‘I’m writing a memoir. It’s a pack of lies’: John Banville on a lifetime in books, bereavement, and the Irish love of words

The acclaimed novelist thought he had finished with ‘serious’ books. But now, at 78 and still grieving the loss of his wife, he has a new project on the go

I’m going to get a glass of wine, will you have one?” John Banville asks. “I mean, we’re OK, it’s just about noon.” We’re sitting in Banville’s upstairs living room in the harbour village of Howth, just outside Dublin. The low, deep house is in a terrace that rises up behind the seafront. There used to be a good view across the bay from these top windows, he says, but he had to sell the parcel of land across the street and now they are building “a monstrosity” on it. The novelist has lived here since the early 1980s; it is where he has written nearly all of his books – including the 2005 Booker prize winner The Sea. For someone who, it is said, has spent eight to 10 hours a day writing for all of his adult life, Banville insists he is no lover of solitude. “You’re not really alone when you are writing,” he says, “and anyway there has always been a sense of someone else.”

These days he shares this house with his 51-year-old son. His sometime estranged wife, the textile artist Janet Dunham, died three years ago and he is still, he says, in a “fugue state” of grief. It didn’t help that it happened during the pandemic. “She was diagnosed with advanced liver cancer,” he says, “and got Covid five days after, and died four days after that.” He couldn’t write for months and remains, he says, not himself. “I now realise that there are only two kinds of people in the world. People who are bereaved and those who are yet to be bereaved,” he says. “And it’s no comfort really that you know it happens to every [couple]. Because those other people, they didn’t lose the person you loved.”

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