Family and Fiction: Anne Enright

[Music] good evening before we start I would like to acknowledge that we are meeting today on the traditional lands of the Kulin nation and pay my respects to their elders past and present my name is Pamela Paul and the editor of the New York Times Book Review and I am so pleased to introduce Ann Ann Wright she is the author of five novels including the Booker winning the gathering and most recently the green road which is the winner of the Irish novel of the year also the author of two story collections and a work of nonfiction making babies and she was the inaugural laureate for Irish fiction and thank you so much for being here thank you so the topic we're going to talk about tonight is family and fiction but before we go into that I thought and might read a passage from the green road ok joke yeah and yes I will just take this pieces about 6 minutes long and it's from the beginning of the book it is from Hannah the youngest she's 12 and it's from her point of view and it's just a family dinner I'm town it's 1980 town her eldest brother has has announced plans to become a priest which is called their mother much grief or some grief anyway no I've got the wrong page sorry about that and yeah he made the big announcement it's Sunday dinner which the Madigan's always did with the tablecloth and proper napkins no matter wash on that Sunday which was Palm Sunday they had bacon and cabbage with white sauce and carrots green white and orange like the Irish flag there was a little glass of parsley sitting on the tablecloth and the shadow of the water trembled in the sunshine their father folded his large hands and said grace after which there was silence apart from the general side of chewing that is and their father clearing his throat as he tended to do every minute or so the parents out at either end of the table the children along the sides girls facing the window boys facing the room Constance and Hana Emmett and Dan there was a fire in the grate and the son also Sean now and then so there were as warm as winter and warm as summer for five minutes at a time they were twice as warm dan said I have been speaking again of father fall it was April a dappled kind of day the clean light caught the drops on the windowpane and all their multiplicity while outside a thousand baby leaves unfurled against branches black with rain inside their mother had a tissue trapped in the palm of her hand she lifted it against her forehead oh no she said turning away and her mouth sag it opens so you could see the carrots he says I must ask you to think again that it's hard for a man who doesn't have his family behind him it's a big decision I'm making and he says I must ask you I must plead with you not to spoil us with your own feelings and concerns dan spoke as though they were in private or he spoke as though they were in a great hall but it was a family meal which was not the same as either of these things you could see their mother had an impulse to rise from the table but could not allow herself to flee he says I'm to ask her forgiveness for the life you'd hoped for me and the grandchildren you will not have Amos snorted into his dinner dan pressed his hands down on the tabletop before swiping out his little brother fast and hard their mother blanked for the blow like a horse jumping a ditch but Emmett ducked and after a long second she landed on the other side she put her head time as though to gather speed a moon came out of her small and unformed the sand of it seemed to please as well as surprised her so she tried again this next moon started soft and went long and there was a kind of speaking to its last rise and fall oh God she said she threw her head back and blinked at the ceiling once twice up there caught the tears started to run one on top of the last time to her hairline one two three four she stayed like that for a moment while the children watched and pretended not to be watching and her husband cleared his throat into the silence their mother lifted her hands and shook them free of her sleeves she wiped her wet temples with the heels of her hands and used her delicous crooked fingers to fix the back of her hair which she always wore in a chignon then she sat up again and looked very carefully at nothing she picked up a fork and stuck it into a piece of bacon and she brought it to her mouth with the touch of meat to her tongue undid her the fork swung back down towards her plate and the bacon fail her lips made that wailing shape touching in the middle and open at the sides what Dan liked to call her wide-mouthed frog look then she took a sharp inhale and went it seemed to her now her mother might stop eating or if she was that hungry she might take her plate and go into another room in order to cry but this did not occur to her mother clearly and she sat there eating and crying at the same time much crying little eating there was more work with the tissue which was now in shreds it was awful the pain was awful her mother juddering and sputtering at the carrots falling from her mouth in little lumps and piles Constance who is the eldest passed them all quietly about and they carried their plates and cups past their mother she dripped one way or another into her own food Obama said Constance leaning in with her arm about her to slip the place neatly away dan was the eldest boy so it was his job to cut the apple tart but she stood to do dark against the window lights with the silver triangle of the cake slice in his hand you can count me out I said their father who'd been playing in a tiny way with the handle of his teacup he got up and left the room and town said five so how am I going to do for life there were six Madigan's five was a whole new angle as he moved the cake slice through the ghost of across and then swung at 18 degrees to the side it was a prizing open of the relations between them it was a different story altogether as though there might be any number of Madigan's and out in the wide world any number of apple tarts their mother's crying turned to funny staggered inhalations well she dug him to her dessert with a small spoon and the children too were comforted by the pastry and by the woody sweetness of the old apples still there was no ice cream on offer that Sunday and none of them asked for it although they all knew there was some it was jammed into the icebox at the top right hand corner of the fridge [Applause] [Music] now we Americans always find it really depressing and dreadful to be on stage with someone who's Irish because we don't have that lovely lilt and I have a flat New York accent but I'll continue our subject is family and fiction and it's hard to think of a writer who has mined this area with more penetrating psychological insight and at the same time a gritty visceral detail then an and in the process I think you've also challenged the ideas the way in which family is treated in fiction and the assumptions about the way in which women in particular write about family and fiction and I'm curious do you think of family as your subject or as one of your subjects well I hadn't thought of family's my subject I roast the gathering and I thought I was writing about memory and imagination and how things become true I tie the past becomes true somehow of what we know or don't know about the past anyway I thought this is a very grand metaphysical subject and I was just writing the haggerty's there were 12 of them and I was a huge technical challenge but to me that was an existential problem that Veronica and The Gathering is born so arbitrarily she doesn't know why the hell Liam her brother in particular who's just died she doesn't know why he was there in the first place it just seemed that they were producing children because they'd nothing better to do or helplessly somehow so I was writing the haggerty's and they were all labelled Massey was a psychotic and there was it and it was the way that families talked about each other one way or the other and I to me they were just content they weren't really what the book was about they were just somehow not color quite but just content and I got a quite a strong response from readers I there were two kinds of readers of The Gathering one of them said when one woman said all my families in that book and there's only four of us and another one said well it's not like our family of course so there were there were two responses like so unlike the home life of her own dear cream and I realized that I had got something manat about family so much there's a there is a really strong under search of incest in the gathering I mean that that is part of the engine of the book you know and the avoidance or the aversion or the style of love that a brother and a sister might have you know so I knew that I was playing that line because that's what you know the Greeks did it's a very respectable line to play in fiction and so when I came to the Green Road sorry it's a long answer to I I decided that I would look at what people recognized in the family thing and I did look at structures and models for particular styles of families I suppose psychologically or whatever and the labeling and how people put get put in boxes a lot of my fiction is about people getting out of boxes so the roles that the kids are put in partly by the mother partly by each other they're all playing in Rosaline's inner drama anyway so they're trying to get out of whatever description Rosaline has made of them which is always vaguely disappointed description but it's interesting because in your novels you get the sense that you're never really free from your family that you know even Dan in the green road who goes off to New York and then Toronto and earnest in the gathering that they never are entirely free of those expectations on them both maternal and among their siblings yet tom is in New York and it comes he comes back to a new relationship in New York guy called Billy and he says putting you done was all about his pregnant sister is a martyred heir anyway he's very far away as far as he's concerned and he's gone and neither of the boys in the book the book is very much about leaving and coming home and neither of them spent a lot of time worrying about thinking about contacting or connecting with their family or particularly their mother it's just not it's just not their personal style or their social style constant stays at home and has just difficulties about it all but yeah damn Tomlin is averse to coming home because he feels he won't be understood which is pretty much all of us isn't it I mean the thing is though you walk back in to your family maybe or maybe not I think all families our old family is different I think when I think of my own family and people say constantly what should they think and are they worried and all the rest of us it took me a long while to realize that I write a kind of mythopoetic family it's not actually the people I see on Christmas Day or it's not really the same your fiction also seems to be about how much or how little we can know about each other even among family members that there is an idea that there's the concept we have of one another and then the reality and the conflicts between those yeah well very deliberately in this book we know an awful lot about each of the siblings before they meet up so the dialogue should have all of this knowledge you know when they start talking to each other we know what the subtext is somehow and we also know more about them than they know about each other and it is slightly to do with the incest taboo again because when we go out into the world one of the things we do is we make our own families and there's no there's pretty much only one way to do that you know sex is the way the families are made and that's not something that any family member wants to know anything about thank you very much but also under that kind of matern includes all kinds of senses of adventure and connection and not family that we're doing elsewhere and we can't you know you go back say oh this stuff and the other and and Wow and oh and oh dear and they you know that this have you turned to at the bathroom light or you're always like that and yet in the gathering a lot of what the framework is around about Veronica kind of trying to fill in the gaps about her grandparents to understand what it is that she doesn't know about Ada and about Charlie and lamb Nugent ins yeah her trying to imagine and then not knowing what the difference between what she's trying to conjure and what the reality is yeah I think in Veronica's case it's more of that idea of what what is the secret what is the secret is that a dark secret it is a dark secret in the in in the book as it as it as it translates through the generations and something about the grandparents generation makes that available to her that she can store a fire I mean we can make it into a story she make it into history she can put it into costume she can look at the old photograph somehow and make them move around and understand their story and describe it in a way that she wouldn't be able to do for her parents generation because her parents I just got kind of a question mark for her kind of a blur it's like in both of these books the your astonishingly familiar with your family your your you know the grain of their voice the sound of their footsteps the you're very physically aware of your families it's always a shock to see how old they've got but how you don't know them in in in there outside selves you know it's almost like they're totally familiar with who they were as children when you're growing up so that you're not ever able to fully see them as adults yeah or that familiarity is a kind of comfort and a drag at the same time that that's where you that's where you you live when you're together you're back in that zone to what extent do you think as you're writing about family specifically about the Irish family as opposed to about families in general I really don't know I mean I it depends on the the response I don't know does it depend on the tone or the culture but there are some countries where you go and people recognize it very strongly and you realize the world is constitutional families I mean maybe in Manhattan and London people don't have families I remember a guy in London said or maybe they do and they you know they just left them just left them back yeah but at this guy in London he said I'm not going home for Christmas I hate my family oh there's polish I mean one is hating them got to do with this of course I mean like Wow where is in Ireland they absolutely know you know it doesn't matter what you think your your home one way or the other is partly because the island is so small and they but also I think is very strongly part of the migrant an emigrant story so that people not being able to come back for Christmas or not being able to come back at key moments or being able to come back so that the family in the Irish context is the thing that is left as as as a sorrowful connection or a sorrowful thing and and so that somehow makes the family even more iconic than the Catholic Church already does you know so it is the iconic unit and it is I think the strongly functioning social unit in Ireland I mean families are very tight and Ireland you really do stick by your family one way or the other I think I wonder is your Irish readership in a way more exacting and terms of their expectations of your depiction of the Irish family as opposed to you know people from New York or Australia who might just think well that's how they are in Ireland um well I don't know I think readers tend to psychologize hugely and they're always drawing connections between your characters whether you've done it are looking for reasons or complaining about what they do or they don't do the writer is more interested in structures and shapes and other kinds of dynamics you know they're interesting what kind of pot you can put it in you know so I don't get huge amounts of but the other thing the Irish readership is very silent I remember our to be gathering was finished I went turned to the school and this woman looked at me in the Leena as we called was the line gone into the bring the small kids into the classroom and she just looked at me I said what should I do to her and I realized oh she's read the book but she made this particularly that nobody would ever say Jesus 68-63 I mean there might be a little bit of like oh well now but but but where it's it's almost a sanctioned space the book always has been this in Ireland it is a place where anything can be said you know going back to Ulysses and all the rest of it but poor poor poor Jimmy drove her poor choice poor Joyce's family I mean I was weird hearing that poor poor James Joyce's sister who worked with my granny poor woman a lot of your writing about family a lot of writing about family in general not yours seems strangely divorced from its starting point which is to say it's sex and you seem in your writing to thwart that deliberately is that is that a conscious thing that just - I mean your your books are about family but they're they they're also about sex yeah you write a lot about sort of the tensions and the overlap between familial love and sexual yeah Atlantic love I mean I think what I said earlier that families are made by sex this is one of the great Forgotten mysteries I mean it's the it's the kind of and also really weirdly I mean that that we kind of chase away from reproduction in you when you think about sex you might think about you know in this kind of age of pornographic anxiety we think that sex is something about bikinis or something but it's not it's actually about producing children but it's actually what it's about we spent an immense amount of time not saying that avoiding that certainly in in media terms and you know you you'd you'd be hard-put to put the whole picture together it's like it's it's like we're all somehow children that sex is ooh this yeah well actually it's it's how you got onto the planet so I am interested in how we the difference between I'm interested or I'm slightly burdened by in in order my characters are burdened by loving people loving people loving people that's it it's it's you know loving you don't choose your family you love your family and what's like what's that about okay what why do you why do you not have a choice and how do you how do you manage that love and also you love your children and they love you and that's seems to me both glorious and doom they really don't have a choice and you really don't have a choice and you have a choice the only one you have a choice about is your romantic partner that's the only love that you choose or don't choose I see maybe there's a lot more of the biological love in the world and there is romantic love if you know I mean genetic love than there is sexual love and you wouldn't know that looking at the newspapers either what's the most challenging thing about capturing family the way families really operate in a novel I don't really bother about us really I mean I just I mean because in the gathering it was completely unintended I didn't set out to do anything I think mostly I'm setting out to do something else and I use the characters along the way do you have a challenge for yourself do you set yourself some kind of challenge with each novel yet sort of I think I think when you're sitting down you're always three or four years older than the last time you started a book right so the challenge is to partly know where your ass a little bit I think you do have to own the change of whatever you know experience you're your own changing so for the chant your own mutability somehow and then you're also you've got a new set of problems in your head and you're asking new questions of life and and you only know what the question is when you finish the book can be undone but when I'd finished this book the green road I recognized that the question was somehow about compassion and I've been thinking about people you know you're thinking about people and get deep so there's a kind of gossipy level of challenge and when I said why is it that people who are unhappy people who are happier people who are looking after other people and if you're unhappy it makes you quite selfish and being selfish makes you unhappy so it's a kind of a self-enclosed kind of thing and so that was one of that was one of the questions I had been asking but more or a or more creatively I had the book a sense of space I had a sense of geography so that was the challenge I set myself as about places did you actually go to Mali for example it was it was it Molly Molly yeah and I mean you captured these eras for those who haven't read the novel there's a big section in New York in the early 90s that was very specific to that time in place and the gay community during the AIDS crisis at that time and then the period in Mali did you do a lot of research I did a huge amount of research for the epidemics because I thought I was gonna write about a human I don't know what I thought I was doing there's always about three books that fall away you know so I thought I was gonna write this I was really interested in the aid and humanitarian community partly because it's a missionary tradition in Ireland and I know people who who had joined the missions as priests and nuns had gone away and I also know people still to this day there's always if there's a famine there's an Irish person there handing out the the high protein bars and whatever else that you know there is an Irish tradition and I was looking interested in the paths that people took that or not they classically done New York Boston London Australia Australia debt so I was looking at other other trails that Irish people make through the world and I can't remember the question it's like versus jet like lagging off now you know it was yes no no you got so yes I had search it was research yeah the question I tried lurch and stumble through various science including Melbourne in 2008 I at the end of the year I went to Uganda to do a piece for The Guardian about they've done a year-long observation of a community in northern Uganda coca tini and although I'm hugely interested in this subject I find I couldn't read any of the articles and I thought how do you make people interested in this that was a one challenge also the aid community doesn't isn't very open doesn't talk about what's going on it doesn't talk about what them the money goes to arms or wherever because they want the money to keep coming in so there's a kind of piety to the discourse they're all in very short come short term contracts although that was huge I thought anyway I went to Uganda and instead of talking about myself I was looking around and I was incredibly nourished by it it was it was just terrific not to be in a hotel somewhere and not talking about myself at night it's just great and I thought well that's interesting so I did and and and a few few I did a few I went to Honduras for another article about land tenure there it's a very tough part of the world and so I met hugely interesting people and I wanted to I mean amic doesn't honor them he's a chilly bastard really a mess you know yeah yeah it's it's sort of the least empathetic character yeah he's the he's the most morally good I mean yeah when we talk about challenges in the novel I thought you were going to bring up structure you alluded to you a little bit earlier but the structure of the novel is for really interesting and that you begin with the family together and then you do sort of leap forward in time and place where you have a chapter devoted to each of the characters and then I'm not going to give away the ending don't worry but then you they reunite and they do for Christmas yeah but then you don't do the obvious thing and then there and then it then it continues in the same time and in the same place after that sort of mementos yeah yeah I mean this structure is imperfect in the book and I sometimes a writer will realize with great relief that they can just write a book that takes place in 24 hours or wouldn't that be wonderful and they have a structure and they but this structure was slightly grown in the dark as I grow grow my books like mushrooms in the dark and so this the structure made itself may made itself apparent I had been thinking as I said geographically and I also had to have a another access over time so each of these sections takes place essentially in a different place and so as I say I don't it's a bit flawed I quite like that it's a bit hard because it it's wrong for a reason that made it made its own demands dan leaves not just that dinner table not just Ireland and not just his mother but he leaves the book for 60 pages you know or 50 pages and that was that seemed to be necessary and right to me but also each of those sections people say are they like short stories but but in fact they're like different languages to me a little bit but I don't know if but I didn't make that foreground though it's interesting that you that you say that it's flawed because to me the structure felt like a metaphor for the way in which families operate because you you have everyone go off and then you have them come back together and in the old-fashioned novel it would have sort of all been tied together neatly with a bow at that point where everything is kind of resolved and you have this sort of this again I'm not going to reveal the ending but a semi resolution there and then it goes on and the families continue on even after you have a major event yes it's bit like life yet so you want the book to be a bit you know I mean you could say postmodern by saying these these these sections come out of essentially different novels and each each character has their own novel but you could also say it's more like life than like a book at the end I want to go back to the idea about compassion and empathy in what ways is the book really about compassion well each when I finished the book my editor said that each of the characters faces mortality but I had thought that each of them faces a challenge to their camp and then I thought well maybe that's the same thing in some way that Dan in New York he's surrounded by amazing far too interesting times he's living through in in New York and there's an invitation there to him to step up and he doesn't really take it and you don't really blame him either at the end of the chapter the the narrator the choral narrator says you know these things are hard these things are hard so you don't really judge him he's just wasn't in a place where he could look after other people then Constance does nothing but look after other people she stays at home and looks after other people and then at the end of her section there's a kind of thing where she just feels terrible about this poor woman that she wasn't brilliant to in the in the queue in a hospital auntie she and not being good releases the kind of sense of abandonment I think it's the only place the word abandonment is used in the novel so why is a good Constance it's it doesn't come from an easy place for her it comes from a place of self-denial and and difficulty it comes from and that's how she fixes her life but pay not about solution and so and then a mess is good he's good but he doesn't love anyone it's an interesting the other thing that I found is a mess yeah that you play with is you you constantly up and expectations in this novel so it's a situation where you you think something's going to happen and then something else happens and it's so with with Dan you think Dan's gonna get AIDS and then you think with Constance she's gonna get cancer in the there's an early scene I think one of the best see is in the waiting room a breast cancer clinic and and you think okay know what's gonna happen and then it doesn't happen and then later on there's a scene with the mother where you think okay I know there's something terrible is going to happen it Hannah in the in the first so you know she's gonna times a star on the floor you have scenes where you think someone's on the brink and then they're not that's very well observed well yes I mean if you look at this stories of Alice Monroe they haven't got a gothic element and the wonderful thing at the end of the stories is of things happen to be all it's okay so these fears and threads and events and and and and near misses or nearly something that occasionally in Alice Monroe like terrible things do happen but mostly people come through and so I am interested in those fantasies of mere just you know that we liver every every you know every so often or maybe even daily we think of some disaster worst case scenario this yeah dystrophic thinking yeah your tone well I mean you you you travel and you think your children are going to die but you know but here we all are everything's fine I'm gonna go back to 2004 the subject here is fiction and family but I want to turn to nonfiction and to book he wrote back then called making babies and you had written a couple of novels and short story collections before writing that book why did you turn to memoir to write about motherhood this is a book I wrote when I thought I had no readers no readers at all and and if I thought I was gonna get some readers I wouldn't have told them all of that stuff she because too much information making babies too much information I wrote it I was sparked into writing it by an editor in Dublin of the Dublin or dinkler Brenton Barrington Lisa will you write this story of of Rachel my daughter's birth and I said oh okay and I I had been online when I was waiting for labor and all of that kind saying those long nights during cheek sellers and okay going online and reading people's accounts at their labor and there was quite interesting as a kind of way that women were talking and they were talking online and they were writing a Kant and clearly was really important these are really important it's it's that birthdays of course I was important as writing about a deaf you know it's it's like big stuff and that and it's not you know and it's not something that you talk about at the bus stop over some people do yeah but online where and I was wondering how bad it's gonna be how good anyway so I was interested in this forum which was a popular form and then this editor is an American and has a very particular idea of what nonfiction is I think quite a New York idea of what nonfiction is and so I could I could I could I could see the piece that I would write for the Dublin review and it was the first piece in that periodical and a woman came up to me afterward late much later and she was crying and she said I read that piece and I thought I've never made anyone cry not that I know of and so that's very interesting so I thought and then and then so the book grew from there I mean I make more people cry yeah in a good way I think you know there was a very high rate that very high rate letter to the Guardian that was complaining that I hadn't had a miscarriage and who was writing about birth because they thought that things something dreadful is going to happen in this narrative that's what they wanted but her why why else would you read it why we else would anyone write about her pregnancy unless it was going to end terribly anyway there was a baby who's just lovely did you find there were there were things that you could ways that you could write about motherhood things you could say and nonfiction that were not as accessible and no I think the in fiction is where you could really go to the dark side you know that is and certainly with Hannah I did quite a lot at us and in fact nonfiction writing about these human beings there was a kind of poets impulse but if you're going to write about people you're gonna enhance them in some way I mean you're gonna love them the book is full of complaints and stupidities and all kinds of banging arm but there is as I was typing a sense that I was it was I was loving these people rather than exposing them lots of people feel when you write about them in print you know I want to talk for a second about Hannah before going back to making babies you just said that you know Hannah is I mean there's a kind of very brutal depiction of motherhood and of the contradictions between sort of maternal love and maternal resentment and even perhaps darker than that yeah bit darker cuz uh uh Hama isn't really getting the love thing I don't think she's not that aspect of it and it's it's really interesting because whenever I'm on a pub in a public forum people ask me about constants image and time and they never ask about how long you like that IIIi I said to one person what about Hannah he said we get to Hannah in a minute so this is a rare thing that I'm asked about Hannah and because I mean all of Hannah's issues with all of Rosaleen's Rosalina's you know all of you know you're endlessly disappointed in her children and she's quite self-involved and and and but not full of self knowledge but all of that anyway this thought that all comes out in Hannah when she has a baby herself so all her issues are writ large or they become really really impossible and big for her further for that time so and you know there are funny little things about Hana that are usually said about men she feels really yeah that yeah it's quite an extreme situation of ambivalence ya know the baby yeah I'm not to give the plant away but she's in extreme in I do remember actually being very sick and lying on the sofa and my ass was completely happy sitting there in her nappy and I'm completely happy and I thought I could die but just because I'm here and I'm not moving you're happy when I got up and my right to make a cup of tea be like where are you where so that is much more extremely done with her lap because she's in extremists and the baby is just really pleased to see her and so she doesn't say what about me but there are those feelings are there I don't know if it's resentment of the baby that it's more I have to look at it again there to be honest because I never really talked about it and yeah the things that mothers aren't supposed to say you know about about their babies and their feelings towards them the baby is let off fairly lightly in this you know she does she manages not to be um not to focus on her her negativity on the actual baby and it's interesting though because you must see Han as a central figure because it starts as novel starts off with her yeah now reading it and then yeah is the last one of the siblings that you can't yeah and I was really sad I mean there are meant that I really wanted the women in this book to have a better time I really wanted that to happen and it's based in 2005 and there are all kinds of things you think well social shifts of whatever possibilities and I wanted them to have a better time but just the fact of Rosaline and dalmatic it's just the way it was I couldn't spring them into a better life they were they were one way or the other that the the failures of Rosaline's mothering where writ large one way or the other I mean it Constance has a good enough time it sounds like the characters kind of get away from you in a way that they they're from your original intention wait you get yeah I thought dinner table that I read it's all pretty much there Emmett's cynicism Tom's fakery Rosaline's self dramatizing Constance doing the dishes which she does for the rest of her life never start as I don't tell my children and aunt Hana and that gaze that she has of the mother crying and the tears that's quite a stunned gaze and you think well that's quite a creative artistic gaze it's quite it's just quite tranced by it all so there's two ways it could go I mean she would end up using it an integrating as an and or it could just fall apart for and it does fall apart now I don't think Hannah's going to I think in the long term she's going to be alright put it that way going back to making babies for a second you said at the time and another interview that you sort of turned the problem in your life the baby is the problem and the joy in your life your real life into a solution in your writing life yeah I thought that was really interesting and I'm wondering if with this novel was there something that you were grappling with or thinking about that you sort of tried to resolve oh yeah I mean I have a little rule that the problem is the solution when I got pregnant an older novelist idea I've never said this before said oh well that'll soften your cough eyes in you'll never write another book hahahahaha so now every time I finish a book I have a memorial cough and you know the feeling that I wouldn't write again so I realized that the only solution was to write about the babies so yeah so that that problem is that problem of compassion was real to me in when I started this book about about how unhappiness about unhappiness that's that was the problem but the unhappiness that I saw another people my own unhappiness how how how that broken open or how you get out of the circle of us and having all my work I think being interested in the circumference of the self people you know particularly from the first person point of view in the Forgotten walls and the gathering and the limit and of solipsism and what you can see and what you yeah so I needed and wanted to break out of a sense of self from the book and that's one of the reasons that it's in for second sections at the beginning hmm I have about 15 other questions for you but I'm going to restrain myself from selfishly taking up the rest of the time and turn it over to our audience so if any of you have any questions there are people coming around with microphones just indicate to them hi you you said that henna will do well which presumably means you really are involved in this family is there a risk of a sequel or perish the thought of prequel a prequel actually I know loads about Rosaline's parents and Pat Madigan's parents who were on opposite sides in the Civil War and apart madigan one of his relatives to the story was that he was shot and the chemist wouldn't treat him pull down the blinds so I could write that but other people have written that book everything so I have there's a lot that I've taken out of the book both pre and post this is what you're getting that'd be enough I'm turning back to the gathering could you talk a little bit about the haunting in the book and the presence of the ghosts and the dead and how that might parallel in your own life in my own life it might parallel more properly in my own sentences as in some of the ghosts and the gathering are just things and sent the way the sentence goes you know general mean it's just like a statement of something that is imagined or like a poet might sometimes say this is in the room and you know it's not in the room there's some of them are like that they're just metaphorical and some of the ghosts in the gathering are about the thing that has never been said and that the ghosts in the room is the elephant in the room there are and some of it is about things that won't light won't die because because because of it because they aren't known or resolved so there are a lot of different style of ghosts in the gathering my own life isn't so I can't remember the word what would you call it if you're really inclined hi I just like to ask you what you think it is about an Irish family that can tell its story to such a universal audience well some of part of me says well why do we have to why are they we the only ones who have mothers well why do we have to have mothers for everyone because of course everyone it comes from a family that's one of the or some style of a family or not tragically you know I mean everyone has family in mind somehow but I don't know why the Irish maybe that I don't know I mean I was talking to an audience in Dublin before I had finished as I was finishing the borough's I was writing the book and I was avoiding like crazy the idea that it would all happen over Christmas dinner I was really as an account to this now I just can't I mean I had been avoiding bargain filled for the first half of the book and on encase succumbed to bargain fields and I said no I'm not going so far as Christmas and then I realized that everybody in the audience is going home in a month's time exactly was in November and they were all going back to their Christmas and it's just true it's just true of how how we conduct ourselves somehow I don't know the answer back in the 80s I read a book called moral and monopoly by Tom somebody or other I can't remember his surname but in that book there was a chapter on the Irish mother and the effect that the Catholic Church had on the Irish mother the control the Catholic Church had over the Irish mother I was wondering in view of the debate that's going on at the moment about the maternity hospital in Dublin whether or not the Catholic Church's in the last throes of controlling the Irish mother I was just remembering the other just a travelling here people like me if somebody had asked me I was in Auckland and somebody was asking about reproduction and over reproduction over production and I remember women of my mother's generation saying of a small family of the road he only gave her two so so it wasn't all imposed put it that way but there was you know I remember other stories as well as you may well imagine and the maternity hospital story is a really astonishing thing that's happening in Dublin at the moment where the Sisters of Charity are going to be given ownership of the new Maternity Hospital who these women are I don't know they just took a I don't know if they're qualified right anyway they've been running hospitals in Ireland since the year Dalton saying things like now you're paying for your minutes pleasure that's one one quote and actually they're not so active in Hollister E but a friend of mine had a baby in Hollis Street five years ago the lovely Lawrence and she asked a medical question in her at Halle Street and was said told to put her trust in the Blessed Mother I mean the wrong person to say it about - so it just drags on in the most amazing way in the most amazing rate man and this is because of land ownership contractual legal just in the most astonishing you tenacious way and you realize the Catholic Church thinks in terms of a thousand years so how we all feel about them at the minute not brilliantly doesn't matter damn so they'll hang on to every single last brick it's really interesting how a society can change and not change at the same time it's one of the things that and the layers of change and and where things Lodge and things Lodge in documents about land and all that can just carry on it's a great idea I must put it to sister Agatha one of the people who actually runs that hospital new you can see he can Google all of them and he won't find a picture but they wouldn't want to photographs no accountability nothing no transparency no no hello and actually I'm going to get my daughter to join the Sisters of Charity and so that when they all die she's gonna own Ireland sorry I'm I'm over here I'm interested in your development as a writer could you take us through a potted history or decline perhaps [Laughter] poverty well I always wrote and I'm still tarnish and yeah I wrote bad poetry at school and then I wrote a fragment I was quite interested in at college and then I tried to write a proper story and I and I really failed as writing a proper story for a long time and that was a third person past tense narrative and then I wrote some bits and bobs and went and did an MA in creative writing in the University of East Anglia where I didn't write anything and then came home and wrote four stories in a row and they were published then I got a job in Orkney by accident six years in television production and then I went full time in 1993 and with great pain anxiety and and difficulty produce two novels then I had kids and I didn't care anymore and I just started typing do you think there are any differences between Irish Catholic families and Protestant families chutney has water bottles that's a terrible thing to say about Protestants take it all back I know Protestant family were very wealthy and they had 11 children in the last generation because they were in love and anyway there was a difference on the road where I grew up there were three Protestant families about 42 Catholic families and one Jewish family and the Protestant families limited the size of limited the number of their children in mysterious ways and I mean do tribally speaking their word the people did sense whether they exist or not differences and I would be reluctant to over overindulge that tribalism if you know what I mean does that make sense but the hot water brothers are fabulous and the chutney number I I don't mean to be rude by mentioning another writer but I wonder whether you've read Jonathan Franzen or talk to you about mothers and Families that's a really widely interesting question because ie you're now gonna get me to admit though I haven't read Jonathan Franzen I started skimmed and like had a good smell at the book and I I checked vidiq the Christmas oh yeah no that's all right yeah nobody told Jonathan Franzen I think it survived who do I read who do I read and well I always read Alice Munro and at the moment of reading or have been reading these young American chicks who writes whatever that they they won't like when Miranda July and Maggie Nelson and who else Rachel Kushner and I'm enjoying the hold go with them I'm just the energy and the kind of intellectual risk and determination that's involved I like all that that and so I'm reading Tolstoy confessions but that's only because I have to and yeah iiiii don't talk about my real reading much because there's so much reading you do professionally and I only realize why I'm really reluctant about now because I have this is the this is only true my mother taught me to read when I was three and I and this was discovered on the road where I grew up and there was performance reading was obliged of me the neighbors for bringing out the books and say read that read that man just three she's three so when I'm asked about what I'm reading I it feels like performance reading as opposed to that very kind of close what must have been very lovely real reading that I was doing with my mother so so I'm a bit weird in neurotic now and I know it's taken me like 20 years to know that enough to say it I used to just and think yes I'm going well I do go back to priest I am going back to priest yes it's really hard to determine what influences I mean some of the things that were available to me as a young person we're just you wouldn't claim them as influences I mean things like Yeats I can't say Yates is an influence that it to me that's a whole kind of game of claiming that the boys do and I don't do it much you know oh I was seriously influenced by a by Joyce but I live in the shadow of Joyce and blah blah blah blah oh yeah I love Joyce lovely love Joyce but not Dubliners I thought it was really boring and now I think it's wonderful so it books change over the years I liked Nabokov a one-stage my god we are completely out of time alas so a big hand to and and write thank you thank you very much thanks visit wheeler center.com for the best in books writing and ideas from Melbourne Australia and the world [Music]

Channel: WheelerCentre

Views: 2,589

Rating: 4.8000002 out of 5

Keywords: Anne Enright, Pamela Paul, New York Times Book Review, Literature, Irish literature, Love, Family, Ireland, Irish, Fiction, The Green Road, Christmas, Fiction Laureate of Ireland, Man Booker PRize, The Gathering, Relationships, Wheeler Centre, Conversation

Id: wDpu5B-Gntc

Length: 59min 39sec (3579 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 06 2017