Anne Enright on her Booker-winning novel, The Gathering, and how Canada helped make her a writer
Her latest title, The Wren, The Wren, examines mother-daughter love
WARNING: This audio contains discussion of suicide.
This fall, as Writers & Company wraps up after a remarkable 33 year run, we're revisiting episodes selected from the show's archive. This interview originally aired Feb. 3, 2008.
Award-winning Irish writer Anne Enright probes the messiness of family relationships — the complexity of mothers and daughters, as well as the intimacy of brothers and sisters. Her daring 2008 novel, The Gathering, which charts the aftershocks of the tragic death of a young man inside a large family, told from the perspective of his grieving sister, won the 2008 Man Booker Prize.
Enright's latest title, The Wren, The Wren, traces the love between a mother, Carmel, and her daughter, Nell. The two women also wrestle with the long shadow of Carmel's father — a sensitive, somewhat self-indulgent poet, celebrated in Ireland. It's been called perhaps Enright's best novel yet.
Born in 1962, Enright studied at Trinity College Dublin, before leaving Ireland to attend the Pearson College of the Pacific on Vancouver Island and studying creative writing at the University of East Anglia. Over the years, she's published non-fiction, short story collections and several novels. In 2015, she became the inaugural Laureate for Irish Fiction. In addition to the Booker Prize, Enright has won the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and the Irish Fiction Award.
Enright spoke to Eleanor Wachtel in 2008 from Dublin.
The culture of large families
"I think large families are probably the same as small families except just multiply it by three or four. I suppose large families were just sort of benignly or otherwise neglected and left to grow as they could. And so there is a kind of survival instinct or sense of pride, the sense of the group about them. So they are linked.
"And to a large extent, the book [The Gathering] is about how we are connected to other human beings, whether we want to be or not. [The narrator] Veronica spends a lot of time in an attempt not to be connected, trying to get away from family.
"They don't have their parents asking them how they feel and they don't have anyone inquiring. So Veronica says it's quite a private way to exist that no one gets into your stuff. It's a very unsentimental way to live. It's very unrationalized or under-rationalized. But I don't know if you can rationalize families. I don't know how much talking helps with families or rationalization. So she says it's an honourable way to live.
"And I suppose they're proud and they have a code."
A complex sibling relationship
"[Veronica and her brother Liam] were very close in age. They were also hived out. They were farmed out to their granny with their little sister Kitty when they were eight and nine years of age, for reasons that were still mysterious to Veronica when she grew up.
"And I have met these people. I've met people in Ireland who were sent up the road to live with some old people and they don't know why they were sent to live up the road — whether the old people paid their parents money, or whether they were there to keep the old people company as a charitable act, or whether it was one less mouth to feed.
"Anyway, that did happen. [In The Gathering], they were sent off to their granny's house in Broadstone in the centre of Dublin and that kept them close. They were in it together. It's almost an incestuous relationship between the two of them, but I didn't really make that explicit. They're compadres; they're complicit. They're in it together.
She felt she denied what she felt for him until it was too late and then she felt it for him too strongly.- Anne Enright
"The thing is, there are very good reasons why you don't love your siblings too much. We spend an awful lot of time avoiding loving our siblings. We spend a lot of time getting annoyed with them.
"We spend a lot of time dreading Christmas, for example. There are strong taboos that prevent us from loving them, as perhaps we might. And when Liam dies, because he's not there anymore, [Veronica] can love him for the first time. And so that's part of the wave of emotion that crashes over her in the book is the fact that she loved him. I mean, he was an alcoholic by the time he died. 'He was a grey heap of a thing,' as she describes him.
"That's what she felt for him. She felt she denied what she felt for him until it was too late and then she felt it for him too strongly."
On becoming a writer in Canada
"I think I was just culturally obliged to become a writer. I went to a school in Canada called Lester B. Pearson College of the Pacific and had a rather amazing English teacher there, to whom I've dedicated my next book of short stories.
"I showed him my bad poetry and he was wonderfully ironic and encouraging at the same time and understood exactly the whole excruciating business of writing things down. But the director, as we called him, of the school, was introducing me to some sponsors one day because they gave money to the school and they said, 'What are you going to do when you grow up?' And the director said, 'I think she's gonna blow the world apart with her writing.'
"And I was completely embarrassed because it was in the early 80s and the Irish were busy blowing the world apart in other ways. The idea of bombs and blowing up things, I just didn't want that in the conversation somehow. And I thought it was a bit of a slip on his part. But it was the first time I had been described as a writer, as I recall.
"Canada can take credit. I had a great education there and good fun."
Anne Enright's comments have been edited for length and clarity.
