In 2012 we took a long rent on a cottage in County Clare with a sea view that went all the way to the Aran Islands. It was a fancy version of the cottage my father grew up in, 30 miles south along the coast and, when I told him we were going there, my father, whose voice was damaged in his great old age, started to whisper a poem of his youth: “Oh little Corca Baiscinn, the wild, the bleak, the fair, / Oh little stony pastures, whose flowers are sweet, if rare!” Truth be told I was running away to County Clare, in the turbulence and ardency of middle age. I walked out like a madwoman every evening up the grass-covered, green road that began near the house and which went many miles over the uplands of the Burren. During the day I wrote about an Irish aid worker in Africa. I had been writing this for some time. The little house belonged to a builder who was working in Nigeria because of the collapse of the Irish housing market, and I thought this a nice synchronicity. Every time the aid worker sent a letter home he thought about the stone walls of the west of Ireland with the fuschia and orange montbretia (as we call crocosmia) growing alongside it. I really did not want him to be thinking about stone walls; it tapped into something “too Irish” for my purposes. I moved him to Meath, to Dublin, I moved him to a small town nowhere, but Emmet, as he was now called, kept thinking of home the way the drinker in the “Sally O’Brien” Harp ad thought of home, and I could not shake him, or the book, out of it. It took me ages to reclaim the moment of my father’s little recitation and to own the nostalgia for the west of Ireland that it contained. It is a poem of exile: “The whole night long we dream of you, and waking think we’re there — / Vain dream, and foolish waking, we never shall see Clare.” In January of 2013 I wrote a scene set around a family dinner table, where the mother cries foolish tears, which the children both dread and ignore. I had the mother, that is, or the mother’s foolishness. And I knew the children went everywhere, because that is what Irish children of my generation did. As I worked their lives (when I saw them at the dinner table, I knew them already, it was as though I had walked into a pre-existing room) I found that the girls, who really wanted to move, could not move. Constance stayed at home. Hannah got as far as Dublin and more or less fell apart. The boys were protected by their own coldness, though that was their problem, too. Emmet saves the world but does not love it, Dan can not care for the men he desires. Each of them walked off into their own world, with its own way of telling a story. When they come back to their mother and to her foolishness, the reader knows more about them than they know about each other. I set out to write another King Lear (it always helps to have a plan) but the children had other needs. I followed them, let them grow up and, really, given the circumstances – the mother’s vanity, the father’s silence – there was a limit to how far and whether they could get away.