ROSITA BOLANDsifts through Colum McCann's answers to your online questions about 'Let the Great World Spin', last month's book of the month

Q Apart from the Twin Towers walk, is Phillipe Petit’s story somewhat fictionalised or strictly based on real stories from other books about Petit?

John Braine

That’s a question fraught with all sorts of implications for what is true, what is real, what is imagined. I’m using the walk as a metaphor, a pull-through. In fact I didn’t really care all that much about Petit – and I don’t mean this as callously as it sounds. I certainly cared about the walk, the act of beauty, the act of creation, the art of it. But Petit as a character didn’t come into it all that much for me; the tightrope walker is the only one who remains nameless in the book. I did worry about Petit’s appraisal. I talked with him on the phone and he gave me his blessing. I sent him the book in several different versions, but I never heard back from him except for an answering-machine message. I salute his beauty, though. I salute the act that remains, even though the towers are gone.

Q I would describe Corrigan as “beat”, and when the narrator arrives at the airport he is reading Howl. I was wondering how much the writings of the beat generation influenced the book. If not them, then what writers or books had an influence on you when writing this book?

Emmet

Back in Dublin in the 1980s these were on my bookshelves: Ferlinghetti, Kerouac, Brautigan, Ginsberg, Snyder, Kesey. The spines were broken from reading them so much. I used to go and sit in the Stag’s Head and read. That sounds torturously teenage of me, but that’s how it was. Occasionally I would braid it in with an Irish writer. Someone like Ben Kiely, for instance, who was quite radical to me, or Desmond Hogan or Neil Jordan. And Sebastian Barry’s The Engine of Owl-Light – that book blew my head off.

Q I think Colum is writing a sceenplay for this book. Is it difficult to decide which parts of his own book to leave out?

Máiréad

I am writing the screenplay with JJ Abrams, but we’re both a bit handcuffed by other projects at the moment. We’re trying to distill the story down. To find the beats and the rhythm for the screen. I will say that both of us believe that we will have to embrace the beauty of the non-linear. JJ in particular is fascinated by the fact that we are all just an arbitrary moment away from connectedness, so I think we will make a film concerned with time and connectedness, about the human spirit and where it is heading.

Q How did you go about researching background stories for various parts of this novel? Can you tell us a little about what you are working on now?

Rosita

I wrote this book quickly. I did spend a good deal of time in libraries (watching films, searching out photos, reading oral histories, watching documentaries) and out with the cops on the streets. Then again, you can learn just as much by hanging out in a housing-complex stairwell as you can in 10 sociology books. It’s all about feeling. You try to get the texture true. I’m juggling two incredibly different projects. One takes place in Ireland in 1845; another takes place in New York in 2010. I’ve been bouncing these ideas off each other for quite a while. Maybe I’m resolving my own conflict with being a person of two countries myself. I think the Irish novel will win out, however. It feels like it these past few days. I’ve spent about six months trying to find a voice, and she arrived this week. She will probably be a small part of the novel, but she’s a beginning voice, and I woke up this morning fired up. That’s how I gauge a novel: how soon I run to the computer after getting out of bed.

This is an edited version of readers’ questions and McCann’s reponses. You can read the full text at irishtimes.com/blogs/thebookclub

This month the Book Club is reading Ghost Light, by Joseph O’Connor