Author of the week

Gabriel Byrne

Gabriel Byrne might have a few more books in him—if he can avoid the delete key, said Sarah Lyall in The New York Times. The actor’s new memoir, Walking With Ghosts, has already won praise from literary stars and fellow Irish natives Colum McCann, Edna O’Brien, and Colm Tóibín. But Byrne almost blew his chance at having any readers. About a year ago, he was finishing up the manuscript when one false keystroke made his laptop go blank. “It was kind of devastating,” he says. “I went to the store where they have the geniuses, and I said, ‘I want your most genius genius.’ And he said, ‘Unless you can get some kind of spy agency involved in this, it’s gone.’” Fortunately, Byrne, now 70, had enough of it in his head to quickly rewrite it.

The focus of the book is the actor’s Irish childhood. The eldest son of a Guinness barrel maker, Byrne aspired to be a priest. But after he left Dublin at 11 for a seminary in England, a friendly priest there groomed and molested him. Decades later, Byrne tried to confront the priest over the phone, but the older man claimed no memory of Byrne. That experience, said Karl Geary in LitHub.com, confirmed for Byrne that life often resists the tidiness of fiction. “There’s an idea, which I don’t subscribe to, that you face the problem, you find closure, and you move on,” he says. “I realized that there doesn’t have to be a resolution.” Having finished one book, he’s now working on another, this time a novel. “I would hesitate to call myself a writer,” he says. “But some kind of an instinct is saying to me, Do it.”