Actress
A Novel
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3.9 • 12 Ratings
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE 2020
Man Booker Prize-winner and bestselling author Anne Enright's latest--a brilliant and moving novel about fame, sexual power, and a daughter's search to understand her mother's hidden truths.
This is the story of Irish theatre legend, Katherine O'Dell, as written by her daughter Norah. It tells of early stardom in Hollywood, of highs and lows on the stages of Dublin and London's West End. Katherine's life is a grand performance, with young Norah watching from the wings.
But this romance between mother and daughter cannot survive Katherine's past, or the world's damage. As Norah uncovers her mother's secrets, she acquires a few of her own. Then, fame turns to infamy when Katherine decides to commit a bizarre crime.
Actress is about a daughter's search for the truth: the dark secret in the bright star, and what drove Katherine finally mad.
Brilliantly capturing the glamour of post-war America and the shabbiness of 1970s Dublin, Actress is an intensely moving, disturbing novel about mothers and daughters and the men in their lives. A scintillating examination of the corrosive nature of celebrity, it is also a sad and triumphant tale of freedom from bad love, and from the avid gaze of the crowd.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This evocative, incisive tale from Man Booker winner Enright (The Gathering) turns a gimlet eye on the complicated relationship between a famous mother and her only daughter. Actor Katherine O'Dell is known throughout Ireland in the 1970s and '80s; she is also a loving if distracted and sometimes absent single mother to Norah, who's often left in the care of her nanny. Norah, who narrates, recounts mainly through flashback Katherine's star rising from humble beginnings in a traveling Irish theater troupe to her peak in Hollywood, where she increasingly struggles with alcoholism and depression. As Katherine enters her 50s, it largely falls to Norah to care for her mother, but when Katherine is committed to a mental hospital after shooting a movie producer in the foot, Norah finds professional help to care for her mother, as Norah marries, has children, and pursues her writing career. Enright portrays her characters with tenderness and grace ("It took me no time to adjust after she came home from hospital. And I don't know what I loved, as I tended her fragile bones, but I thought I loved my mother. Because she was always the same person for me"), depicting a fraught mother-daughter relationship without clich or condescension. Enright's fans will love thissharp, moving work.
