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Anne Enright: ‘A lot of bad things happen to women in books. Really a lot’

She began a novel about the dark side of Hollywood – and then the Weinstein scandal broke. The Booker-winner on mothers, marriage and misogyny

When Anne Enright began writing her latest novel Actress in 2016, a story of the dark side of showbusiness with a full cast of sleazebags and sexual predators, she felt that she “was breaking some kind of news”. Then came the Harvey Weinstein scandal. Ever since her 2007 Booker-winning novel The Gathering, which touched on sexual abuse in Ireland, she “has been interested in things that are barely spoken or taboo”. But now, “what went on in Hollywood” was finally being talked about. “It is really interesting how the tide rises,” she says. “I was one of the many boats on this rising tide.”

In Katherine O’Dell, her fictional fallen star of stage and screen, all “mad green eyes”, cigarettes and secret shame, Enright has created a heroine as irresistible to the reader as to her audiences and hangers-on, “a great Irish Disaster”. Narrated by O’Dell’s daughter, a writer, looking back to Ireland in the 1970s, Actress covers familiar Enright territory: tricky mothers, a dark period in her country’s history, sex and marriage (the narrator’s domestic contentment is set against the violence and shabby romances of her mother’s past). Enright had been promising to write her “theatre book” for years, drawn to “that nostalgia, that slightly tawdry, slightly worn-out, hopeful, foolish thing. I always loved all of that.” She was a professional actor “for at least six months” after leaving college. “I loved backstage.” She wanted to capture what she calls “the moment of glamour”, which is also a “pang of loss. The moment you see that something is beautiful is the moment it starts to recede from you, or you see that you don’t have it. It’s somehow unreachable.”

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from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/32xRnCA
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