When I was twenty, I did a play in New York where I was an Irish priest. [...] I didn't know what to read, but, when I went into the bookstore, there was Joyce. I didn’t have a literary family. My mother read a lot, but she read horror books. "Portrait" is an example of a book that turned me onto a new world. It sort of slapped me. The rector's long description of Hell threw me into maybe the worst nightmares I've ever had. There was also something about Stephen Dedalus and his innocence, growing up in a Catholic school, where he was bombarded by religion and also trying to find his individuality within it, that somehow paralleled what I went through.
This is the first big book that I read. I think I was in my twenties. You know when you look at a book that big and you go, 'Fuck, how am I ever gonna read this?' Then there's some ego involved when you're done, because you can go, 'Yep, I read that.' There’s something about the scope of the story, the sheer human energy in it, that made me realize that I wanted to write; I wanted to have that ability to convey so much in one book.
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