It is the first March day with a hint of spring in it when PW meets Rosemary Mahoney at Houghton Mifflin's New York offices, just north of Union Square on Park Avenue South. Mahoney and her guest are led to a conference room where she plops herself down into a chair, a leg comfortably draped over the armrest. Dressed in blue jeans and a black sweater with a maroon scarf, she is a handsome woman of 42 with strong Celtic features, including a broad forehead. Her hair is coal black, with just a few graying strands. If someone told you she was a Kennedy cousin, you would believe it.
Her new book, The Singular Pilgrim: Travels on Sacred Ground, is about her circuitous search for God, as represented by all the major religions, at hallowed sites around the world. As a pilgrim, she visited Lourdes, Station Island in Ireland, El Camino de Santiago in Spain, the Holy Land, and Varanasi in India. "First of all, I love to travel," she says, "and after I finished my last book I was thinking about what I would do next. I happened to see The Canterbury Tales on my bookshelf, and I took it down and started reading it. You know, we were supposed to read it in high school and I never really did. So I started reading it and I thought, wow, this is fantastic. Now at this age I understand it and I can appreciate the humor. I felt, wouldn't it be interesting to write about pilgrimages? Religion is interesting to me, but it's also the adventure side that was equally appealing—and the way people behave when they're doing extreme things or going on a long trip with a particular intent is fascinating to me."
Mahoney, as she did in her three previous books, ventured out alone. In The Early Arrival of Dreams (1990), she went to China to teach; in Whoredom in Kimmage (1993), she worked herself across Ireland just as the country was on the verge of massive social and economic breakthroughs; and in A Likely Story (1998), she recalls a summer working for Lillian Hellman when she was 17. "When I'm actually working on a book, I find that my perceptions are keener when I'm alone," she says. "And because these were trips that had sort of a spiritual intent, I wanted to really spend time thinking about how I felt, and I find that easier to do when I'm by myself. It gives me more time to think."
Asked if she was a loner, she just nods her head. "Kind of, yeah," she confesses. "I work at home. I live alone, right now. I do a lot of things alone. I row for a couple of hours everyday on Narragansett Bay and I love being alone on the water. I am a kind of a loner and it may be because I don't feel I fit in. I have a lot of friends. I don't watch a lot of TV and that can be isolating."
As you listen to Mahoney you soon realize that there is a precision to her speech, like words on a page. She often edits herself as she speaks, producing perfect, sometimes brilliant, sentences off the top of her head. Occasionally, in certain words, you will hear Ireland. And like the Irish, she is naturally suspicious. "That is kind of an Irish thing," she admits, "to always feel a little bit defensive and a little bit suspicious. I used to be pretty close-mouthed about myself and one thing I've noticed with each book—with this book a lot—is that I reveal more of my personal life. [Most writers] start out writing about very personal things, then they end up writing about broader, social issues or the world. But I seem to be doing the opposite. For a long time I found it hard to say who I was. The first book I wrote, the one about China, somebody said to me, 'I loved that book, but you weren't in it at all.' " Mahoney takes a long pause, thinking. "Well, I am and I'm not. The thing is, the more you reveal about yourself, the less control you have over what people think of you."
One of the themes running through Mahoney's work is her relationship with her mother, still going strong at 80. Mahoney was the last born of seven children and her mother, who suffers from polio, depended on her heavily as she grew up. "We were very, very close," she says. "My father died when we were very young, and she was the one parent I had."
She frankly discusses her mother's alcoholism in A Likely Story and her religious influence in A Singular Pilgrim. "She was a huge influence in my life," Mahoney freely admits. "She read A Likely Story in manuscript form. I felt it was fair to show it to her since she is such a big part of it. She wasn't thrilled about certain things, but my mother has always been very truthful about the realities of her life, and she's very brave, and she said, 'You know what? This is true and maybe the best thing for me and for everybody in our family is to have this be out in the open. I'm not going to lie and say cover it up.' I think she really believes in having the truth be known. Also, I mean, from the response I got to that book, she comes off very well. People ended up just loving her. She was a big influence in my life and was my hero in a sense."
Mahoney had no official Catholic religious instruction other than being prepared for her First Holy Communion by her mother. "I was born in Boston," her mother once told her, "but I was brought up by 19th-century Ireland." Thus, the Catholic religion Mahoney was indoctrinated in—her mother's—was of the hardcore variety.
"I got a lot of [Catholicism] from my mother because it was so important to her," says Mahoney. "Her father nearly became a priest. He went to Maynooth [in Ireland] and got to the point where he was allowed to wear a Roman collar. She has a photograph of him. He decided he didn't want to join the priesthood, and he left Ireland without saying good-bye to his parents because he didn't know how to tell them. He came to Boston. He taught Irish in a school there, which is how he met my grandmother."
Many middle-aged Irish find themselves in a hunt for God. They become intoxicated with their religion, which has often lain dormant in their lives for years. At one point in The Singular Pilgrim, Mahoney writes, "[A]t a certain point in my life I had disowned God," yet later writes, "[A]s I prayed I realized that in the past few years I had been thinking about God a thousand different ways."
"I think it's in the nature of God and in the nature of belief that we have to work at it," she says. "In a way, we do have to go to Him—if he's really there. I still am not sure whether I believe or don't believe. I'm always on the edge. Even now, after doing all these travels, but I think part of belief and part of faith is actually struggling with that doubt. That's where faith lives. There was a time when I was a teenager I was very resentful about the fact that God would seem so secretive. If God is here, why play this game? Why not just say, here I am and this is what I want you to do. Part of having a relationship with God is also having a relationship with your own soul and with all those things that, being a human being, we're uncertain about. That uncertainty is a big part of it."
At this point, she turns to her interviewer and asks if he believes in God. She receives a tentative response. "Well, I want to," she says stridently. "I very much want to. And when I see people who have true faith, like my mother, I envy her. It comes easily to her."
She remembers St. Patrick's Purgatory in Donegal, Ireland, as the pilgrimage she enjoyed the most. "I was suffering a lot personally at that time," she remembers. "I broke up with a guy who I'd been with for a long time and really loved and thought I was going to spend the rest of my life with. I was extremely unhappy while I was there, so I was a bit vulnerable. And being there, it just worked—it made me feel better. The thing that I found most enlightening, that I learned the most historically, was on the Sea of Galilee, I really felt the human side of Christ, and something about that to me was very comforting. Christ's humanity to me is almost more interesting than his divinity—if he was, indeed, divine. His bravery, what he did, and the odds he was fighting against—being on that lake was very moving and comforting."
Mahoney has a gift for description. Her talent is in describing ordinary things in extraordinary ways. She can be tough as she was with Hellman ["Her teeth... were like the cattle catcher on the front of a freight train"], gripping as in her stark portrayal of the lepers of Varanasi, or she can be very gentle as she describes the magic of a mildly retarded English girl at Lourdes. "Lillian Hellman I wrote about because it was an experience in my life that was pretty tough. I learned a lot there. I'm interested in characters. I'm interested in unusual people. I'm not interested in the conventional. I am always drawn to the oddball... because I feel like an oddball. I feel like a freak. You know, something in the retarded girl really touches me. And I feel like I get her. I'm interested in people who have very strong ideas, who have physical mannerisms that I find striking. I'm interested in the physical world enormously. If I could have been a painter, I would have been... but I don't have that talent."
Her talent for description also takes another form—nudity. In three of her books, people—including herself—show up naked without warning. "You know," she says, "I think one of the things that interests me most about being a writer and being alive is who people really are. We're so full of façades. Everything is about style and fitting in. There's something about being naked—we are who we are when we're naked. We're a little more like animals. Not that a person's naked body tells you who they are, but there are no defenses there. Honestly, I didn't notice that I write about nakedness."
In the past, she has taken hits from the critics. "Yeah," she says in exasperation, "for the strangest reason, that I was unkind to Lillian Hellman—of all people—who was incredibly unkind in seriously damaging ways to a lot of people." The Irish were equally harsh about Whoredom in Kimmage: "In Ireland, I think people thought I'd revealed the scandalous side of the Irish, and the alcoholism and the social problems, and it was unfair of me to go to that little village and reveal these people's personal lives." Having been burned by the critics, she has taken a new course. "At this point I have stopped reading reviews, which isn't easy to do. In the end, you cannot control what people think about you. You have to be who you are. What am I going to do? Change the way I write because somebody didn't like what I wrote? No, you can't do that. Honestly, I care less and less about what people think of me. It isn't that I don't care about people, but I realize I have to honor who I am. So, I'm not afraid to reveal things about myself now."
Although she won the Charles E. Horman Prize for Fiction Writing as an undergraduate at Harvard, she has yet to produce a work of fiction. "Next I'd like to write a novel," she says. "I had an idea and I'm not saying that this is ever going to happen, but I've always been very interested in the history of the Jewish community in Dublin. And even in the Jews that are still living there and there aren't many, probably 900—1,000. Always been very interested in that subject and if I wrote about it, it would probably be a novel. I do want to write a novel next. I'm trying to figure out how I can do it."
Whatever her next project is, you have a feeling that it will be a beautifully crafted work that will enlighten and upset because she possesses that rare Yeatsian ability to cast a cold eye on the most feared and unmanageable of human conceit—the truth.
