In ‘Brooklyn,’ Love Is Lost Over The Atlantic

VPM | By Jacki Lyden

Published May 3, 2009 at 5:26 PM EDT

Updated July 13, 2023

Colm Toibin’s literary career has been gathering in force and reputation over the decades. He is 53, a stocky man with a large, bald head and expressive eyes. As an Irishman, he is a wanderer. His fiction and nonfiction works have wandered far.

I first interviewed Toibin in 1999, for the novel BlackWater Lightship. It was a contemporary tale set in Ireland, about three generations of women caring for a man dying of AIDS. But both of his subsequent novels are stories of exile: The Master, about Henry James, the American writer abroad; and now, Brooklyn.

I had the chance to meet Toibin in Dublin a year or two after our first interview. He has a wonderful old house near the center of town, full of paintings and full of light. But what I remember best, besides Toibin’s warmth, is his fountain pen and notebook. It was suggestive of the intimacy he achieves in his literature.

In Brooklyn, Eilis Lacey leaves Enniscorthy, Ireland (Toibin’s hometown), for Brooklyn in the early 1950s. We follow her across the sea and onto what seems like the gallows of loneliness. Because Toibin doesn’t rush any of this, it’s particularly painful and exquisite:

She was nobody here. It was not just that she had no friends and family; it was rather that she was a ghost in this room, in the streets on the way to work, on the shop floor. Nothing meant anything.

In Eilis’ loneliness, we discover something much broader: the loneliness of any people, dislocated in time and space. Right now, in an uncertain America, Eilis’ journey has particular resonance. Toibin speaks in a County Wexford accent, with care and precision. He draws us into the humble and delicate moments of Eilis Lacey’s journey. And we are easily able to imagine ourselves in her place.

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Jacki Lyden

Longtime listeners recognize Jacki Lyden's voice from her frequent work as a substitute host on NPR. As a journalist who has been with NPR since 1979, Lyden regards herself first and foremost as a storyteller and looks for the distinctive human voice in a huge range of national and international stories.

In the last five years, Lyden has reported from diverse locations including Paris, New York, the backstreets of Baghdad, the byways around rural Kentucky and spent time among former prostitutes in Nashville.

Most recently, Lyden focused her reporting on the underground, literally. In partnership with National Geographic, she and photographer Stephen Alvarez explored the catacombs and underground of the City of Light. The report of the expedition aired on Weekend Edition Sunday and was the cover story of the February 2011 National Geographic magazine.

Lyden's book, Daughter of the Queen of Sheba, recounts her own experience growing up under the spell of a colorful mother suffering from manic depression. The memoir has been published in 11 foreign editions and is considered a memoir classic by The New York Times. Daughter of the Queen of Sheba has been in process as a film, based upon a script by the A-list writer, Karen Croner. She is working on a sequel to the book which will be about memory and what one can really hold on to in a tumultuous life.

Along with Scott Simon, current host of Weekend Edition Saturday, and producer Jonathan Baer, Lyden helped to pioneer NPR's Chicago bureau in 1979. Ten years later, Lyden became NPR's London correspondent and reported on the IRA in Northern Ireland.

In the summer of 1990, when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, Lyden went to Amman, Jordan, where she covered the Gulf War often traveling to and reporting from Baghdad and many other Middle Eastern cites. Her work supported NPR's 1991 Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award for Gulf War coverage. Additionally, Lyden has reported from countries such as Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Jordan, Egypt and Iran. In 1995, she did a groundbreaking series for NPR on Iran on the emerging civil society and dissent, called "Iran at the Crossroads."

At home in Brooklyn on September 11, 2001, Lyden was NPR's first reporter on the air from New York that day. She shared in NPR's George Foster Peabody Award and Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award for coverage of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Lyden later covered the aftermath of the fall of the Taliban in Afghanistan.

In 2002, Lyden and producer Davar Ardalan received the Gracie Award from American Women in Radio and Television for best foreign documentary for "Loss and Its Aftermath." The film was about bereavement among Palestinians and Jews in Gaza, the West Bank and Israel.

That same year Lyden hosted the "National Story Project" on Weekend All Things Considered with internationally-acclaimed novelist Paul Auster. The book that emerged from the show, I Thought My Father Was God, became a national bestseller.

Over the years, Lyden's articles have been publications such as Granta, Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times and The Washington Post. She is a popular speaker, especially on mental health.

A graduate of Valparaiso University, Lyden was given an honorary Ph.D. from the school in 2010. She participated in Valparaiso's program of study at Cambridge University and was a 1991-92 Benton Fellow in Middle East studies at the University of Chicago.

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