READING ROOM:

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Literary fiction Actress

by Anne Enright,

Jonathan Cape

Almost everything about famous Irish actress Katherine O’Dell was fake. She wasn’t Irish, her name wasn’t O’Dell, her titian hair wasn’t red, but she did love her only child, Norah, who in turn adored her mum. That reciprocal love, though, is far from blind and Norah retells her mother’s life, cracks and all. Katherine and Norah’s world unfolds in a whirlpool of stories in this lyrical, bitingly witty, ponderous and engrossing novel from brilliant Irish novelist Anne Enright. It is a place of grease paint and putting on a show, of drunken nights and inappropriate lovers, of violence, loneliness and ultimately an extinguishing of the light.

“I have been waiting to do a book set in the theatre for a long time. At one stage, and briefly, I worked as an actor in Dublin,” Enright tells The Australian Women’s Weekly. “Theatre people are my kind of people.” While embedded on the boards, the novel actually has a filmic quality, reading like a first person docudrama, the lens capturing every seedy detail.

We roll back to Katherine’s childhood; she was the daughter of strolling players, stepped onto the stage aged 10 and grew into a luminous star. Norah lives in her mother’s shadow, gazing from afar as others swoon. But as she grows older she sees the truth. At her 21st birthday Norah can’t bear to have her mother stand beside her, bulging out of a dress that was too tight. “The dress was a costume, it made her look demented,” she says. Katherine was nevertheless the belle of the party, but Norah notes “there was a stage in the drinking when faces went slow and the room filled with difficulty.”

Early on we learn that Katherine died at 58 and was committed to Dublin’s Central Mental Hospital after shooting a producer in the foot – literally. How she got to this point and Norah’s own path is the novel’s haunting tale, a portrait of “anguish, madness and sorrow”.

The power is in the tension between a daughter’s love and her adult view of her mother. “I have written several different mothers in my different novels. This time, the narrator’s mother, Katherine O’Dell, is wonderful and much loved (though in fact quite a handful),” explains Enright. “This sense of wonder comes from that place where we think our mothers are completely amazing – perhaps when we are two years old. The truth of the matter is that mothers are just women.”