Gabriel Byrne: When I started to write the book, I hadn’t intended to write a memoir. I was sketching just some images that were persistent in my head. I sometimes think that those images are like when you come on a fence and a sheep has left a bit of wool there; it’s just snagged. And you look at it and you say, I wonder why that’s there. Why is that image there? What does that image actually mean?

The one thing that I learned about the act of memory from writing this is number one, memory is fragmented. It doesn’t move in a chronological past, where you say that happened and then that happened. Memory jumps between the present and the past constantly. It also jumps between fact and imagination. And sometimes you have to excavate the moment to see whether this is a fact or if this is what you think you remember.

An extreme example of that would be if you went back to the house that you lived in, as an adult, and you’d say, god, it’s really small here. That’s an example of how memory can be unreliable.

And that’s why I think I took a while to write the book, because I wanted to test every image from every point of view to say, okay, this is as truthful as I can be.

I don’t think we can really test our memories as much as we should do. Because people say, ah, I don’t really remember that much, it’s kind of hazy. But if you get into the frame of mind where you—I’m not saying meditate, but if you really concentrate on the image, unconscious memories will start to bubble up.

I don’t think that most of what happens to us goes into this big vacuum that we can’t remember. It goes somewhere, and we have to find a way to access it. One of the things that you really remember in life, you remember kind of remarkable things. The day your mother said this or you went to that school or whatever. But what I was interested in was those tiny moments on which our lives turned and that we don’t think are important. But going up the stairs and opening the door and walking in can change your life as much as a major event that happens. I was curious about those little moments, and how are those moments stitched together with the big moments to create who you are?

Byrne was speaking from his home in Maine, in the northeastern United States, snow visible through the window. He was eloquent and open about his life, picking up threads of themes that figured in his recently published memoir, Walking with Ghosts, which he described as trying to connect big and small moments in his life, and “how they have contributed to what I’ve become”. . .

Another story contributing to who he is was about a Christian Brother at school. “I wanted to write about violence, the violence of authority in relation to the powerless. Yes, we were beaten physically, but I think what resonated more was the emotional abuse, and the denial of self.

“That particular Brother took excitement in beating, and you could see how at the end he’d say, ‘Now, you made me do that.’ But you could feel his sense of… the perverse enjoyment, though we couldn’t articulate that at the time. But as a group, without understanding what was involved, we took violent revenge on him.”

Byrne described almost cinematically how, as the Brother cycled out of the school one day, the children started to pelt him with stones, until he was knocked off his bike. “And we stayed there long enough to see the wheel of his bicycle turning and the blood seeping through his hair.”

Karl Geary: I thought I’d start by just embarrassing you a little bit. I was just looking through some of the notices Walking with Ghosts has received. The first one that struck me was from Edna O’Brien, who says, “The wonder of this memoir is its unembellished truth. It’s written by a man whose amazing story is the stuff of literature,” and then Colm Toibin: “Dreamy, lyrical and utterly unvarnished.” Colum McCann comes in and says, “Make no mistake about It: This is a masterpiece.” I mean, that’s three pillars of Irish literature. And all have said that you’ve managed to do something with the memoir that hasn’t been seen before in Irish literature. It’s an enormous achievement. You’re somebody who could do a number of things. You’d already written a book 20 odd years ago, you knew the difficulties. What was it, do you think, that made you want to attempt this massive undertaking?

Gabriel Byrne: Yeah, well, I would agree with you there, Karl. I mean, in terms of it being a massive undertaking, I think that if I can compare it for a moment to, say, preparing a role for the stage or for film, the initial excitement soon gives way to the fact that that’s all it is, an initial excitement. And then the hard work of actually putting everything together begins. And that involves, in my case, anyway, always a lot of missteps and miscalculations and over-optimistic forays into what are often cul-de-sacs. And the final thing eludes you completely.

What I did know was that I didn’t want to do a conventional thing. I mean, there wouldn’t be any reason for me to do that. But in thinking about it, what I decided to do, I think, was not a chronological book, but to think to myself, what were the moments in my life that changed me forever? What was the first time you became aware of time? Even if you couldn’t make head or tail of it, but the notion of it started to infringe on the edges of consciousness. What was the first time you became aware of death? What were the first flickering images of childhood, the first recognitions of some kind of reality? What was the first time you were introduced to the notion of love and sex? You know, the first misunderstood and incomprehensible yearnings and longings for romance and love? All those invisible markers in the journey. When were they? So, it was a series of firsts.