The novelist John Banville told the Irish Times that he was, not to put too fine a point on it, a shitty dad, and what’s more, probably most writers are. “[Writing] was very hard…on the people around me, on my children. I have not been a good father. I don’t think any writer is. You take so much and suck up so much of the oxygen that it’s very hard on one’s loved ones.” No palaver about compromise. More generally he says of writers: “Well, we are ruthless. We’re not nice people. We might be interesting, we might be diverting…but mostly [living with us is] just slog.” And then he goes on to say
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