [25:34]
Niall Williams
Yes.
- [25:34]
Charlie
When we talked a couple of years ago, you told us how long you felt a writer can take a reader on an excursion before getting back to the main plot. You said it's the writer's gift to know how far afield he or she can go.
- [25:50]
Niall Williams
Yeah.
- [25:51]
Charlie
You don't introduce your foundational story, the central tension of this book, until 100 pages in.
- [25:58]
Niall Williams
Yes.
- [25:59]
Charlie
Did you think you were taking a risk in doing that?
- [26:01]
Niall Williams
Absolutely. There are many risks in this novel, but that's certainly one of them. And there was some debate with editors, both in the United States and America and in England as to whether or not we should get to the child sooner. So my argument is that it's much shorter than nine months. So to get. So it's not called the birth of a child, it's called the time of the child, and that includes the time before and the time after. So I think you have to sort of bear with it. But it is a risk, of course. The risk always is, will the reader stay in the chair? And this is about the quality of the narrative voice to me and the authority of the telling. If the reader feels comfortable that this is a writer, this is a voice that has a story to tell and can tell it, then the reader will stay in the chair. And I think of that all the time when I'm writing, because I'm the person in the chair and am I interested and am I with it? And so while beauty of language, various things, rhythm, interesting humor or character, can. Can you know that the little hooks to keep the reader going, you still have to be aware of the narrative engine of the story. And you only have your own instinct to judge by whether that's going to work or not. I think the bigger risk with this story, Charlie, was that I found that I was writing about human goodness and that's an enormously risky thing to do in the world that we're living in. And I was going to write about human goodness without cynicism, and I was going to try to write out of love. Myself as a writer, I love these people. And those are big risks nowadays in the world. And that's not what, you know, contemporary literary fiction aims to do mostly, I think, in my experience of it anyway. And so I was aware of that, but also aware that, you know, life is getting on. It's time for me to take risks and go for it and say things that I feel I'm here to say I can say. And so that was the bigger risk.
- [28:09]
Charlie
We're going to pause for a moment with our conversation with Niall Williams, and when we come back, he's a great storyteller when he talks to us. He's a great storyteller when he writes. And I remember in Good Morning America I used to get frustrated with Garrison Keillor when we'd have him on as a guest because he wanted to tell long stories, wonderful winding stories. And Niall has the same gift, but at least in a podcast we can let him tell the stories. And he told us a wonderful story about his wife, Christine, Chris, and when he brought her the book. And we'll have that for you after this break.
- [28:51]
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- [29:22]
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- [29:57]
Kate
So here it is, the rest of our amazing conversation with the incredible Niel.
- [30:01]
Niall Williams
Williams when I finish this manuscript. As usual, I give it to Chris, and there it is, a printed out stack of 350 pages printed out, and it's on the kitchen table. And she then has to read it. She's my first reader, and in the two years in which I've been writing it, I haven't told her anything about it, other than when she says at dinner time, how's it going? And I say, okay, that's it. And our whole livelihood depends upon this, right? So here's two years of work which might be valued nothing or more so we don't know. And she's going to be the arbiter of that. And am I going to send this out in the world and will this. You know, our savings have been running down over the two years while he's off there writing in the mornings and then gardening in the afternoons. And that's it. That's the life. So I gave the book to Chris and she begins reading it. She might read 30 or 40 pages, and I see 30 or 40 pages have been turned over, and she says nothing. I cook dinner that evening, we have dinner, we watch a show on TV, and next day I see, okay, now it's 70 pages have been turned over. She says nothing. And little by little, over four or five days, she's reading the book and I'm saying nothing. And she's saying nothing about the book. We're still carrying on as if normal, as if nothing and nothing about it is happening. And then I see that the last page is turned over and the book is now in reverse. The manuscript is now in reverse on the. On the table. And she says nothing. And then I wait and she says, I need to think about it. Okay, so that's a dagger in your heart if you're a writer. Okay, so you walk around with that dagger in your heart for the next day, waiting. And then she says, well, I think the thing I should say is I think this book is pure Niall Williams. And at first the writer goes, yeah, but is it any good? Do you mean Niall Williams with all his excesses and flaws and redundancies and poor grammar? Is that what you mean? But I didn't obviously say any of that. I just listened to watch her, listened to her, and she said, yeah, I think it's pure Niall Williams. And I understood that actually for all writers, artists of any kind, that's the best possible answer you can get. It is, in fact, what you're trying to do is to make your own signature and that you are the only one in the world who can Actually make it. And that is that signature means that something of your spirit, something of your soul has come through your body and out onto the page and now exists outside of yourself.
- [32:26]
Charlie
Now, Williams, thank you ever so much. This is a wonderful book. Yeah, people can give it to others for Christmas. It's a wonderful Christmas book. It's a wonderful book for any season. Thank you.
- [32:35]
Kate
Yeah, thank you.
- [32:36]
Niall Williams
Thank you, Charlie. Thank you, Kate. This has been absolutely. Pleasure talking to you.
- [32:44]
Kate
You know, now, having talked to Niel Williams, if he and Chris wanted to just build me a little wing off the side of their house so I could follow him around and just listen to him all day. And I love that story that he told. I think it speaks so much to Niel Williams, because I'm one of those people that has to know, like, if I put a book on the table for my spouse to read, I would not be able to then watch a TV show with them and have dinner with them quietly that night. Like, I'm one of those people who grabs people by the collar and asks all the impertinent questions right away. I'm very impatient. So I think it speaks so much to who Nyle is and who Chris is that they were able to have this sort of, you know, exchange. He wasn't gonna bother her before she was ready, and she wasn't gonna give him her thoughts before she was ready. And somehow they made peace with that. Like, that is not me, and I wanna learn from them. So again, Niall and Chris, think about building me a little weighing off your house so that I can just learn your inner peace.
- [33:47]
Charlie
Well, in the first podcast we did with him, right at the beginning, two and a half years ago, he told us that some people are so moved by his stories of Vaja that they want to come meet him. And he lives in a small town in Ireland, Kittletumper, which I think he told US has only 37 people. One of the things he said, I don't think we put it in the conversation. I think we edited it out. But he talked about the few houses of Killtumper, and then there's a few more in Upper Killtumper.
- [34:17]
Kate
Yeah, I think that came about because we asked him if Killtumper had a bookstore, and I think he actually giggled and was like, no, no. Well, that's far too urban for us.
- [34:28]
Charlie
But as you got the sense, as we talked to him, that he told us that story at the beginning that we have cited so often in this podcast that when he writes, he just has a first sentence and he Looks at it like putting a thread through a needle, through the eye of a needle, and then slowly pulling the thread each day without any particular idea where it's going. And I think that was very much reflected in what he said as we talked to him this time. And the thing I love and the reason that you. That you come out of this wanting so to know him personally, he says, I'm writing the kind of books I want to read. And that makes you realize that there is a goodness in him. And when he writes about his reaction to holding this child for the first time, his. His adopted child. His adopted grand. No, let me start that again. When he talks about holding his grandchild for the first time, it's just. Well, you understand so much of what he's writing about in this book.
- [35:34]
Kate
You know, I have to ask you, by the way, because you had the added. Now we're going to go off. I want to go off on a little bit of a tangent here. I handed you my daughter and then told you I named her after you. What layer does that add?
- [35:47]
Charlie
Oh, it was a moment so profound, Kate, that I couldn't process it for days. I kept thinking, what an honor this is, what an incredible honor this is. And it took a while to process. Also, as he wrote, I thought of our first child when Jessica was born, and walking into the delivery room, they grabbed Arlene and took her. And I couldn't be there because we ran into a last second complication. But I walked into the delivery room and there was your sister. The first time one of my children was on a table. And I remember, I think it was as profound a moment as I've ever had in my life. I realized that instantaneously, I loved that thing more than I've ever loved anything in my life and ever will, and that I owed it everything and it owed me nothing. And I felt this.
- [36:50]
Kate
And isn't that a weird feeling, though, that you go, I've had control of every moment of my life up until this point. And it's not that your kid owns your life, but you know that your life isn't about you anymore. I think that's what I was trying to say with the driver's seat backseat metaphor. You know that you are not the person, that your happiness is not what you're serving first anymore, ever.
- [37:14]
Charlie
Your life has changed instantaneously and in terms of profound moments. When you told me that my name was androgynous and that it could be given to a girl, it was an incredibly profound moment. When I first saw you. I was in the delivery room. And that was also an incredible, incredibly profound moment. Those are the most profound moments. And as he says in the book, or he said to us, birth is a story of incredible meaning and simplicity. It happens thousands of times a day and what a miracle it is. And you asked him about believing in miracles and it's a small miracle. They hand this baby to Ronnie, Ronnie Troy, who did not expect ever to be a mother. And her love for the foundling is instantaneous.
- [38:05]
Kate
It is, it's magic. I mean, if you, if you, I mean, yeah, yeah. Anyway, what a pleasure. It's just magic. And Niel Williams is magic and this book is magic. So again, if anybody on your holiday list, friends, family, what have you, this is a book they need. Time of the Child by Nael Williams. So it's an incredible magic, the passing of generations. We are gonna remind you about the folks that make this podcast possible and get a coda from Niel Williams. But before we do, I wanted to tell you that we read readers comments. We really do. I'm a little bit obsessed with them. And many of you have written in and said, when are you gonna have Louise Penny on? And I have to admit I've come to Louise Penny very late in life. When I first got that email, I was like, well, I should pick one up. So I picked up the first one, the first Inspector Gamache book, and now I can't stop. I'm reading them all. So I'm really excited to say that Louise Penny has agreed to be on our podcast next week. So if you're an Inspector Gamache lover or a Louise Penny lover, and if you are a mystery lover, you should be both. We're gonna be talking to her about her creations next week and about her creation of a whole small town and a whole cast of characters that support this mystery series, all of which are a pleasure to read.
- [39:16]
Charlie
Niall Williams creates faja. Louise Penny creates Three Pines. And I love Three Pines. We will visit Three Pines with Louise Penny next week. First, we remind you of the folks who make this podcast possible. And then a coda from Niall Williams.
- [39:31]
Kate
The Bookcase with Kate and Charlie Gibson is a production of ABC Audio and Good Morning America. It is edited by Tom Butler of TKO Productions. Our executive producers are Laura Mayer and Simone Swink. We want to make mention of Taylor Rhodes, Amanda McMaster and Sarah Russell at Good Morning America and Josh Cohen, Asal Asanapour, Meg Fierro and Amira Williams at ABC Audio.
- [39:52]
Niall Williams
I have an overwhelming sense of gratitude to those readers who've come to FAH and found there something that maybe was not available to them in the present time that we're all living through. And so I'm enormously grateful to readers, to librarians, to bookshops, and to people like yourselves who are sort of ambassadors and champions of books. And in my. From my end also, this little place called faja.