Actress by Anne Enright

In the fall of 2015 Anne Enright appeared at The Festival of Authors Parry Sound. For me, it was one of the highlights of all the years that we have been presenting authors in Parry Sound. Anne Enright has won many literary awards including The Man Booker Prize, and the Whitbread Novel Award, and was appointed Ireland’s first Fiction Laureate.

With many award-winning earlier novels and volumes of stories under her belt, her newest work of fiction is Actress. The narrator is Norah FitzMaurice, the daughter of Katherine O’Dell, a woman who was once an actress known the world around. Norah is an author who has written many books but never the one she “needed to write, the one that was shouting out to be written, the story of my mother and of Boyd O’Neill’s wound.” 

The book that Norah now writes is not just about Boyd O’Neill’s wound, which was the result of Katherine shooting him – by mistake? – in the foot, but all of the story of Katherine and Norah and their life together, from the moment of each of their births, to the death of Katherine in Norah’s middle age. Not many of our lives would be anything like theirs, but women are all daughters and mothers are always mothers, and the connection between them is both wonderful and heart breaking.  We read of Norah’s love for her mother, from the time she was born - as a young girl, a teenager, a young woman, and then a mature woman herself. We also read of Katherine’s love for her daughter. All of this taking place through the years of Katherine’s success, when her beauty and talent were at their height in the theatre in Ireland and England, and in film in the United States. Years of bounty and adoration, followed by years of decline.

The identity of Norah’s father was a secret known only to her mother. Norah wonders and sometimes imagines who he night have been, and this mystery is central to the novel and to Norah’s life for many years. As is Norah’s long marriage, the security and love found over so many years of adulthood, after a bohemian and ramshackle childhood.

There are so many wonderful conversations between Katherine and Norah, one of my favourite is the advice given when a boyfriend disappoints, “Oh dear, oh never mind. There’ll be more, darling. There will be another one along in a while”.

And so very touching are the final years, and then days, in Katherine’s life as Norah cares for her. A mother who “was always the same person for me”, a woman who no one else knows as well as her daughter, regardless of her fame.

There is no doubt that Anne Enright is the finest of novelists. Reading Actress re-affirms my belief that reading fiction is truly one of the most pleasurable things in life.