He autographed a copy that I dedicated to my Irish grandparents.I said that the his writing reminded me of
my favorite author.I said that I hoped he didn’t mind being
compared to an Englishman-Charles Dickens.He just laughed
and said in that case no.
I stood in line after one of his university lectures attended by perhaps 650 people, and he autographed well into the night. During his talk he had railed a bit against the entrenched Catholic hierarchy of his home town and what he felt was callous and demeaning treatment of the poor. Naturally, his comments were generalized outward by many critics and his countrymen (and I'm sure they will be on this thread as well) to an all-fronts assault on Catholicism per se, but I didn't read them that way; his writing was very precise. He resented the indignities visited on his mother when she tried to get help from the local parish, but he also simply but movingly described a priest who heard his confession (he stole food) as an adolescent and simply forgave him.
In the moment when I came up to him in line, I had marked some pages and pointed out to him that he had redeemed himself with the Catholic Church by writing of the priests who were kind to him. What a surprised look he gave me!