Anne Enright

Presenter0:01

BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts. Hello, I'm Lauren Laverne, and this is the Desert Island Discs Podcast. Every week, I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks, book, and luxury they'd want to take with them if they were cast away to a desert island. For rights reasons, the music is shorter than the original broadcast. I hope you enjoy listening.

Presenter0:42

My castaway this week is the author Anne Enright. Irish culture and identity are rich veins in her work, along with family, sex, the body and motherhood. And these threads are part of a larger tapestry, exploring universal questions about human nature and exposing sometimes uncomfortable truths. In 2015, she became the inaugural laureate for Irish fiction, the public face of her home country's literary life. They could hardly have picked a better candidate to represent the complexity of contemporary Ireland. Early on in her career, she decided that she could write about anything because, as she put it, nobody who considered themselves a keeper of the canon would hear it. It didn't quite work out that way. Her novel The Gathering won her the Booker Prize. She says, The periphery has always been the more interesting place for me. I didn't quite fit, and that suited me. I never wanted to be mainstream as a writer, but look what's happened. Anne Enright, welcome to Desert Island Discs. Thank you very much, Lauren. Your writing is often about change. Why is it so important to you to look forward to

Anne Enright1:44

I can't tell you how much I hate conservative work and how prof you know how hard it is sometimes for people to spot that actually a lot of people are working in nostalgic or they're chipping away making something that that that is almost dead. You know, I like the work to live, I like the work to be flawed, I like it to engage and put people off even. I like it to be busy somehow.

Presenter2:09

Yeah.

Anne Enright2:10

Uh

Presenter2:10

Good that you have

Anne Enright2:10

A talent for scenting Yeah.

Presenter2:11

Yeah.

Anne Enright2:11

That's it. Yeah.

Presenter2:11

Tell me

Anne Enright2:12

Tell me a little bit more about that. I have certainly an interest in sentences and what they can do. The thing is when you're writing, you're in there and it's it's a bit like a black box. You can't get out it's it's state of flow, you know, you're following something and catching it at the same time. So that feeling of a gap that's been filled even as it opens is just brilliant to experience, quite addictive, very much what I go to when I need comfort. And that's why I write I write to shut the world away. I mean, I just love it. It's just great to have a space in your head where you go where you're working something out.

Presenter2:50

When you took on your laureateship, you mentioned that you wanted to raise the issue of the gender imbalance in the canon. What needed

Anne Enright2:58

To be said.

Anne Enright2:59

It was really moving to be somehow chosen and

Anne Enright3:05

I took on the gender thing with great reluctance because I wanted to be a writer, which was a very important thing to be, and not a woman, which was a slightly less important thing to be. But I thought I'm going to say the things that need to be said. And much against my

Anne Enright3:18

Better judgment. I got dug into the issue of gender and the canon. Ireland was so busy being Irish and being pleased with itself for being both lovely and lyrical and above all things Irish that nobody paused to look at the astonishing gender imbalance there was within the reviewing culture, for example. And there was a huge amount of unconscious bias in the literary scene. The disparity that I found that was most interesting is that women are very happy to admire men, but men find it very difficult to admire women in return.

Presenter3:52

You spent three years with that as one of the key issues that you wanted to talk about. How much progress were you able to make, do you think?

Anne Enright3:59

Well, those three years coincided with an absolute explosion of wonderful literature by women, world-taking literature, books by women. Emer McBride, Sally Rooney, Anna Burns, three great female writers. So by the time I'd said it, there was no need to prove it. And the walls had all been tumbling down. So I was just part of that. And I was in fact just documenting it, not pushing them down at all.

Presenter4:23

And how does it feel to be part of that new wave so many wonderful women's voices in Irish fiction?

Anne Enright4:27

The Irish fiction. It feels less lonely. Thank you for asking.

Anne Enright4:33

When I say it feels less lonely, there always have been women's voices side by side all through my writing life, but to see them hit new heights has been salutary, fantastic.

Presenter4:44

It's time to go to the music and tell us about your first disc. Why have you chosen it?

Anne Enright4:47

I used to listen to Glen Gould on a kind of a loop.

Anne Enright4:51

playing the Goldberg variations in the nineteen fifty five iconic recording. But after that had been happening in the room for a very long time, we would break in suddenly to this lovely Brahms intermezzo in E flat, and it was a moment when I lifted my head from the desk.

Presenter6:08

Part of Brahm's Intimetto in E flat, played by Glenn Gould. And then write You were born in Dublin in nineteen sixty two. Anyone who's read your work will know how brilliantly you write big families. So talk me through the dynamics of being the youngest of five.

Anne Enright6:22

I am the youngest of five, which is not like being the kind of middle of nine or twelve. And actually, if there were less than three, that was considered a bit of a sorrow on our road. And everybody on the road settled at the same time. It was a little cul-de-sac, and we all played out in the middle of it on our bikes. And yes, I was the youngest of five, so I was precocious, I was very chatty, and I was, I suppose, always looking for attention and getting it sometimes. So I was kind of treasured and poked at the same time.

Presenter6:53

Was there a sense of trying to get your voice to cut through, trying to make yourself heard?

Anne Enright6:57

Yeah, there are five interesting people in my generation of the family, and each with their own point of view. Actually, as I grew older,

Anne Enright7:06

One of the things that used to annoy me was that my memory of events was never the official one. So if I said that happened, there were four people who were older than me who'd say, no, no, no, you're wrong. That's not the way it happened. And I would say, no, no, that happened to me. So I know. And they, you know, so I wasn't the official keeper of records for sure. You had to become a writer then. I had to become a writer, and it annoyed them all.

Presenter7:23

That had to become a

Anne Enright7:27

So the other thing about being the youngest in the family is that the pressure was off by the time it came to me. So my parents, my mother in particular, wanted to get the children into one profession or another and get them sorted and settled, but she'd sort of run out of energy. And I wasn't really up for it. So there is some phrase which I haven't been able to find since where every gentleman's family, the luxury is an artist. So I had the luxury of being an artist, and the family had the luxury and the terror of having an artist in the family.

Presenter8:01

Tell me a little bit more about your mother. Cora, you've said that you have a theory that writers all have mothers that are big figures in their lives.

Anne Enright8:08

People's mothers are big to them, one way or the other, whether they talk about it or not. And maybe writers are better at.

Anne Enright8:15

admitting that. But yeah, my mother is ninety one. She grew up in Phibsburgh in Dublin. And I think the most mythic thing about my mother is that she was born after her father died.

Anne Enright8:32

So she was a magical event.

Anne Enright8:36

And a kind of perhaps a disaster as well as a wonderful happening. Her mother didn't know she was pregnant at the funeral, for example. So she was reared by a very literate, educated woman who was widowed with four children very unexpectedly by a man who died young. They were a very bookish family. My granny went to university, which was really mad. Very few women did that. So there was a very strong dynamic there about books, about poverty.

Anne Enright9:06

And about magic, maybe.

Anne Enright9:08

It's time to hear your second track today on. What's it gonna be? This is a track from Tom White's Heart Attack and Vine, and it's Jersey Girl. This is a track that I listened to in my first years in college when I started going out with my husband Martin.

Speaker 19:23

And no time for the corner boys

Speaker 19:28

Uh

Speaker 49:28

Down in the street making all day Uh

Speaker 19:31

Uh

Speaker 19:34

No no horse on eighth avenue

Speaker 19:40

Cause tonight

Speaker 49:40

I wanna be with you

Speaker 49:45

Who's tonight? I'm gonna take that ride.

Speaker 49:51

Cross the river to the Jersey side

Presenter9:55

Jersey girl, Tom Waits, Ann Enright, let's stay in your childhood for a little while. Is it true that you used to read a book a day?

Anne Enright10:03

When I was seven I had read all the books in the children's section of the library, and I was agitating to get an adult ticket, which they sort of handed to me with a small smile, and then let me loose around the stacks. I still remember how dark it felt, the green lino on the floor and these oak bookcases.

Presenter10:21

What did you find there?

Anne Enright10:24

So I would read, you know, Joyce or

Anne Enright10:29

I'm actually a bit embarrassed at the precocity of my reading. I don't know why. I bought my first copy of Ulysses when I was 14 and I read Lolita at far too early an age and things like I shouldn't really have read and regret reading like Norman Mailer. Comprehension as a result was not a key value for me. It's like you don't have to understand it to love it.

Presenter10:51

What about school? You said you went to a good convent school.

Anne Enright10:54

I met a very posh English woman once and I told her I was educated by nuns and she said, And were they terribly sadist?

Anne Enright11:01

I said, no, no, they were themselves. Ireland was a very religious place. I was trying to describe it to my daughter recently. She was saying, why did people have so many children? And I said, well, they didn't have any contraception. She said, why didn't they have any contraception? And I said, well, it wasn't sold. It was illegal. And she'd say, why? And I said, well, because the church. And she said, why did people do what they said? She just couldn't get her head around it. You go to confession.

Speaker 111:05

I was trying to

Anne Enright11:25

And tell them, and she said, Why did people go to confession? And I said, Because if you didn't, you would go to hell.

Anne Enright11:32

And I had a similar conversation with my mother actually not too long ago. I said, What was all that fuss? And she said, Well, you know, there was always hell. And there was always hell.

Anne Enright11:44

You've said that you was

Presenter11:44

Strongly committed not to be whatever a girl was when you were young. What do you mean by that?

Anne Enright11:50

A funny thing kicked in in my teens and I still don't get it, and it is that thing that girls have to be good.

Anne Enright11:58

And it's not just about boyfriends or sexual behavior, it's about your nails and it's about looking after everyone. And I was very wary of the feeling of catastrophe that attended this. What is the catastrophe if you don't get an A? It's actually, there is no catastrophe. But that fear of being less than perfect, I found very onerous. And I found the whole

Anne Enright12:27

I mean, I suppose today you'd called it the gender thing. It was a bit foreign to me. I do remember being very cross when people tried to limit what I wanted to have or get or be. I remember being very noncompliant, yeah.

Presenter12:43

Time for your third disc today on What's It Gonna Be?

Anne Enright12:46

When I was sixteen, I finished school and I went off on a jaunt. I got a scholarship to Canada. There were fifty two countries and two hundred students on scholarship, and the money was just spilling for by my Irish standards, was just amazing. I remember the first question I asked is, When is there hot water?

Anne Enright13:04

I came from a country where there wasn't always hot water and the Canadians just laughed like when you turn on the tap, that's when there's hot water.

Speaker 113:06

Perhaps

Anne Enright13:12

There was community involvement and lots of hiking through forests and stuff. It was really great. I had actually finished school, so I didn't need my exams. So this is Case of You by Joni Mitchell, which comes from that time.

Speaker 113:16

Uh

Speaker 413:16

Blizzard.

Speaker 413:25

Just before our love got lost, you said I am as constant as a northern star, and I said.

Speaker 413:34

Constantly in the darkness. Where's that at? If you want me, I'll be in the bar.

Speaker 413:44

On the back of a cartoon coast

Speaker 413:50

In a blue T V screen light

Speaker 413:55

I drew a map of Canada.

Speaker 413:58

No can adapt.

Presenter14:03

A Case of You by Jonie Mitchell, taking you back to Canada, Ann En Wright. You moved there for two years with your scholarship at just sixteen. How did you feel about leaving home?

Anne Enright14:13

People sometimes say, well, you're not afraid, and I didn't really know what I should be afraid of. Partly because we used to go off on cycling holidays and things at the age of 13 that children wouldn't do now. So going off was an adventure. It was an amazing time for, I think, most of the people who were there. But most distinctively for me was I got a great teacher, my English teacher, Theo. And I did show Theo my ghastly poetry. How was the feedback? Well, he said, yes, it's so mortifying, isn't it?

Anne Enright14:43

And to have that articulated and out in the air, that was a good move already. But in our first class, he taught a poem by Keats called La Belle d'Amson's Merci. And there's a rude line in Keats, which was, she looked at me as we did love and made sweet moan. And Theo said, well, we all know what that means. I was 16 and I was absolutely furious. I went up to him afterwards. I said, you have ruined, ruined, besmirched a great poem and a great poet for me. And he looked at me like, okay, we've got a live one.

Anne Enright15:21

But I mean, I think about it sometimes. I was a really moral little miss. Did you enjoy the freedom?

Presenter15:26

that your trip abroad brought.

Anne Enright15:28

Yeah. I met people there who were so different from me. I remember the first conversation I had with this fellow student who didn't believe in God, the first person I met who didn't believe in God. He was a very tall Dutch man, who also, as part of this conversation, overshared the information that he and his family were often naked in

Anne Enright15:49

In the same space. So I couldn't deal with any of that. I mean, how did that go down with you? You described yourself as quite a moral kind of 16-year-old. I just thought he should really believe in God and put his clothes on.

Presenter15:52

I mean how did

Anne Enright16:01

And that would make us all a lot happier. So, that mindset was new. So, you're so.

Anne Enright16:07

I'm thinking when you're growing up, so it was a real lesson in diversity. What did you miss about home and Ireland in the late 70s?

Anne Enright16:16

The month I left Ireland, the Pope came to visit. So I missed the Pope. I wasn't sorry to miss the Pope. I was by that time, although quite religious, I wasn't a Catholic, I was a a non-Catholic. But I got letters from my school friends, just ecstatic with the Pope.

Presenter16:22

Besides the

Anne Enright16:35

And I thought this is kinda mad. But it made me feel yes, for two seconds hugely lonely that I hadn't missed that. And then the next thing I missed was the Debs dance, which is the dance after school. And people were going off with boys that I knew. And that was when it really hit me and I had a big cry. And after that I was grand.

Anne Enright16:56

Let's have some more music. It's time for your fourth disc, what's it gonna be?

Anne Enright17:00

This is Then You'll Remember Me. It's sung by Day Dannon and it comes from The Bohemian Girl. This song was actually James Joyce's second favourite song. I have no idea what his first favourite was. He was an accomplished tenor, Joyce. I heard it when I was a teenager and then it disappeared. You know, it's one of those things, we had it on vinyl, and I couldn't find it on Spotify. So when I finally landed on it, I was delighted.

Speaker 417:22

The Maybor

Speaker 417:25

Perhaps in such a scene, some recollection be

Speaker 417:35

Of times that have this happy

Speaker 417:41

And you remember me

Speaker 417:47

And you remember, you remember me.

Presenter17:57

Then You'll Remember Me by Day Denan. You came home from Canada, Anne En Wright, and attended Trinity College in Dublin reading English and Philosophy, and while you were there you signed up with the Players' Theatre. Were you keen to act?

Anne Enright18:12

It was what I did in my first week when I was there. I sported at the time a poncho. You'll be glad to go. The poncho was not a Mexican poncho, it was a poncho I had made myself from a homespun blanket that I had bought in Kilkenny Design. And I went up to the table in Freshers Week for players and with a flourish of my poncho, I signed the form. You met your husband Martin there. He directed you? He did. He directed me. He tried to direct me and has failed ever since.

Speaker 118:17

Uh

Anne Enright18:44

Actually now I can overshare and say that I auditioned for Martin in September or October of that year and the thing he wrote down on the sheet, his notes from the audition, he said bingo.

Anne Enright18:58

Exclamation mark.

Anne Enright19:00

Prophetic prophetic it was, yeah. You acted for a year after college. What did that give you? Yeah, I was a professional actress for or actor for at least half a year. It gave me the super rush of being unprepared and going onstage, with the set still sticky with paint.

Anne Enright19:19

No one knowing their lines. It's a dream. And it kind of stayed with me in a dreamscape for years afterwards.

Presenter19:26

It's that moment of

Anne Enright19:27

Uh Improvisation

Presenter19:28

Uh

Anne Enright19:28

Yeah.

Presenter19:28

Uh

Anne Enright19:28

And not knowing where you're going, a creative place to be for you then. Well, improvisation is a brilliant skill. To know that you don't need a safety net is fantastic when you're making up a story or whether you're working voices. And I often, as a writer, I'm working somebody's voice, the narrator's voice, or the dialogue or whatever. And so theatre and acting is a really good preparation for all of that. How did you start writing in earnest? I suppose I started writing in the theatre. I had my ghastly poems and then I was writing a few monologues. And then when I was 21, my siblings bought me a typewriter for my birthday.

Anne Enright20:03

I sort of banged out, rattled out. It was on a little metal table in the bedroom, which was quite cold, and I would sit there and pound out these little vignettes, um, a couple of plays. And the implement itself is significant for you, isn't it? You suit a typewriter.

Presenter20:18

A Suta keyboard.

Anne Enright20:19

I do, yeah. I I find when I write long hand it's a bit too lazy.

Anne Enright20:24

I delayed you writing, on and on it goes with lots of flourishes and you know I need I need the crispness, I need the sharpness of the keyboard.

Anne Enright20:34

Let's take a break for s

Presenter20:34

Some music. What are we going to hear next?

Anne Enright20:36

Ah, this is a song that my husband plays. Sometimes after dinner he picks up the guitar. And I know he's feeling feisty if it's this song by Johnny Cash.

Speaker 420:48

There's a man going round taking names.

Speaker 420:52

And he decides who to free and who to blame.

Speaker 420:58

Everybody won't be treated all the same.

Speaker 421:03

There'll be of golden leather reaching down.

Speaker 421:09

When the man comes around.

Presenter21:13

Johnny Cash and The Man Comes Around. So Ann N. Wright, you decided to focus on your writing and chose a creative writing course at UEA. It was led by Angela Carter and Malcolm Bradbury, no less, but you said that there was no shaft of light and inspiration didn't strike. Why?

Anne Enright21:32

Yeah, I sailed off on the ferry, literally with my typewriter and a suitcase, and arrived at UEA. And Angela Carter was there. There was a workshop, there were nine of us, really good, nice people were there. But I failed and failed again, really. I had a huge sense of myself as a writer, but I had no huge sense of what I wanted to write about. So I sat in a breeze block room in Waveney Terrace in the University of East Anglia and unwrote my great book, which was hugely overambitious. And I'd sit up all night and lose words. And so it spiraled down for me. I just, it wasn't good. The work, I couldn't produce it. And I think by Easter, I was not in a great place. But I came home and I wrote three stories in a row and they got published by Faber. It was amazing.

Presenter22:20

It's amazing.

Anne Enright22:21

It's really odd.

Presenter22:23

Yeah.

Anne Enright22:23

What had made the difference?

Presenter22:23

What do you think?

Anne Enright22:25

Oh, I was writing short stories. They were small and I could do them. I mean, the novel I had planned was set in three different centuries. In three different languages, by the way.

Presenter22:27

That

Anne Enright22:33

Oh, stop.

Anne Enright22:36

I mean, come on. So I I I was doing some

Presenter22:38

Something I could do.

Anne Enright22:39

Yeah.

Anne Enright22:40

Yeah.

Presenter22:40

In nineteen eighty seven you joined RTE as a producer of a late night show called Nighthawks while continuing to write short stories at weekends. Was it running on adrenaline? Live T V can can be quite an adrenal experience.

Anne Enright22:52

It is apparently more adrenalizing than going over the top in World War One, though how they measured that, I don't know.

Presenter22:52

Yeah.

Anne Enright22:59

And we did it over and over again. So, I mean, yes, you do run out of adrenaline after, you know, a year or two. It was hard. We were young and we were feisty and unknowing. And I do think that the media takes people like that and uses their creativity and says, go for it. So you burn out after three or four years. But I was glad that I'd been in the world. And it was really interesting to see ambition at work and the mystery that was management. All of those things. It's better to know them than not to know them, perhaps. You burned out, though.

Anne Enright23:35

How bad was it? Oh, it was pretty bad, all right. Um I was high functioning, I I was increasingly angry, and then one day, oof.

Anne Enright23:43

Gone, bang.

Presenter23:45

What happened?

Anne Enright23:46

I was booked into a facility.

Anne Enright23:48

and I sat on the bed and I couldn't unbutton my shirt.

Anne Enright23:53

Just wiped, absolutely wiped. And I I don't know how long I spent there, actually.

Anne Enright24:01

Yeah.

Anne Enright24:03

Two or three weeks, something like that.

Presenter24:06

How did you find your way back?

Anne Enright24:09

Um

Anne Enright24:11

Wi with difficulty. Thank you for asking. No. How did I find my way back? Well, I took the meds and I spent six months in a kind of numb enough state. But I yeah.

Anne Enright24:25

And I felt as though I had lost something for a while, actually. That a room had been closed in my mind, that I wouldn't be able to open that door again. And I think that was probably the medication. Then I kind of came off the meds and made decisions about my life. One of them was to leave broadcasting, and the other was to earn enough money to get a flat where I could live and get married.

Speaker 124:36

I think

Anne Enright24:54

But the real decision was to write.

Presenter24:57

Let's have some more music. What are we going to hear?

Anne Enright24:59

This is a track by Laurie Anderson, which takes me back to those broadcasting days, and it's Hiawatha from Strange Angels.

Speaker 425:09

And I said

Speaker 425:12

Ella

Speaker 425:13

Operate, get me memories, Tennessee.

Speaker 425:19

And she said, I know who you're trying to call darling.

Speaker 425:23

And he's not wrong.

Speaker 425:25

He's been away.

Speaker 425:28

But you can hear him on the aisle

Speaker 425:32

It's how

Speaker 425:36

Yeah, this is your country station.

Speaker 425:40

And honey, this next one for you.

Presenter25:44

Laurie Anderson and Hiawatha. So Anne Enright, the plan one part of the plan was to get married. You married Martin in nineteen ninety one. He's your first reader when you write.

Anne Enright25:54

He is actually my first listener. So you read to him? Yeah, I won't let him read it. And he says, no, let me read it. And I say, no, you have to listen to it. And so we have a little squabble. What's the difference? Well, it's who controls the difference, I suppose. And I know something's running well for me when I want to read it out to Martin. Does he give you feedback?

Presenter26:09

Yeah.

Anne Enright26:15

He does give me feedback. He has about fifty different kinds of silence now.

Anne Enright26:20

And are you keenly attuned to them, I guess? I'm keenly attuned to all of them. So I can tell if it's an approving silence or a very, very excited and delighted silence or kind of what the hell was that sort of silence.

Presenter26:22

I'm keenly attuned to

Presenter26:24

Yeah.

Presenter26:34

Uh

Anne Enright26:34

Uh

Presenter26:34

Or mm maybe. Your fourth novel, The Gathering, was published in two thousand seven and it won the Booker Prize. That brings money, of course, fifty thousand pounds, and global recognition. How did it affect you personally?

Anne Enright26:47

Well, it didn't affect me at all for a while. It seemed to affect everyone around me in the most hilarious sort of way or alarming sort of way. What happened? So, well, I I was the calm centre of a lot of publishing agitation suddenly. People change within the industry and their attitude to you shifts. So you're walking through a different world, interestingly. Quite odd. What was new that you were encountering?

Anne Enright27:13

Um well I

Anne Enright27:15

I have a great sort of yearning for the privacy of the book. And I think that's one of the beautiful things about reading is it's just you and the page, you know. It's not a communal experience, but this was a crowd experience. And it took me a while to get back to the individual reader. It didn't make people necessarily happy.

Anne Enright27:39

You winning a prize?

Anne Enright27:42

Who wasn't happy? Who wasn't happy? Who wasn't happy? Everyone who thought they should have won the prize, they were unhappy. Yeah, particularly it has to be said the guys were made unhappy. You know, I think it's true that if a woman does well, that men can be sort of somehow personally insulted by their success, even though it's not really about them at all. Did you experience that? Well, it took me a while to figure out what was going on in a couple of cases. All right, yeah. But you get little stings and barbs, and you think, oh, what's his problem? Oh, oh, yeah.

Anne Enright28:13

So it was something you had done to them.

Anne Enright28:16

Uh

Anne Enright28:17

It's really interesting when what is somehow you're sprinkled with fairy dust or something. It's quite a magical experience. So it brings out.

Anne Enright28:25

quite infantile, quite irrational uh stuff.

Anne Enright28:30

And that's interesting to see. You're the center, briefly, thank God, of a lot of people's projections.

Anne Enright28:37

Let's have some more music. It's your seventh disc, Anne Enright. What are we going to hear and why? We're going to hear the wonderful Leonard Cohen, that writer of music. Actually, when I was 13, my siblings, my appalling siblings, gave me a book of poetry by Leonard Cohen as a birthday present. It was called Flowers for Hitler. I don't know what that means about what I was like at 13. I suppose I was a bit of a goth, but it was a dark choice, don't you think?

Speaker 429:05

Well my friends are gone.

Speaker 429:07

And my hair is grey.

Speaker 429:10

I ache in the places where I used to play And I'm crazy for love

Speaker 429:18

But I'm not coming on.

Speaker 429:24

I'm just paying my rent every day in the Tower of Song.

Presenter29:32

Leonard Cohen and Tower of Song. Ann En Wright You wrote not long ago that I started to ask myself in middle age, who was I trying to annoy? Isn't that just the same as trying to please them? I wonder what answer you arrived at.

Anne Enright29:46

Yeah, well, I thought about this a lot after my father died, how easy and gentle the sense of his authority had been all through my life and how much he trusted me in all my various ventures and adventures. And that isn't necessarily what you get from other male authorities, which can be much more restrictive. So it was a sense of getting over that mythic, real or otherwise, sense of someone who is going to judge you, whether it's the makers of the canon or the high-minded academics or whoever is in charge of what's right now and what's important now. So I was negotiating with a sense of importance and because I'm naturally quite transgressive and undermining of senses of importance, I was never going to really win that game, nor should I have been playing it at all, really, because creativity is not authoritarian. It's about anti-authoritarian movement and change.

Presenter30:45

Uh

Anne Enright30:45

Yeah.

Presenter30:45

And have you come out The other side of

Anne Enright30:46

Uh

Anne Enright30:47

Well, I'm standing on my own two feet. I feel planted. I feel more or less secure in my creative process. But you know, I always, always knew that I was going to write. So I was always safe because I had the page.

Presenter31:03

Just one more disc from you, Anna Enright. This is your final choice today. What's it going to be?

Anne Enright31:08

This is Suave Sia Ilvento from Cosifanti by Mozart. It's a sublime trio. They're waving off a ship, waving goodbye to their lovers who are actually not on the ship. They're standing there beside them. So it's a kind of joke goodbye. And as a joke goodbye, I think it's perfect for a funeral, perhaps even my own, as I sail off down the aisle.

Speaker 431:44

Blessing your home.

Presenter32:33

Part of Suave Sia Ilvento from Mozart's Cousifantuti, sung by Elizabeth Schwarzkopf, Walterberry, and Krista Ludwig, with the Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Carl Bohm.

Presenter32:46

Anne Enright. It's a cruel thing, I think, to limit someone with your appetite for books to just three, but I'm afraid that that is very much the deal on this programme. We'll give you the complete works of Shakespeare, the Bible, and a book of your choice. What would you like to take with you? I think I'll have to take the priest.

Anne Enright33:00

In Search of Lost Time, as it's now translated. If I was, you know, a very long time on the Desert Island, I could have a parallel text with the French on one side and the English on the other, and I could uh work up my French. It's yours.

Presenter33:12

You can also take a luxury item to help you pass the time more enjoyably, what you fancy.

Anne Enright33:16

I'd like some r really high thread count cotton sheets, please. Okay. Yeah, dense, cold, cold cotton. It has to be over six hundred or nothing. Don't worry. There you go.

Presenter33:25

And if you had to save just one of your eight tracks from being washed away in the surf, which would it be? I think it has to be the Mozart. He's sublime.

Presenter33:35

Anne Enright, thank you so much for sharing your Desert Island discs with us.

Anne Enright33:39

Thank you.

Presenter33:50

I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Anne. If you'd like to hear more from other writers who've been cast away, you'll find them on BBC Sounds or via the Desert Island Disc's website. Among them are Ali Smith, Gilly Cooper, Jan Morris, Peter Aykroyd, Vikram Seth and Kate Atkinson. In 2016, Kirstie Young cast away Anne's fellow Irish novelist, Colm Tobeen.

Speaker 434:12

I can write anywhere as long as there's a blank wall in front of me, no great view, and a pretty uncomfortable chair. But I've been working a lot recently in Wexford in the house you mentioned, in the place where we went every summer in the years before my father died. And it's funny, you know, when I'm going down to the Strand, the smell is the same smell. Harvested fields, clover, but even animals, because we were from the town, so it's going right back into the past, which means I'm getting images. And even if I'm not writing directly about it, it's quite emotional, even being there. Productive writing is such a discipline. You're not somebody who'll take a long lunch. I think the big thing is never do lunch. You know, you need a lot of silence and time on your own. Things happen of their own accord, but only if you give them, I suppose, peace. And I mean, music can be helpful, but not while you're working. Is it true that you once told a creative writing class that you have to be a monster to write? Yeah, I meant that, you know, stop worrying about your grandmother's feelings, your mother's feelings, your girlfriend's feelings, or your own feelings. Your job is to get the thing down. And if you have to use something that belongs to you or to somebody else, write it down. But don't be saying, oh, you know, when my Auntie Mary finally dies, I'll be able to write the most wonderful story. Write it now and tell your Auntie Mary you're just sorry, but you've told a story that is really quite private and belongs to her. But now it's going to be published and it's coming out next week. Have you had to do that with people in your own country? Yes, certainly with my mother. She was very funny about it. It was an early story. There were a lot of children in the house, so she would get all the knives and forks and put them in the middle of the table and just take what you needed. I put that into a story as an image of a mother who wasn't very tidy and good with housekeeping. And she said, well, wasn't that awful the way you put it into the story? If I'd known that, I would have set the table properly everywhere.

Speaker 135:45

Um

Speaker 135:56

Yeah.

Presenter36:10

Calm Tobin speaking to Kirstie in 2016. Next time I'll be casting away the first woman to be master of Jesus College Cambridge, Sunita Elaine. I do hope you'll join us then.

Speaker 136:43

BBC Sounds Music, Radio, Podcasts.

Presenter36:47

Anadelvie was due to inherit sixty-seven million dollars.

Speaker 436:51

I'm so excited about what the future holds.

Presenter36:53

She secured huge investments for a project in New York.

Speaker 436:57

She was very confident in her words.

Presenter36:59

And yet, it was all a lie. She's a con artist. Join journalist Vicki Baker as she delves into a real-life scandal. We'll mix drama with documentary to tell the story of Anna Delvey's rise and fall. Fake Heiress, a new six-part podcast on BBC Sound.

Speaker 137:17

I was watching this whole thing happen thinking, it can't be true.

Presenter37:20

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