Roddy Doyle reads Maeve Brennan's short story "Christmas Eve," and discusses Brennan's relationship with Ireland and Doyle's own family, with The New Yorker's fiction editor, Deborah Treisman.
This is the New Yorker fiction podcast from the New Yorker magazine.
I'm Deborah Treisman, fiction editor at the New Yorker.
Each month we invite a writer to choose a story from the magazine's archives to read and discuss.
This month we're going to hear Christmas Eve by Maeve Brennan, which appeared in December of 1972.
She was getting what she called nervous, and she couldn't understand it because she'd been looking forward to Christmas.
She didn't know what was the matter with her.
Christmas Eve was chosen by Roddy Doyle, who has published nine stories in the magazine.
Doyle is the author of many novels, including the commitments, for which he also wrote the screenplay.
He joins me for Mutiny Studios in Dublin, Ireland.
Hi, Roddy.
Hello.
So, Roddy, Maeve Brennan moved to New York from Ireland when she was a teenager in the 1930s.
And for years, she was much better known here than she was in Ireland.
Though a lot of her fiction is set there, none of her books, I think, were actually published in Ireland at the time.
Where you come from.
Is she considered an irish writer or an american one?
Irish, very much so.
Now it was as if she was discovered a new writer, even though she was dead in the late nineties.
And there was a story about her because, you know, the rumor, the myth was that she had died homeless on the streets of New York, that she'd.
Become a bag lady.