Interview by Elizabeth Day 

Anne Enright: ‘Love is a great punishment for desire’

The Booker-winning Irish novelist talks to Elizabeth Day about infidelity, Ireland's financial crisis and combining writing with motherhood
  
  

anne enright
'Obsessive": Anne Enright at home in Bray, near Dublin. Photograph: Eamonn Mccabe Photograph: Eamonn Mccabe/Eamonn McCabe

The Forgotten Waltz is about the damage wreaked by infidelity and the tricky relationship between a young girl, Evie, her father, Sean, and her father's lover, Gina. Some scenes between Evie and Gina can make for uncomfortable reading. Were you worried about this?

I thought I was going a bit hard on the whole scenario but then I looked up "smoms.org". It was full of American stepmothers of unknown provenance complaining about their stepchildren, and I realised I wasn't being too harsh at all.

Comparisons have been drawn with classics such as Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina. Did you consciously decide to write along these lines?

I think when you take any theme, you do look at precedents, and both Bovary and Anna are precedents of stories of women being unfaithful. Yes, you look at the tradition, and you realise that women who deviate from the traditional course end up dead – until about 1975 maybe. I was looking for a more interesting punishment than death, and I thought that love is a great punishment for desire.

In all of your books, you weave through the serious issues – infidelity, abuse, alcoholism, violence – with threads of humour. It's a delicate balance. Do you have to work at it?

I work at the sentences. Many of the things people find distinctive about my writing, I think of as natural. In fact, you'd have to point a finger and say, "Why has that writer not got a sense of humour?" Why are we not amazed by these humourless books? What are they trying to do by eliminating the natural sap that rises, the natural pleasure that we get, particularly if we're dealing with words?"

What is the funniest book you've read?

I remember being on a beach in Crete, laughing so loud at JG Farrell's Troubles, sitting there in my suntan lotion, with all these German families looking at me.

One of your teachers on your creative writing MA course at the University of East Anglia was Angela Carter. What was she like?

Wonderfully vague and terribly impressive. She was very friendly but she had nothing, really, to say about my work.

You won the Booker in 2007 for The Gathering. Did you find that level of acclaim exposing?

I don't know what I felt. I still don't know what I feel. I feel a bit bored being asked about it all the time but that's not your fault. The Booker is more interesting from the outside than the inside. The idea of success is just that – an idea.

The Forgotten Waltz is set against the backdrop of the financial crisis in Ireland…

I was saddened by what happened. There was no schadenfreude in it. We could see it was coming. It's interesting to live in a fantasy and to think: how do you write fiction when you're living in it? I always write to and about Ireland but, for the first time with this book, I couldn't avoid this subject. It was just there, in the weather, a feeling, in every house, and I knew I was going to get it into the work somehow.

You once wrote: "Only bad writers think their work is really good." Are you ever satisfied with what you've written?

It's satisfying as it's happening: that moment of getting something down. You're looking for a way to say something, and you've finally managed it. But that emotion doesn't necessarily last very long. The better book is always the one you're going to do next. I'm wary, too, of giving too much credence to the emotions we have about our work. Flaubert is long dead, and whatever he says about Emma Bovary doesn't matter because there she is. Our grandiosities as writers die with us, thank God.

What is your writing routine?

When I'm working I'm not so much disciplined as obsessive. I have this feeling that I need to clear everything away and get this down. For 10 or 11 years, I had my kids, I wrote four or five books, and I was working all the damn time.

Do your children (nine and 11) write?

They're interested in what they're interested in. They're like two big dogs you see dragging little old ladies across a park. They have many enthusiasms: with my daughter it's mostly films, drawing and visual but my son writes stories. You have to stand back and admire.

I remember when my son was small, before the dawn of language, finding him sitting up in his nappy in front of my computer, watching a DVD, and he turned to me and said, "I click." I was trying to teach my father about the computer and he was in his 70s. And there was this child saying, "I click." Amazing.

 

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