Mary Costello: how I came to write Academy Street

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“I’ve never lived in New York but have visited many times. I was there in the summer of 2011 and, almost every day, took the A train up to Inwood. I found Academy Street and the apartment building my aunt had lived in. I walked around the streets and the park, visited the church, the library; imagining the lives of my aunts, my uncle; hearing the echoes of their footsteps on the streets, the footsteps of so many Irish emigrants who’d started out there with hopes and dreams”

The Good Shepherd School in Inwood: “There is something about that generation of young men and women, something I glimpse in photographs and in stories of their lives – their innocence and earnestness, their lack of cynicism too – that moves me. One day I sat on a bench across the street from the school as parents gathered to collect their children. In an upstairs classroom I could see the tops of little heads, and tiny hands being raised and lowered. Something was constellated in that moment and Tess’s whole life began to unfold before me”

Mon Apr 13 2015 - 11:34

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