Nora's abandonment of the boys was pulled from his own childhood experiences.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/03/ma...3toibin-t.html
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Also in Toibin's fiction is the recurrent character of an emotionally distant mother, one who uproots her children to leave them with relatives, as his own mother did with him and his brother Niall, when his father suffered "some sort of brain aneurysm." Colm and Niall, who were 8 and 4 respectively and the youngest of five siblings, were dropped off with an aunt's family in County Kildare while their father was hospitalized in Dublin, 35 miles away. Toibin can't remember how long they stayed "three months, maybe four" but during that time, his mother never visited, never wrote and never called. Pulled out of school and away from their friends, the boys never knew when she was coming back. Once their father returned home, they did, too, but their mother, overwhelmed, stayed distant. When his father died, Toibin was 12.
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