Cressida Leyshon interviews the writer Mary Costello about “The Choc-Ice Woman,” her story from the October 16, 2023, issue of The New Yorker.
I had Frances in my mind for a long time, but didn’t have her full story. Then my mother-in-law mentioned that she’d known a woman, years ago, who had accompanied an undertaker in the hearse taking the remains of her aunt from Dublin to her home place in the country. This is a common practice in Ireland—my brother sat in the hearse when my father’s coffin was taken to the church and graveyard.
According to Coetzee, fiction is, for Musil, a “laboratory for the refinement of the soul.” I spend a lot of time reading and thinking about novels and stories and poems and essays—and their authors, so I suppose it is inevitable that the writers who matter to me and who’ve had the greatest impact seep into my characters. The main character of my last novel, “The River Capture,” is obsessed with Joyce.
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