Rosemary Mahoney’s nonfiction has been lauded by New York Times, the National Book Critics Circle, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Christian Science Monitor, Publisher’s Weekly, Entertainment Weekly, Amazon.com, and Conde Nast Traveler, to name a few. She has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers Award, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, a Transatlantic Review award, and Harvard’s Charles E. Horman prize for writing. A citizen of both the U.S. and Ireland and currently residing in Greece, her explorations have taken her around the world, and it is some of the world’s most precious treasures that she has brought back through her writing. We are thrilled to welcome her to Occhi.
You have traveled all over the world. To what do you owe your unquenchable thirst for adventure?
When I was a child I always had a natural urge to go outward into the world. I used to look at the photos in National Geographic and think, “I want to go there.” I liked feeling independent and self-reliant. When I was seven and eight years old I used to ride my bike all over our town and feel that I was really living, was part of the big world. Kids could do that then. And no helmet. When I was 17, I went to Ireland to study Irish Gaelic and ended up living alone in a little cottage at the end of the Dingle Peninsula. I had a little motorbike and went wherever I pleased. I was incredibly free because my mother trusted me. She never tried to rein me in. I learned so much about myself as well as the place, and I think the experience clarified for me that it was actually possible to really venture out into the world and return home in one piece.
When you began your book Down the Nile: Alone in a Fisherman’s Skiff, did you know you would include the observations of Gustave Flaubert and Florence Nightingale, both of whom traveled to Egypt well more than a hundred years before you? And why them?
I had read a lot of books about Egypt when preparing for my trip on the Nile, and the letters of Flaubert and Nightingale captivated me. What I liked about the mid-19th-century accounts of travel in Egypt was that the trips were necessarily slow and extended. People went and stayed for three and four months. They had no choice but to travel slowly, and in moving slowly they really learned about the place. That was the era when Egypt was still a mysterious novelty to people from the west, discoveries were still being made, and to the Egyptians, Europeans were still a somewhat strange, exotic presence. So there was an aura of wonder in everything, in all the encounters and transactions. They were not tourists in any modern sense. Also, Flaubert and especially Nightingale really studied Egypt; they read history and archaeology books in order to really understand what they were seeing, and in understanding it, it had a lasting effect on them.
They immersed themselves. They both had a passion about it. I admire that. Now we’re dropped into a place for a couple of days, skim the places we’re told to see because they’re the places people have been seeing for ages and we can’t get our feet out of that rut that’s been carved into the landscape by those who came before us, and then we leave. I hear college students saying, “My family went to Europe this summer. We did Paris, we did London, we did Amsterdam…” What do they really mean by “did?” I suppose they did what someone told them they ought to do. They saw the recommended sights and ticked them off the list. In their defense, people don’t have large swaths of time anymore to really investigate a foreign place. And tourist spots become tourists spots precisely because they’re remarkable in some way, or breathtaking, or ancient. Just as clichés become clichés because there’s truth in them. I don’t scorn this kind of tourism at all, and I don’t like it when people disparage tourists. At least they’ve made an effort to leave home. But having an adventure takes imagination and a bit of curiosity. You won’t have an adventure if you don’t care about it. It’s a personal choice. That is if you’re lucky enough to be able to choose.
When you were a teenager, you wrote to the playwright Lillian Hellman and asked her for a job and later wrote a book entitled A Likely Story: One Summer with Lillian Hellman, about your experience. Did you suspect going in that your summer as Hellman’s maid would turn into a memoir?
I had no idea that I would write a memoir about my experience with Lillian Hellman. None. It didn’t come to me until years later that that experience was as great an adventure as any other I had had. I dared to get myself into that situation, and it was a struggle to get through it. Lillian Hellman was a famously difficult, tricky person. I didn’t know that beforehand. I was very naïve. I had these journals I kept in those days and when I looked at them years later I was surprised by what I had forgotten.
Your book For The Benefit of Those Who See begins with an up-close description of a friend’s laser eye surgery and then follows your travels to Tibet and India where you lived among blind students in order to better understand their journey. How did you become interested in the subject of blindness? And what insights did you gain from your work with people you met along the way?
I really wasn’t very interested in the subject of blindness aside from occasional apprehensive fantasizing about what it would be like to be blind. And then an editor at O, The Oprah Magazine asked me to go to Tibet to write an article about a blind German woman named Sabriye Tenberken who had gone to Tibet and started the first school for the blind in that country. I spent ten days with Sabriye at her school and was astonished by the experience. Contrary to what I had expected, the blind children at the school were very happy, very independent, bold, and capable in ways that for a sighted person seemed almost supernatural. But there’s nothing supernatural about it. Blind people simply learn to use their remaining senses with greater acuity than sighted people do, and the way they do it is surprising to us. I decided that the subject was worthy of an entire book.
What I learned was that if you lose one faculty, it’s not the end of the world, because you’ll gain others. I learned that blindness doesn’t equal mental deficiency, which is what a lot of sighted people tend to think: if you can’t see, you can’t reason. And people have thought that across the ages and in every culture and country. But how silly! There’s usually nothing wrong with a blind person’s mind. It’s just the eyes that are compromised. As Sabriye Tenberken likes to say: I’m blind. So what!
For your book The Singular Pilgrim: Travels on Sacred Ground you made pilgrimages to some of the world’s best known holy sites of worship. Can a pilgrimage lead to a state of grace? What does it mean to be in a state of grace? Did your travels alter your own beliefs in any way?
Yes, I think that any intense experience can lead to a state of grace, but to answer your second question, I’m not really sure what a state of grace actually is. A lot of religious pilgrimages are penitential; they’re physically difficult or require great mental focus and personal sacrifice. Any time you apply yourself to something difficult with dedication and enthusiasm and persist at it and come out on the other side having accomplished what you set out to do, you gain self-knowledge. You learn what you’re capable of. Perhaps self-knowledge is a state of grace. I don’t mean in a solipsistic sense. I think it’s actually understanding your relationship to the rest of the world and how you fit into it. The pilgrimages that I undertook didn’t really alter my beliefs. I don’t believe in God in any prescriptive sense. I think that God is the unified energy and spirit in every living thing.
Which of your books is your favorite and why?
That’s always a difficult question to answer. My mother, who had seven children, used to say, “Do I have a favorite child? All I can say is that there’s not one of them I’d send back.” The Singular Pilgrim contains some of my favorite passages of writing, especially the Chapter on Varanasi, India, and there are parts of Whoredom in Kimmage and For the Benefit of Those Who See that I think are very good, but as a whole, A Likely Story is my favorite book, perhaps because it’s the most personal. It’s a darker book than the others. Some of my favorite books are very dark. My most popular book seems to be Down the Nile. People still write to me a lot about that one. It may be the book that the widest audience can relate to.
Do you have any desire to see any of your books used as the basis for a feature film? If so, which one would work best?
Every writer wants any form of interest in her book, so yes, why not? A Likely Story has been optioned for a film at least three times. That’s the book that has a clear arc in its beginning, middle, and end. And there’s a famous person in it (Lillian Hellman) who had a very strong character, and my mother is in it, and she was a fascinating, very wise person, sort of a counterbalance to Lillian Hellman. (Not that my mother wasn’t also difficult!) So probably that would work best. At the moment I’m writing a much more in-depth memoir about my family, my mother’s paralysis from polio, my father’s suicide, my mother’s drinking, and other things that hugely affected my six brothers and sisters and me. We are extremely close in age, so when things happened to us, they happened to all of us at once.
Your narrative style is so evocative. Did you ever think about adding a fiction title or two to your body of work? Do you enjoy reading fiction?
I rarely read contemporary fiction. I find it difficult to suspend my disbelief long enough with most fiction. I become bored very quickly if I can spot how the thing was stitched together, especially if the style and the language aren’t extraordinary in some way. Life is short, so I prefer to read about things and people that actually exist than things and people that don’t. I don’t read for plot, nor for entertainment, nor even relaxation. For me, reading is a challenge. I suppose I think of it as part of my work. It always amazes me when I find people who are able to read with a lot of activity buzzing around them. When I’m really reading, I have to be alone, so I can concentrate. And in a way, reading is very personal. I read in the hope that I’ll find an alert, interesting consciousness expressing itself. Queen Elizabeth I purportedly told Shakespeare that she liked his plays well enough except she wished he would include “more matter with less art.” In other words, she wanted plot and didn’t care so much about all the poetry and the beautiful language and the philosophical ruminations. She wanted murder and intrigue and romance, which is what most people want. There’s nothing wrong with that. It just isn’t what I want. You asked whether I would write fiction. I actually have been slowly working off and on a novel that takes place in Ireland. I have no idea whether I’ll actually finish that.
Do the challenging times we live in currently feel at odds with the kind of work you do?
I’m a very solitary person, especially when I’m working. Having to be careful and stay home and not mix hasn’t really changed my life much. True, I’m not taking any trips now, but that’s okay because I’m in the writing phase of my life. But having said all that, I find myself incredibly distracted now by the news and by all the uncertainty that’s facing the world and especially the US at the moment. One does begin to think, “Does what I’m writing have any relevance now to the world?” Sometimes it’s hard to see how it would be relevant. That invites a feeling of futility to creep in, and that’s discouraging. But you have to fight that. I’m still eager to read books that have nothing to do with the pandemic or racism. Books that are “timely” are extremely useful, but time passes and what’s timely changes into something else.
Please provide links where Occhi readers can learn more about you and your work.
https://www.irishcentral.com/opinion/others/rosemary-mahoney-irish-writer#.Wx1uWTuN4Ct.twitter
https://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/05/books/review/Fugard-t.html
Images, courtesy of Rosemary Mahoney
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Good interview.