Intimacy With Strangers

A Life of Brief Encounters

'This wonderful book builds a mosaic of stories about fame and failure, love and loss, of public achievement and private concern. An immensely enjoyable read.' - Joseph O'Connor. Intimacy With Strangers offers a dazzlingly original, thought-provoking approach to celebrity interviewing. Ciaran Carty draws on his career involving many of the world's leading writers, artists, actors and directors as they explore intimate concerns, ranging from love and rejection to the smallest physical sensations of pleasure and pain, and to the great issues of politics and wars, God and atheism - the big and small of the human condition. Interweaving recent cultural and social history, Carty exposes unexpected affinities shared by his eclectic cast of subjects. Through chains of happenstance and six-degrees-of- separation, Intimacy With Strangers mirrors the cinematic cuts, fades and dissolves of its author's sensibility as a film critic, creating this magical memoir and an idiosyncratic portrait of a kaleidoscopic Ireland in a global setting.