Readers Place

Anne Enright interview/review

An interview from The Book Depository by Mark Thwaite:

1. What gave you the idea for The Gathering?

A book needs more than one idea – it is when two ideas collide that you start writing. Having said that, I have no real clue as to what those ideas were. I have a fragment of an early short story that turns into the character of Nugent in the book. I have a lot of research about the Irish anti-prostituion movement, that just got dumped. And I have a first chapter that just wrote itself – the whole Hegarty family seem to have walked into my head unannounced.

1. How long did it take you to write The Gathering , Anne?

When I check my computer files they go from November 2003 to May 2006 so that’s two and a half years – which is about standard for me.

1. What does it mean to you to be longlisted for the Booker Prize?

People love the Booker tag. The response is so direct and immediate – really different from the usual slow, quite vague reaction an author gets for a book. It’s a bit like getting married, actually – the way it gives people an excuse to be nice to the couple, even if they’ve been co-habiting for years.

1. Do you read the critics? Have you been pleased with the response to your work? Have you learned anything from it or changed the way you write?

The critics have been either really enthusiastic, or in some cases quite averse. Some of them are plainly unsettled or disgusted by the sexual content. I should worry about this, but it just makes me wonder what they do on a Friday night. And do they ever talk about it afterwards?

1. Why do you think miserable domestic dramas are so popular?

There is something about fiction that allows us to wallow a little. My essays about motherhood (in Making Babies ) are full of the joys as well as the shocks of having children. The short stories I write about mothers, on the other hand, are quite bleak. I think fiction gives you a space in which to keen a little. It is the intellectual equivalent of crying at a Hollywood weepy – very satisfying. Besides, domestic misery is, one way or another, something we have all been through.

1. You write short stories as well as novels. What do you like best about each form?

I like living in a novel – there is great company in it, for the few years it is in your head, and I feel a real sense of loss when I come to the end. Short stories are, for me, a more instinctive form. They come or they don’t come, and I don’t spend lots of time figuring them out.

1. How do you write? Longhand or directly onto a computer, straight off or with lots and lots of editing?

I write on to a computer – I like the rhythm of the keyboard – and I draft and redraft endlessly. It always amuses me when people say ‘I did six drafts’. How can they draw a line, six times, and call those pages ‘a draft’. The book never becomes a stable object for me – if I had the chance now I would rewrite again.

1. What do you do when you are not writing?

I look after the kids, I suppose. If they’re asleep I might go online. It’s a glamorous life.

1. Did you have an idea in your mind of your ‘ideal’ reader? Did you write specifically for them?

The reader in my head is just someone I like; a friend I haven’t met yet. The main feeling is one of complicity; I feel sure that they will enjoy what I enjoy, sympathise at the narrator’s woes, get the jokes.

1. What are you working on now?

I just put the final polish on a collection of short stories called Taking Pictures , which will be out next May. After that, my mind is a perfect blank.

1. Do you have any tips for the aspiring writer?

A successful writer did not write the book you open in the shop. The successful writer wrote about sixteen crap books, and kept working them, and rearranging them until one less crap book was born. Never look at your work and despair – this is hard, it takes nerves of steel – look at your work and then work at it.