“I’m in a bit of a lull,” Anne Enright says when I ask what she’s working on. “You wait for a catch, a snag to your interest.
“The wonderful Annie Dillard has a story about an Inuit woman who has a baby to feed and no fish, so she slices tiny bits of her own thigh as bait. ‘This is what a writer does,’ she says. That’s Annie Dillard, though, not me.”
But the New Yorker magazine recently published Enright’s short story The Bridge Stood Fast, and Jonathan Cape a brilliant career retrospective of her nonfiction, Attention, reflecting on her life, writers and art, and Ireland and the world, so she has been not idle but taking stock.
“I’m in a lull because of the world, probably also because my parents are both gone – and the family home. I’m trying to recalibrate after a long decade of elder care for me and my siblings.”
Enright’s mother, Cora, died in November 2023, her father, Donal, in June 2016, a few months before Donald Trump was first elected US president.
“I lost a wonderful man from my life while the world gained a terrible one,” she wrote in an essay in No Authority, a collection from 2019 of her writings as the inaugural laureate of Irish fiction, in which she addressed, among other things, misogyny and male privilege. “I knew many good men and very few bad ones. Was this male goodness also illusory? What, I wondered, came between these individual, well-intentioned men and the wider enactment of equality?”
She reprises the subject in fictional form in her New Yorker story. “Even though the story is set in the 1980s, you want to feel it is saying something relevant to now. The world is so different, you want to meet that change in some way. The story is very strongly based on me going down to Clare with my dad, picking blackberries and mushrooms. I wanted to capture that fantastic thing of having your dad all to yourself when you were 11. Any girl who is stuck on their da, I had access to that easily.”
In the story, the father suddenly has to leave, and a darker masculinity takes centre stage. It asks, if men are more or less good, how did we get saddled with such a damaged patriarchy? There is also an undercurrent of Ireland’s urban-rural divide.
Enright once found the New Yorker’s fiction editors “almost anti-voice”, wanting to turn colourful sentences beige, but she has always admired its editing as “a lesson in clarity, foregrounding things the reader needs to know”, one she passes on to her students at University College Dublin, where she is professor of creative writing. “Don’t be hiding things under your jumper. There’s something you’re not telling.”
I realised that the people who didn’t like you weren’t going to like you because you won the Booker: they were going to dislike you more
— Anne Enright
Enright has enjoyed consistent critical success since her debut short-story collection, The Portable Virgin, from 1991, won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. Winning the Booker Prize, with The Gathering, from 2005, made her name internationally. “It was fantastic timing. It very much did its job for me.” She didn’t think she had written a Booker winner. “I was rearing small kids and locked away for a few hours a day in Bray. I was hauling it out of my guts and thought, No one is going to like this.”
The late Irish Times literary critic Eileen Battersby was unimpressed. Enright says, “I realised that the people who didn’t like your work weren’t going to change their minds because you won the Booker: they were going to dislike your work more.”
In my view she has reached another level with her three most recent novels, The Green Road, Actress and The Wren, The Wren. But despite being up for the Women’s Prize for Fiction five times, “you just know that’s not going to happen. The magic is moving elsewhere,” with “a shift to a cooler female voice”.
“You outgrow ideas of fashionability. Writing the sort of book I write, which is interested in style and language, how the sentences fall, it used to be called literary, but things shift. Style in some mouths is a semi-insult. I’m not second-guessing the market. That is the enemy of good writing and a sure way to fail.
“There are times late at night you think you’re no good at all, but you learn to live with the uncertainty. Usually for me it’s a structural flaw or unease. I’d break it up or smooth it out a bit. In The Green Road and The Gathering, there are tensions between the book falling apart and coming together. I sometimes wish I could write a book in one style and one voice the whole way through.”
All this made winning the $175,000 Windham-Campbell Prize this year a huge and welcome surprise. “I thought those days were gone.”
“You always finish a book too quickly,” she says, although she has never worked to a deadline since her debut novel, The Wig My Father Wore, from 1995, “which I missed by two years. I was very neurotic about it in the early days. I wrote with great difficulty. I wrote every day for 30 years. I need to. I’m slightly obsessive and addicted to it.” She usually has two or three nonfiction deadlines, however – work she takes on if she believes it will bring her fiction or thinking on.
“Stylistically, Wig is not showing its age. Is that a very arrogant thing to say? I noticed my New Yorker story is doing what I do, moving from paragraph to paragraph faster than other writers. On one level it is naturalistic, but I can sense that old energy from the first story in The Portable Virgin is still there.
“I thought I want to stop doing that now, but it still is the engine that keeps me going, that movement into surprise, the way that the paragraph ends in a way that you don’t expect from its beginning, so there is a bit of a dance going on. I’m not writing modernism like Tom McCarthy, but I’m not writing like William Trevor, either, so there is a conversation between the two.”
Enright recognises that some of her novels are couples: The Gathering and The Green Road; Actress and The Wren, The Wren. “They are bookends. They talk to each other. You realise at the end [of writing a novel] that you haven’t done at all what you meant to – if I knew that’s what I was going to do, I would have started out differently – and so you do start out differently.”
I wasn’t expecting to be asked about suicidal thoughts 40 years in my past, but I suppose I have always skirted around the difficult feelings of those years
— Anne Enright
Both Actress and The Wren, The Wren “have mythological, supernormal parents. They have a glow, given them by fame, which is shorthand for how we feel about our parents anyway. In The Wren, The Wren I had the advantage of being able to make [Phil the poet] real by making his work real, and so it was a completely different engagement [than with Actress], more exciting. You could give him go, let him have his say.
“I’m a great believer in that, which is one of the reasons why my books tend to not fragment but collate, because they have a democratic impulse behind them. You can demonise Phil – he is every kind of foolish bad man – but once you get him speaking you can also experience him. Maybe 20 per cent of my readers on a good day would be male, but I’ve had a good male response to the Phil chapters. My work is political but not ideological.”
In other words, it is polyphonic, not just one point of view.
Enright reminds me that during the first pandemic lockdown she surprised me by picking a collection of poetry translated from Irish as her summer read. “Poems like The Yellow Bittern and To a Blackbird were moving and also key to my writing The Wren, The Wren. Now the thickets of misogyny are being cleared from Irish letters, I’ve been going back to Irish poetry, a reclamation.
“For decades there was almost a hum off Irish work that was not for or about you. I became tired of having to praise it, the lie that it contains, the women’s lives trapped by that sentimentality. But you can’t be too cross when you sit down to write something. You have to let the feeling settle and then go back to reaccess it.”
I ask to see Enright’s writing desk, and she surprises me by sitting cross-legged on the sofa in a basement room, where she types on her laptop: “Slow slow, quick quick slow. It’s more of a rhythm, a rush and a stop. Writing by hand feels like a voiceover; this is more in the moment.”
Dialogue, she says, shouldn’t all be the same length unless you’re Beckett or Pinter. There is always a power dynamic or a kind of dance going on. “I am very interested in the pattern of interruptions. Women interrupt to be helpful; men interrupt as a territorial thing.”
She writes about Ireland but not for it, she says. “I’m very proud of the fact I had the 46A [bus] in every single book. Now it’s gone, I don’t know what to do. I don’t think I can put the E2 in.”
To write precisely about the imprecise, often ambiguous nature of things is one of Enright’s gifts, so it is no surprise when I ask where she grew up to learn that it was on the borders of Perrystown, Terenure and Templeogue – “postally Dublin 12, religiously Crumlin, and Terenure for the estate agents” – where the Dublin bus stopped and fields began.
[ Goodbye to the 46A: End of legendary Dublin bus route made famous in songOpens in new window ]
As for class? “It’s an evolving space for me,” she says. “No one along the Dart line, which is so class-bound, believes this, but we were, as far as I knew, indifferent to class. Possibly because we were an academic family, a lot of investment went into that.”
Her parents were both civil servants, but with five children to raise, their house was very modest. “My mother came from a falling class – middle class with no money, because her father died just before she was born. She had a Catholic spiritual sense that people were people and shouldn’t be judged for what they had. A lid would be put on notions.
“The English novel of a certain decade is obsessed with class, and I’m not interested – those power relations are not my concern – but I am very interested in people’s notions of themselves, and notions in the Irish sense.”
She always does a deep dive into her characters’ backgrounds. “I do know where people come from, how they place themselves socially, but then I lose all that and focus on something else about their lives.”
Enright was a precocious child. She won a Kodak Instamatic camera for a national essay competition when she was 11. She preferred Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland to The Wind in the Willows, playful and ludic like her father, but disappointing her mother. “It was news to me that reading could be the wrong sort.” Had she been a boy she wouldn’t have been allowed to be a writer, she has said. “I did cause a lot of maternal anxiety. But my father said, ‘I don’t know what she has, but she has something.’”
She passed her Leaving Cert at 16, then won a scholarship to a school in Canada, whose headmaster predicted that she would blow the world up with her writing – an unfortunate metaphor. He was not the last male critic to displease her. “I had absolutely no money, and there were lots of people with lots of money, who dressed with confidence, who had travelled.”
She studied English at Trinity College Dublin. She tried her hand at writing monologues and acting with friends – Lynn Parker, Pauline McLynn, Declan Hughes – who would form Rough Magic Theatre Company, and Martin Murphy, whom she would marry. She graduated with a first.
“When I was trying to place myself as a future writer, I wasn’t thinking of Irish writers at all, but once you go out in the world you are obliged to talk about nothing else. I read all the Frank O’Connors as a child, just reading for pleasure what was in the house, Robert Coover, Donald Barthelme, Marguerite Duras, the modernists.
“I was in a state of contention with writers like John McGahern, a kind of argument which is also a very strong connection. I felt he became a little too like his father even while rejecting him, that he was quite paternalistic. For the most part he rose above his damage with considerable grace, but I have an issue sometimes with how his language is laid on the page.”
Enright then started writing fragments, a form that the French literary theorist Roland Barthes writes about as having the constant pleasure of beginnings, without arc or resolution. “It works by juxtaposition. It’s a scrap. Wig narratively relied on collage, the feeling that things are either making new meanings or breaking down.”
In 1986 she won a scholarship to the University of East Anglia, or UEA, in Norwich, “the back of beyond, middle-class to the max”, for a master’s degree in creative writing taught by Angela Carter and Malcolm Bradbury.
Carter nourished the work but was a little condescending. “She asked why I wanted to go back to Ireland – clearly, for her, a very backward, provincial place. If you wanted to be a writer, go to London. I was a bit too Irish for them, unrepressed, a bit of an alien species. But when I fell apart they were very nice.”
What went wrong? “Young people nowadays know staying up all night is not a good idea. I lived in an evil little room, never went for a walk. There was a lot of student depression. I worked from 8pm to 4am. I lost words. I had no idea what I was writing.”
It sounds a bit like Jack Nicholson in The Shining, I say. She laughs. “There was a bit of Barton Fink going on. I was very isolated. I didn’t go down to London. I had no money – £3,000 to get through the year, totally scraping by. Someone offered me a lift to London, then, like a nice English person, turned round and asked me for petrol money, after leaving me in the wrong part of town.
“I was increasingly unwell. There were other difficulties. I wasn’t particularly in touch with my family at the time. I do remember people thought you were funny and therefore couldn’t be sad. My counsellor just laughed and laughed. A lot of my 20s were rocky, one way or another.”
Ten pages from the end of Making Babies, her memoir of early motherhood from 2006, she quietly drops the bombshell that on Easter Monday 1986 she attempted suicide.
People had been living a false life. Denial makes people strange
— Anne Enright
“The older I get the more political I am about depression, or less essentialist – it is not because of who you are, but where you are placed,” she writes. “Ireland broke apart in the eighties, and I sometimes think that the crack happened in my own head. The constitutional row about abortion was a moral civil war that was fought out in people’s homes – including my own – with unfathomable bitterness. The country was screaming at itself about contraception, abortion, and divorce. It was a hideously misogynistic time. Not the best environment for a young woman establishing a sexual identity.”
“My mother was very conservative, Catholic,” Enright says; “I was very oppositional, very strong in my own opinions.” Her parents had had four compliant children and didn’t know what to do with her, an overachiever in the wrong way, clever but maverick. “My mother was, or became, hard to please. That relationship didn’t thrive for a number of years until, reluctantly, she came to an accommodation.
“Ireland was changing underneath but not on the surface. I wasn’t the only person who had difficulty in that generation. The stories were legion. People had been living a false life. Denial makes people strange.”
Suicide is a sensitive topic, and we leave it there, but the author follows up the next day with an email that clarifies things further.
“I wasn’t expecting to be asked about suicidal thoughts 40 years in my past, but I suppose I have always skirted around the difficult feelings of those years. I moved in with Martin after college and my mother took very poorly to our ‘living in sin’, so by the time I left for UEA I wasn’t speaking to my family, and then, for reasons that must have made sense at the time, I broke up with Martin too. I had the feeling I was embarking on my writer’s life completely alone, and when the writing did not come good, everything seemed to fall apart for me. That is the scoop, right there.”
I wonder how this trauma fed into her writing, the early work experimenting with fragmentation, that falling-apart impulse. Her debut novel features Stephen, an angel who has died by suicide. The Gathering’s eponymous family reunion is triggered by the suicide of a sibling, Liam. A death wish hangs over her short story Night Swim. Difficult mother-child relationships are a recurring feature in her best work. The fault line in families is often generational as much as gendered. It is no wonder her writing is so charged as she captures this.
“It’s great to be asked after a million years of no one asking,” she says. “The Gathering has a suicide in it, and I had written about suicide a few years prior to that. Journalists were not reading the same book I had written. The [Booker] prize skewed their idea of what they wanted to talk about. Nobody asked: that’s the exercise of taboo right there. We will talk about everything else and not even notice it. It’s like Poe’s purloined letter: it’s right there in plain view.”
That said, “if I was writing The Gathering as a book about suicide, I would have done it differently. Your questions are more personal and my answers are more social: I talk about the environmental, social factors in my life at the time, in a way because the personal is too personal and also, in a way, not fully true, or not enough. You can become unhinged for any number of reasons.
“The novel, as a form, is really interested in causation. Liam’s sister Veronica looks for a cause in The Gathering and doesn’t find one, except for the fact that Liam very clearly has been abused as a child. But suicide is absolute, death is so absolute, there is no cause big enough to explain it.
“After the Booker, some of the journalistic antagonism was so extreme I woke up 20 years later thinking that [abuse] must have happened to them. Though the book is not about the brother’s abuse so much as Veronica’s problem of witnessing it. All that is one of the slowest burns in Irish life. It is only two years since the Blackrock [College sex abuse] scandal surfaced.”
Stephen in The Wig “owes a lot to gay Catholic iconography, Latinx gay culture. It’s more a queer reading.” Again, she follows up the next day: “Two things though. The post-suicide angel in The Wig owes something to the feeling that I was in a ‘second’, somehow magical life now.
“I am not sure if the writerly impulse towards fragmentation maps absolutely onto the psychological, though I see how you might want to make the connection. Working with fragments is not so limited as linear fiction when it comes to capturing experience – it mimics the way consciousness works, so is a lot more like life. Joyce used fragments. I am fed up saying I have a problem with authority, and that is why I do not write realism. Naturalistic fiction is a lie – and a dull one at that. This is me changing the narrative from your ‘broken’ to my ‘honest’ or even ‘smart’.”
Miraculously, despite everything that had happened and not happened in Norwich, Enright came home that summer and spent six weeks at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, the artists’ retreat at Annaghmakerrig, in Co Monaghan, during which she wrote three stories, which were published in a Faber anthology (alongside Hugo Hamilton). Her mother sent her a clipping of an RTÉ ad: “Producer-director wanted”. She got an amazing reference from Malcolm Bradbury, and next thing she was a trainee director at Montrose, alongside Jim Sherwin and Moya Doherty.
At a time in Ireland when most young people didn’t even have a job, she was directing live TV shows such as Nighthawks, making great television with the likes of Kevin McAleer and Arthur Riordan, but it was 85 shows a year with no holidays. It was high cortisone, living on her nerves, anarchic. It ended in a breakdown, “which I would now call a burnout”.
“How much time and young energy and talent did I throw into that effing organisation,” she wrote. She quit and became a writer full-time.
What sort of creative-writing tutor is she?
“I feel we are moving towards the American consumer model of education, the idea that you’re going to get doled-out information that will teach you how to write. I feel that is an illusion; it makes the student satisfied with the service but not good on the page. I’m interested in reversing the polarity. I read the students’ work. They will be read, not taught, and be given line edits, as well as a broader response and editorial guidance. There is nowhere else you can get all of that in one place.
“I tell them the structure of a sentence is the structure of the writer’s mind. I show them what they are doing on the page and how to see what the work is requiring of them. Getting a conversation going between the page and the artist. Writing as an act of discovery. I love a fresh text: it makes me recognise the provisionality of everything you are doing on the page, because we are all in the same boat, writing badly and then making it better and, finally, good.”
Attention: Writing on Life, Art and the World, by Anne Enright, is published by Jonathan Cape on October 30th
You can contact Samaritans on freephone 116 123 or by email at jo@samaritans.ie
