Anne Enright Is Not Really Writing About Families, Actually

Irish author Anne Enright won the Booker Prize back in 2007 for her fourth novel, The Gathering. 

 

The Booker carries significant clout in the anglosphere, and here in Australia is still one of the literary prizes most likely to shift you from a niche readership to mainstream appeal. Back in the early 2000s, it was possibly at its highest point, with even the longlist attracting endless speculation and commentary.

 

And as I was getting ready to interview Anne Enright for her recent visit to Australia for Adelaide Writers’ Week, I came across a Guardian blog post from when she was longlisted for the prize.

 

At first glance it seemed mean-spirited and stupid. The writer admitted to being generally grumpy and ungenerous in their prejudice against Irish writers at the time, and they opened the review by assembling a grab-bag of – as they put it – Irish childhood cliches and where they appeared in the book.

 

Here’s a taste:

Drunken father, who veers between maudlin sentimentality and maudlin violence. Humorous uncle – also drunk, but good for the craic and a great source of slightly ribald jokes. Harried mother, living a harried life in an old-fashioned kitchen. Too many children. One of these children dies too young. A grandparent, close to death. A schoolteacher who instils a love of books in the author. Rain. Brown tea. More rain. More tea. 

 

But then something funny happens. The blogger gives up on the exercise. “I’d underestimated Enright,” he admits, “And then some.” He’s completely overwhelmed in his doubts and criticisms by Enright’s writing: her sardonic wit, her complex humanity, the power of her prose.

 

With her Booker win, Enright’s recognition as one of Ireland’s most accomplished writers finally arrived. She became Ireland’s first Laureate for Fiction from 2015–2018 and has gone on to write book after book of indelible, unforgettable characters.

 

I love her writing and, apart from a low-key fear of her incisive, no-bullshit style, I was in no danger of underestimating Anne Enright.

 

I’m Michael Williams and this is Read This, a show about the books we love and the stories behind them.

 

Anne Enright’s latest book, The Wren, The Wren, follows Carmel and Nell, a mother and daughter whose lives have been deeply impacted by the choices made by Carmel’s father, a famous poet named Phil. It’s an absolutely gorgeous work, and like so many of her novels prominently features Enright’s expert writing about family – its complex dynamics, its tensions, its intrinsic dysfunction. And in the character of Phil, Enright gets to explore the ways in which Irish literary icons are received and what they can get away with, an idea that has changed during her career, and one that has in many ways been intensely gendered.   

 

MICHAEL: I did hear you talk about the fact that the big kind of cultural pressures in Ireland, particularly for women artists: silence and niceness, that they were the two kind of guiding things that shaped the way you were supposed to comport yourself, that there was silence around what you did in silence around recognising your work. And then the niceness was a kind of relentless force. 

 

ANNE: Yeah. Sometimes they used words like decorum. You’d see women writers praised for their decorum. I never had any decorum, so I didn’t know how to manage all that. I think, in Ireland, both men and women were, you know, condemned to being lovely, loveliness was our national besetting problem. But for the women especially, being lovely was necessary. I was asked the other night what would it be like if I had been born male? What would my writing career have been? And I don’t think I would have had one. I would have been an engineer or something, you know, because I don’t have to earn a living. I mean, the men in my family had to earn a living. So being a woman, you had it from early on, an amount of freedom, and the lack of response to, profound silence that the work went into in Ireland in my early years meant, it was very disconcerting because when you’re writing, you feel like you’re shouting sort of for two years, with the mute button pressed, and then the mute button comes off because the book is out, people are reading it and they go, “Mmmm,” and they don’t say anything at all. I mean, my early books were interviews in Ireland that were reviewed elsewhere. So it was really strange. And then you say, “What the hell? I can say what I like because nobody’s listening.” So that’s fine. But it did give a kind of transgressive edge to some of my earlier work, which, if I’d had a sense of, an echo back or, a sense of being heard, I would have been more contained, I think. And so that’s not quite a regret, but it’s, you know, a formation of a kind of thing. I mean, you’re always checking and balancing what’s going on. There is some kind of feedback loop between you and the page, between you and the readership and then between you and the critical culture. So there are these, kind of, tiny adjustments, that you make, or internalise to proceed and to make better work, I suppose.

 

MICHAEL: If partly you might not have become a writer, if you’ve been born a boy, because you would have had to work. Is it also the case that a sense of pushing back was a motivating force for being a writer. That you were kind of…it was how you could find a voice and have some argy-bargy. 

 

ANNE: Well, I suppose I say that because when people ask me questions about gender, I’m increasingly careful to consider it properly about what it is because masculinity is also an issue. Because it’s easy enough to be aggrieved. And there’s plenty to be aggrieved about, but it’s not a kind of way to resolve what’s going on, either in your head or in the world. You know, a little bit…it’s good to be cross when nothing else will do. 

 

MICHAEL: The idea of pushback, you know, when you had the Laureate role. 

 

ANNE: Yeah. Oh, yeah. 

 

MICHAEL: You were a very articulate advocate for kind of considering the ways in which chauvinism and gender had so shaped Irish literature. 

 

ANNE: This is…more unconscious bias, you know, because Ireland was so busy being Irish, they forgot about the issue of men and women, really, and Irish male writers, they don’t celebrate misogyny in their work. They’re not nasty, you know, they don’t feed into whatever that fire is. You know, they’re not Mailer and Roth and I’m sure they might read Mailer and Roth, but that’s not the kind of thing they deliver. They deliver really interesting, lovely books. But the unconscious bias nevertheless was huge. I think what happened to me, partly because I was Laureate and I was going to call this out and tally the numbers and just say, “Actually, by the way, this is happening, even though you would deny it or it would surprise you,” was being middle-aged. There’s a thing about middle age where you say, actually, it’s not going to change. When you’re younger you think it’s going to change any minute. They’re going to like me and then the me goes away and you realise that, no, it’s kind of not about you. It’s like some objectivity kicked in and I thought, well, I’m never going to please this invisible, slightly persecutory cohort in my head. I’m never going to please them. So I might as well just get out my bulldozer and go through them. 

 

MICHAEL: You seem happy behind the wheel of the bulldozer. 

 

ANNE: That was a good bulldozer. 

 

MICHAEL: The Wren, The Wren is an absolutely gorgeous work. I’ve been a fan of yours for many years now, and every time you write a new book, I’m like, “Oh, I think this is my favourite Anne Enright book.”

 

ANNE: Oh, lovely. Thank you.

 

MICHAEL: So it’s thus far it’s just this constant upward progression for me. I’m thrilled. 

 

ANNE: Great. 

 

MICHAEL: But the, you know, some of these ideas around kind of gender roles play out in the rendering, but more acutely, the question of kind of generational ism and the ways in which, silences operate between generation and pressures, both seen and unseen kind of run down through a family, through, through different….experiences.

 

ANNE: Styles of inheritance, or legacy.I was reading a review recently that said the men are no good in this book or that, you know, so the women aren’t great either. You know, it’s like, though everyone in my work is seen from someone’s point of view. So, I’m not an omniscient narrator. I don’t give both sides of the argument. I give a multiplicity of characters with a multiplicity of views. So the men are seen to be disappointing or wrong or whatever by both Carmel and her daughter Nell, in part because of the desertion of the family by Phil, who’s the poet, the patriarch figure at the top of the tree there. So Phil’s a poet and his poetry is in the book, so it’s kind of a little bit more about culture. Phil is the culture. He’s the language. He’s the tone of voice, he’s the accent at one. At one point, Carmel says that “When he died, he took all the words with them.” So it’s like he had, you know, language in his gift. Carmel doesn’t really think that what she has to say is very interesting, and she’s kind of proud of that fact. So she doesn’t go around, presuming that she’s of more interest than anyone else. 

 

MICHAEL: But people need to get over themselves. 

 

ANNE: Yeah. No, she’s a very sensible person. 

 

MICHAEL: Very sensible. So I want to kind of think through each of those three characters, because I think they’re wonderful characters and they exist quite differently on the page, but perhaps starting with Phil and the fact that we get a sense of him from his poems, but he is the male genius. 

 

ANNA: Yeah, well, first of all, he leaves his family when his wife gets sick and he’s too anguished and he loves her too much to be around. It’s too upsetting. 

 

MICHAEL: That is both a shit act and a shit defence. The whole wounded, “Oh, I’m just too….”

 

ANNE: But back in the day, nobody pushed back at that and said, “There’s more than your emotions involved in this.” I mean, I think we all know people who are like that, who are the centre of the, you know, their emotions are the important thing in any given situation. And they can’t reverse the polarity, you know, they can’t, they can’t switch points of view, and so that is in, in part what the monster artist was like. The monster artist could also write really delicate, interesting, empathetic work while being not delicate or empathetic in their daily life. 

 

MICHAEL: But part of what often seems to me characterises the monster artist is a kind of staggering lack of self-awareness, and I’m curious about the act of writing Phil’s poems because would Phil’s poems be him distancing himself from the world or….

 

ANNE: No…what I love about Phil is his reach, his sense of yearning and his need for something higher. And that’s sometimes what poetry affords us, you know? But it depends on how low your is, your starting point. I mean, Phil’s starting point is very low indeed. He grew up in a tiny thatched cottage and I mean it’s all that story,  turning poverty into beauty. So yeah, he has yearning. But I also know…I mean, Phil was so easy for me to write his. He was just there and I knew with such, you know, minuscule precision, the types and styles of his self-regard and self-pity and all those things, you know. I knew how hurt he felt about stuff.

 

The Irish poet Paula Meehan said, when people are poor and she grew up in a poor area of Dublin, they have nothing but their personalities. So that character is money, basically. So that’s what gets you through the world. When people think about Irish acting, what happens on stage in Ireland, what happens on the page, personality is a big part of that and a part of personality is charm. Now Phil has buckets of charm. 

 

MICHAEL: Funny how much affection you audibly have for Phil… 

 

ANNE: I know he’s a terrible guy, isn’t he? Yeah. 

 

MICHAEL: But, I mean, how much is that true for you with all your characters? If you spend time with them, if you write them, you need to at least have a certain fondness for them. 

 

ANNE: Literary fiction depends on characters not being one thing. The dynamism, the energy of us is in the fact that they are at least two things, if not more. 

 

MICHAEL: But then that need for dynamism in literary fiction must be part of why families and family units are so interesting to write about, is there a certain ways of interacting, in particular in a family that feel like very fixed points where dynamism is hard to find because we’re locked into relationships.

 

ANNA: That’s interesting. You say fixed and locked in? I mean, fiction is about connection. Family gives you automatic connection whether you want it or not. So, those bonds, they call them bonds as well. They’re not affiliations. They’re not random. When you go out into the world and find. I am slightly…people who say I’m good about writing about families, and I really hope not so much. It’s not that the families that are functional are dysfunctional and people say dysfunctional families in your work. And I’m saying like, well, how are families supposed to work? You know, they get through Christmas more or less. You know, it just seems to be a natural unit for me. But I worry then, like, people think I’m writing about that when and I’m not really writing about families, actually. I mean, in this book, there’s a level that I feel underappreciated, sadly… 

 

MICHAEL: Poor, underappreciated Anne Enright.

 

ANNE: You’ve no idea how I suffer. But it’s the way that there are different languages at play that each character has a different way of speaking, a different kind of historical context. And that language, their tone of voice, their accent, their personality is somehow, kind of, a meta discourse in the book. 

 

We’ll be back in just a minute.

 

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MICHAEL: One of the great pleasures of The Wren, The Wren is that Nell’s section is in the first person, whereas Carmel’s section is in the third person. And there’s something in that choice that’s revealing about both of them, and that kind of shapes our relationship with them as characters. 

 

ANNE: So you go for the voice that feels right for the character. It’s very intuitive, very instinctive. You don’t really have a choice. I couldn’t have written Nell any other way. She didn’t have…she didn’t have that settled, sort of: I went, I saw, I did, you know, she’s in the middle of the world, everything is present, everything flows through her, fizzes out of her. First she’s online, she’s porous. She’s not yet fully formed. Whereas Carmel’s all boundaries, and she’s completely sensible. And when her father left, the poet left, he took, as I like to say, all the poetry with him. So she doesn’t have a yearning life. She doesn’t have an active imagination. She doesn’t trust reverie. She wouldn’t trust charm I don’t think either. And she is in third person past tense. This happened because it happened, manifestly. I mean, who’s to say otherwise? So she goes to a defined world and so many books are written the way Carmel thinks. I find her hard to write because she was so self-limiting. I couldn’t take…I couldn’t take the sentences somewhere strange. I had to keep them nailed to the page. And readers love those kinds of books. But I found that as I was writing Carmel, I thought, so many books are like this, and I’m really trying to make her feel boring, but that’s what a lot of realism is these days, you know? I mean, I’m not really a realist, you know.

 

MICHAEL: But from what I understand, Carmel was on the page for this book first. I mean, you were grappling with the problem of Carmel and to a certain extent, Nell was the solution. 

 

ANNE: Yeah. Nell was the solution to that problem of being stuck to the page. So Nell takes flight. Yeah. 

 

MICHAEL: Because you decided to inflict the child on Carmel. 

 

ANNE: I thought that was going to be interesting. 

MICHAEL: How do I shake her up a bit? 

 

ANNE: Yeah. How do I make this self-limiting into a tragic mode? Because people like that and there’s a high recognition factor in the audiences. I mean women understand that kind of pragmatism really, they like it a lot. Because we’re told to be lovely all the time. And then we have kids and being lovely while managing small children mortgages and all the rest of us just, you know, you have to be tough, actually, to do all of that. So the idea that mothers are always lovely, mothers are always tough. They are, by definition, tough. They’re tough in the labour ward and they’re tough in the days afterwards, it’s a tough business. It is not a kind of apple pie business giving birth and rearing small children. So that resilience is kind of, is celebrated a little bit in the book. 

 

MICHAEL: Part of what’s so lovely is — and it happens in all families, but probably in any kind of network of people — is Nell’s, ls the difference of Nell’s relationship with Phil in his work and commerce, which is inevitable? That kind of one remove means that for nil the work is a consolation. 

 

ANNE: Yes. 

 

MICHAEL: Whereas for Carmel the work is…

 

ANNE: An annoyance. Or it doesn’t make sense to her. Or quite sadly, she can’t actually read it. So Nell, at the age of…in her teens, when she’s having argy-bargies with Carmel, she curls up with Phil’s poetry to sweeten the hurt. I mean, the poems are more or less supposed to be lovely, and I was assisted in that by using actually lovely poems in Irish that I had Phil translate, so they pre-existed as pretty lovely poems. I didn’t have to invent their loveliness, put it that way. So it’s really interesting to see — and it happens to Nell a little when Carmel gets a boyfriend, Ronan — how much children love men, and you don’t want to wag a finger at them and say, “Just you wait. Just you…” But that just looking up to, that just…simplicity of it. I suppose I am interested in the simplicity of our views of men. I mean, I don’t think men are simple, but sometimes we see them in very simple terms. I mean, I’ve written about my own father. My father was just such a lovely man. We just loved him so much. It was really simple. Whereas relationships with mothers, I think, are by definition, complex, you know. So when I can, I return to these very early psychoanalytical — you might call them — moments and concepts, I suppose.

 

MICHAEL: Nell is certainly harsher marker of her mother. You capture the voice so beautifully and the hyper online stuff incredibly. Well. I think you very online. 

 

ANNE: Well, I’m on my computer all day, but of course I’m working. 

 

MICHAEL: Of course, hard at work. 

 

ANNE: Hard at work, for many hours a day and then for maybe, you know, a few minutes at the end of the day, I might check the news. 

 

MICHAEL: Sneak a little look. 

 

ANNE: Yeah. Well, yeah. I mean, it’s also a challenge. The stuff that Nell, her online stuff is…it dates so fast. So she’s interested in animal reunion videos in quite a sweet way. And they were…you used to have to go looking for them. And you’d be really excited to find, “Oh, look at that swan.”

 

MICHAEL: Oh, look at that donkey. And the little girl. 

 

ANNE: The donkey. Do you know, the donkey? 

 

MICHAEL: I know the donkey and  the little girl. That is…. 

 

ANNE: That is just epic. Yeah, it’s just epic. 

 

MICHAEL: It is funny. When I read this book, it reminded me of those videos, which I had a brief period of looking at, and then I’d forgotten. And you sent me straight back down a rabbit hole. Yeah. 

 

ANNE: It’s beautiful. But now they’re all gathered in one place, and if you look at one, their phone will send you six more. 

 

MICHAEL: That’s all you’ll ever get. 

 

ANNE:  Is all you’ll ever get. So it’s kind of it’s it’s it’s easy now. 

 

MICHAEL: Just to go back to the point that you’re making about at the start of your career, the silence of not being read or at least not being… 

 

ANNE: I think I was being read. 

 

MICHAEL: But not being critiqued. 

 

ANNE: People didn’t really want to respond or whatever it did. There is this general sense of wrongness about, and I didn’t realise, you know, for many books that it applied pretty much to all women writers except for very few. 

 

MICHAEL: From outside, my perception would be that that may have changed with Irish writers, that there’s a new generation…. 

 

ANNE: Oh, totally. No, I mean, it’s already quite a long time ago when I wrote a big essay about it all and read the Riot Act and showed the numbers, and that wave was already kind of cresting, which is, now, you know, there’s so many young Irish female writers, who are really killing it out there. So, yeah, it’s done. 

 

MICHAEL: So you’re writing into that different, wider cultural context, but also you’re writing into a very different personal context you know, since you won the Booker for your fourth book The Gathering. I imagine you felt like you had a very different relationship with readers from that point onwards. 

 

ANNE: Well, yes. I did, I found it very confusing because there’s a kind of voodoo of I should it’s kind of magical to win a prize, you know? So it’s like the fairy comes down and bops you on the head with her magic wand and, you know, whatever. So it’s not quite real. And it produces an amount of response that seems a bit strange. And then you realise that you’re meeting the readers, or you’re looking around the hall and there they all are. And that was new to me. I mean, I wrote The Gathering in a very small room for what I thought would be a small and select readership. I didn’t think it would be a general book at all, or nor was it intended to be. And so when it did gather those kind of reading figures, I was like, okay. So I think it took me a while. I mean, the next book, The Forgotten Waltz, was I kind of reduced my palette, made it a bit smaller, so that it would I, you know. I write very intuitively, so I’m not a big planner or structurer, so that’s a pretty delicate mechanism, you know. So you do want to gather your sense of creative privacy back somehow.

 

MICHAEL: Yeah, I imagine that it would be hard not to let it get into your head, you know, if you’re relying on intuition. You know, whether it’s reviews, whether it’s kind of peers, whether it’s readers themselves,  a reset each time must be a tricky thing to do. 

 

ANNE: So, yeah, I don’t know where your head is though, getting into your head…I mean, there is, there are, kind of, layers or rooms or different places in your head. So I suppose it’s getting access to the…I mean, I think there is a sweetness to the process of writing, and that…sometimes you can feel that people are trying to take that from you. And so it’s trying to get back to that, to the source, you might say, or to that sense of sweetness or ease or… 

 

MICHAEL: I’d love to know for you, when you’re at this point of the process between books, what’s the moment when you feel the next book suddenly knocking on your consciousness? Is that a voice? Is it an idea? 

 

ANNE: No, I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t trouble it by recognising it, you know? If you recognise it, you might not let it in. So I remember somebody saying to me, it’s always a year after publication before you sit down properly again. This book was quicker because the pandemic just sliced into Actress, which is the book before it. It was published as the pandemic hit. And I had a great sense of restitution, actually, during the pandemic, the lockdowns suited my ability to imagine and, you know, it was a time of reverie. Not all of it fantastic. But, yeah, it was a very, a drifted, a drifty, cut-loose sort of time. So I don’t know. I mean, normally, back in the day, I would be very cross when a book came out because I couldn’t work. Yeah. And I said, “Why can’t I get anything done?” Because I’ve been doing this kind of stuff for, you know, and there was less was back in that. But, in the old days. So I don’t know. I have a little, you get a shape, you get a tone and a shape and an atmosphere before you get the book. 

 

MICHAEL: It makes sense to me that there’s a closeness between Actress and The Wren, The Wren. There are some ideas in it that feel like that bounce off it that the one is in some ways a response to… 

 

ANNE: Yeah, you’re completing the book that you didn’t quite finish. Or you’re completing a theme that you didn’t quite finish. So the books often work as…they often speak to each other in that way. Especially the ones that follow each other. Yeah. So The Green Road talks a lot to, Well, actually, The Green Road and The Gathering, actually talks to this, so I’m onto a new set. 

 

MICHAEL: New set, a different conversation. Anne Enright, thank you so much for joining us. 

 

ANNE: Thank you. 

 

 

Anne Enright’s latest book The Wren, The Wren is available at all good bookstores now.

 

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Before we get out of here – I wanted to tell you what I’ve been reading this week: a little book, but one that pack’s a punch. Samantha Harvey’s fifth novel which is called Orbital. It follows a day in the life of six international astronauts circling Earth on a space station. I always find space stuff vaguely claustrophobic, but Harvey’s vision is generous and expansive and it is a wonderful, memorable read. As ever you can find all the books we’ve discussed today at your favourite independent bookstore. 

 

That’s it for this week’s show. If you enjoyed it, please tell your friends about it – and rate and review us. It helps a lot.

 

Next week on Read This I chat with Jonathan Lethem. He’s back writing about the Brooklyn of his childhood for the first time in over 20 years, and found it a wildly different experience. 

You know, I grew up with this inheritance, this legacy of gentrification, race and class. These problems were everywhere, mostly unnamed in the space. What’s been so extraordinary is that the distance between when I wrote Fortress of Solitude and now is that everything in our culture has inclined towards giving these things their full names. I think I was a political depressive, and I think that was typical of my generation, that we, in a way, needed to be awoken and to award everything with its proper name again so that we could begin to unfreeze the conversation. And this book benefits from that unfreezing of that conversation. I couldn’t have ever done that on my own. 

Read This is produced and edited by Clara Ames.

 

Mixing & original compositions by Zoltan Fecso.

 

Thanks for listening. See you next week.