AS GOOD AS HER WORDS

Aingeala Flannery chats to Anne Enright about gender imbalances and using her position for good

Booker-winning Irish author Anne Enright has used her platform to highlight gender imbalances and teach other writers how to hone their craft. AINGEALA FLANNERY catches up with her former lecturer in Dublin to discuss her new novel and why it’s her job as a writer to speak the truth.

The lobby of Dublin’s Fitzwilliam Hotel, where I’ve arranged to meet Irish author Anne Enright, is dense with men in suits and guests checking out. They are as loud and busy as she is compact and unassuming, so it takes me a few minutes of playing Where’s Wally? to find her, the inaugural Laureate for Irish Fiction, balanced on the edge of a low velvet armchair, examining the squiggle in the foam of her cappuccino.

“Anne,” I say.

“Ah, it’s yourself,” she says with a tilt of her head, and an ironic little smile.

Anne Enright taught me creative writing at UCD, so I’m no stranger to the sharpness of her wit or indeed her tongue. She is disarmingly charming, and her eyes shine with a kind of impish intelligence when she speaks. It was not unusual to leave Dr Enright’s workshops ticklish and giddy from the comedic riff of her commentary. Only later would it dawn on you that the witticism was, in fact, a criticism. Humour was her way of numbing the pain when she was telling you the writing wasn’t good enough.

Now, as we move our coats and bags into the library snug where it’s possible to talk quietly, she wants an update on my work, by which she means my writing, and I’m quietly pleased she uses the term. It takes several minutes to bring the conversation around to her new novel, which is after all, what I’ve come to talk to her about.

Actress is Enright’s seventh novel, it spans five decades, and tells the story of fictional Irish theatre legend and former Hollywood starlet Katherine O’Dell, as written by her daughter Norah as she goes about exhuming long buried secrets in an attempt to unpick the mythic narrative of her mother’s life. It’s been a lonely road for poor Norah, waiting in the wings, for scraps of attention and love from her glamorous and emotionally unavailable mother. Their grand house on Dartmouth Square seems less a home than a late night salon with “the furniture askew, and everywhere the silhouettes of bottles and glasses like a miniature cityscape, proliferating on tables and sideboards”. Katherine, meanwhile, subsists on grapefruit and boiled eggs. She smokes, she drinks, she hustles for parts, skirting the line between tenacity and desperation. On a good day, she cuts a dash across Dublin wearing Ib Jorgensen or Chanel.

It’s tempting to speculate who Katherine might be based on. She feels so real, and certainly Enright talks about her in those terms. “Oh yes, she was very real to me when I was writing the book. She is entirely herself, but there were influences, of course. Siobhán McKenna was on my mind – the red hair, the beauty, and like McKenna, Katherine’s first love was the stage. And Katherine belongs to that special class of people, like Micheál Mac Liammóir and Hilton Edwards, who were allowed to be different because they were ‘ theatre, darling’, they were icons of one sort or another; people considered them to be outside the world of Catholic respectability.”

Enright is a great teller of anecdotes, and our conversation drifts from Flann O’Brien’s alcoholism to Siobhán McKenna’s little known talent for mathematics, to the fact that 80 per cent of whistleblowers within organisations end up being excluded. We discuss the exquisitely beautiful writer Maeve Brennan, who (similar to Enright’s Katherine) drank like a sailor on shore leave and ate boiled eggs to stay trim. Brennan, Enright informs me, got her break in the US from Carmel Snow, the

Dalkey-born editor of Harper’s Bazaar. Later, when I get home, I will google Carmel Snow and find a black and white photograph of her; she is dressing Lauren Bacall, and they are both wearing Cristóbal Balenciaga.

This, Enright reminds me, “was a time when women hit 35, they went home and locked the door”. We talk about “damaging clichés of femininity”; she stretches her cheeks back with her hands and pulls a face, demonstrating to me how “studios had ways of making actresses cry beautifully on film, the whole business of how to work a scarf or a shawl, and of taping their faces so they stayed smooth, and not ugly when the tears began to fall”.

We don’t mention Harvey Weinstein or the #MeToo movement, but the word misogyny hangs around our conversation like a bad smell. She recalls how in 2016, when Trump was elected, there was a sinking sense of nothing having changed. “Things were,” she says, “worse than we’d imagined, with lurking, and secret, and overt misogyny that is intractable and resists change absolutely. But now we know where we are, we are able to see things more clearly, and it’s possible to say the word misogynist in a way it wasn’t before.”

That same year, women working in Irish theatre founded the Waking The Feminists movement in protest against sexism in the sector. Enright, with her early background in theatre, has been vocal in her support for the campaign, describing the gender imbalance as “surprisingly appalling”, with “female actors bearing the brunt of discrimination”.

Enright recently told the BBC that her winning the Booker Prize in 2007 for The Gathering annoyed male writers. The Wikipedia entry about the novel is interesting, only insofar as it describes her victory with snarling begrudgery, noting that the book had won “accidentally and unexpectedly” and that Enright “had simply been the compromise decision due to disagreements about Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach.”

In the wake of the win, Enright took a practical approach, realising that the prize brought with it an amount of power and respect. She tells me she used it deliberately to ensure that writing by women was reviewed in the books pages of newspapers “to supply what had been lacking in my own early days. I read men and women and reviewed both, but I didn’t discriminate against women.”

She held onto that torch and carried it into her appointment as the inaugural Laureate for Irish Fiction in 2015. The laureateship included a commitment to deliver a series of public lectures; Enright chose to focus on “the female voice, heard and unheard”. She spoke about local historian Catherine Corless and the Tuam Babies scandal; she spoke about writer Maeve Brennan; and for her parting shot, she delivered a public address at the National Gallery laying out, with statistical analysis, how gender imbalance works against Irish women writers. It included the astonishing revelation that just 28 books by female authors were written about by male reviewers in The Irish Times in 2013.

Looking back, Enright acknowledges that it wasn’t in her own interests to cast a cold eye on the publishing world in Ireland. “But,” she adds, “I needed to take that step forward in my own creative and intellectual self.” I ask if she felt obliged to speak out as Laureate. She looks at me with some surprise, and I sense she is disappointed by the question. “Writers,” she begins, in a tone that brings me right back to the role of student. “Writers – the injustice that hides in plain view and the obligation to say something. That’s my job. I’m a writer. I say what is hiding in plain sight.”

Actress by Anne Enright (Jonathan Cape, €15.99) is out now. Anne will appear in conversation with Marian Richardson at the Pavilion Theatre in

Dun Laoghaire at 7pm on Saturday, March 28 as part of the Mountains to Sea dlr Book Festival, mountainstosea.ie. You can also catch her at

Cúirt International Festival of Literature, Galway on April 24; International Literature Festival Dublin on May 22; and Listowel Writers’ Week on May 29.