Actress the next stage in an illustrious writing career
Anne Enright is thinking about politics. Specifically, the way the English talk about Ireland. When we speak on the phone, it is days before the Irish election and the polls are predicting a strong vote for Sinn Féin (the party topped the popular vote), a notion that English political pundits struggle to comprehend, much to Enright’s fascination.
“As a writer I’m really interested in the way people discuss the matters of the day,” Enright says. “There are complex reasons why people might vote for Sinn Féin, not least the huge problems with housing. They’re a left-wing party and we didn’t have an industrial revolution so we don’t have your industrial worker/posh boy problem.”
Is she suggesting that Britain, and England in particular, is still in hock to an outdated class system that gives greater leeway to those educated on the playing fields of Eton, such as the current Prime Minister? Enright laughs before mischievously referencing one of the most infamous lines in British drama (from the original House of Cards): “You might say that but I couldn’t possibly comment…”
As precise yet as unruly as her novels, Enright considers each question carefully even as the answers bubble out of her, frequently interrupting herself to fine-tune her responses, a method that she also applies to her work. “It’s true. I write it over and over again and then read it out loud. Because in order to make it look as though it’s just been written for the first time there almost has to be somebody opening their mouth and saying it.”
Clearly, it works. Enright’s books are stuffed full of dark wit, memorable lines and striking images, from her sharply satirical first, The Wig My Father Wore (1995), through luscious historical novel The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch to 2007’s Booker prize winning The Gathering and 2015’s sweeping The Green Road, which took in everything from the Aids crisis in 80s New York to aid work in Mali.
Her latest, Actress, has just been longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction. It traces the relationship between
Katherine O’dell, a star of Irish theatre and Hollywood film, and her daughter Norah, and is awash with sharply drawn portraits of 70s Dublin. It’s a close-knit, claustrophobic and strangely enchanting world that Enright, 57, was born slightly too late for, yet whose bitchy salons and smoke-filled bars she pins perfectly to the page.
At its heart is the magical, monstrous O’dell, a woman who has built herself from nothing into Ireland’s most beloved star, even though she was born not in Dublin but in the South London suburb of Herne Hill. As Norah admits: “My mother was a great fake. She was also an artist, a rebel and a romantic – so you could call her anything you like, but you could not call her English, that would be a great insult. It would also, unfortunately, be true.”
That gap between the image we present to the world and the more complicated reality lies at the heart of Actress, but Enright stresses that it would be a mistake to think that she is mocking O’dell. “She chooses to be Irish and there’s a secret glee in that,” she says. “To me, Irishness, like all nationalism, is something constructed out of stories and myth in which you take those bits you like and discard those you don’t. Katherine is part of that great mongrel population of theatrical players who move from Ireland to England and back again.”
Nor did she want Katherine to fall into that stereotype of the “glamorous woman with the lonely private life.”
“I wanted to say something more than that – something about the ownership of stories, what it feels like to be a bit player in your own narrative and how to take control of your image and the way in which you are seen.”
To that end, the relationship betweennorahandkatherine, which was partially inspired by that between Debbie Reynolds and Carrie Fisher (the book’s cover uses a famous photograph of a young Fisher watching her mother from the wings), was deliberately not depicted as traumatic.
“I pushed back against that notion,” says Enright. “Norah idealises her mother and, this is made clear, it’s a strange place for a child to be in that they have an amazing mother who is considered amazing by other people for different reasons. At its heart it’s a sweet relationship, although not one the world might really expect or understand.”
In the past, Enright has talked about having been lonely as one of the few successful Irish women writers of her era, a notion she now dismisses as “pretentious… ‘oh I’m so lonely,’” but she has long lent her support to less celebrated writers and is clearly thrilled with the number of women writers coming through the Irish literary scene.
“There’s a sweet spot when people who have something urgent to say but who haven’t had the means to say it manage to apply enough pressure not just to open the gate but to push through it,” she says. “There’s definitely a new sense of freedom and confidence in female voices.” She adds with an air of self-mockery. “So, yes, my work here is done.”
● Actress by Anne Enright is published by Jonathan Cape, price £16.99
‘There’s definitely a new sense of freedom and confidence in female voices’