“For any writer who has known early loss and dislocation, the task is to find metaphors, to work out ways of dealing with experience that are indirect to begin with, and then slowly move toward the original wound by something lurking in the prose. Writing becomes a skin-tight camouflage; the camouflage then carries with it traces of the original impulse to write and to make the writing matter to the reader, traces that gradually become more right with truth and dense with feeling than the original impulse itself.”
Colm Tóibín
From the essay The Hard-Won Truth of the North
The New York Review, July 9, 2015 issue.
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