Christine dwyer hickey biography channel

Four years on from starting it — and looking the picture of health — she talks to Peter McGoran about writing, recovery, and Irish fiction. Christine Dwyer Hickey is an effusive person. As he whiles away the summer with another young boy Richie — the lonely son of an army general killed in battle — he encounters the famous, but creatively frustrated, artist Edward Hopper and his jealous wife, the artist Josephine.

The Narrow Land is a novel about marriage, class, art, childhood innocence and the residual effects of war on the mind. But in the end, the cancer was contained, and I was one of the lucky ones.

Christine Dwyer Hickey is one of Ireland's best-known writers.

While she was recovering, Hickey became fixated on the work of Edward Hopper. I spend a lot of time in Italy, and you see the crisis first hand there. Then I read something about President Truman. After the war, he decreed this thing where all children — as many children as possible — would be brought back to America. Just get them out of those holding camps, get them here and we can try to help them.

And if you look back, it was very heavily marketed, this idea of the housewife, with the station wagon and the nice kitchen and all these mod cons as sort of compensation. So women seemed to be a little bewildered by this adjustment. Overall, I just found this time of transition in America to be very interesting. The original idea broadened beyond simply telling the story of this refugee and began exploring the marriage of Edward and Josephine Hopper.

And you could see she was quite volatile in her writing. So I really wanted to explore their relationship. I really just got very interested in them and started thinking about their marriage and the difference between the two of them.