Just luxuriate in a certain memory, and the details will come. It's like a magnet attracting steel filings.

I'd just go into a room in my memory and just look around and start seeing things that I'd forgotten, like the alphabet on the blackboard in Irish, which we had to chant every day for months and months and months. I remember the Gaelic script and things like that. And this awful, putrid lavatory that we used outside.

The uncluttered life is the key to a good memory.

We never really had any kind of a Christmas. This is one part where my memory fails me completely.

I would just circle around certain incidents, like a vulture with carrion, until it yielded up some incident in my childhood, especially the religious stuff: the sacraments, the First Communion, and Confession, and Confirmation, and all of those turning points in the life of a little Irish Catholic boy.

Sit and quiet yourself. Luxuriate in a certain memory and the details will come. Let the images flow. You'll be amazed at what will come out on paper. I'm still learning what it is about the past that I want to write. I don't worry about it. It will emerge. It will insist on being told.