Actress: A Novel

"Yes. The cover [of the British edition] is a picture of Carrie Fisher watching her mother, Debbie Reynolds. I think they chose that cover because it was so apt for the book, in which a middle-aged woman talks about the life of her mother, who was an actress. The characters had a strange relationship. And there’s a lot of what we would definitely call sexual harassment now, but which then was just passed off almost as a rite of passage. It’s mostly set in the mother’s lifetime—born in 1932, and going up to the present day, when her mother dies. It is just the most beautifully written story about this extraordinary character, who goes mad in the end. It’s told in such a clever way. “Anne Enright was briefly an actress. She performs this book so brilliantly” She would have had her day in Hollywood in the mid-1940s, or thereabouts but mostly she was on stage, doing Shakespeare and Ibsen and Chekhov. I worked in the theatre myself—I was a theatre stage manager for 15 years—so I know the acting world really well. And I think that this book, in particular, spoke to me because of that. I listened to it on audio; Anne Enright narrates the book herself. She was briefly an actress a long time ago. She hasn’t lost any of her ability. She performs this book so brilliantly. It’s so credible. It reads like a true account. I certainly recognise references to characters and real people in the book, who would have been on the Irish theatrical scene throughout those decades. It’s just a joy of a book. And it’s funny in a dark way. It juxtaposes hilarity with tragedy. I highly recommend it. People sometimes think that Booker Prize-winning writers are going to be difficult. But there’s nothing difficult about this. It’s a really enjoyable, straightforward read. There is no highfalutin vocabulary. It’s just a really enjoyable, fantastic, lovely book."