Oct 17

Oct 17 Actress

Author: Anne Enright
Publisher: W.W. Norton
Goodreads | The StoryGraph

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Note: Trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.

Cover Description

Katherine O’Dell is an Irish theater legend. As her daughter Norah retraces her mother’s celebrated career and bohemian life, she delves into long-kept secrets, both her mother’s and her own.

Katherine began her career on Ireland’s bus-and-truck circuit before making it to London’s West End, Broadway, and finally Hollywood. Every moment of her life is a star turn, with young Norah standing in the wings. But the mother-daughter romance cannot survive Katherine’s past or the world’s damage. With age, alcohol, and dimming stardom, her grip on reality grows fitful and, fueled by a proud and long-simmering rage, she commits a bizarre crime.

Her mother’s protector, Norah understands the destructive love that binds an actress to her audience, but also the strength that an actress takes from her art. Once the victim of a haunting crime herself, Norah eventually becomes a writer, wife, and mother, finding her way to her own hard-won joy. Actress is a book about the freedom we find in our work and in the love we make and keep.

TL;DR Review

I found Actress to be beautiful on a sentence level, but it felt just okay to me overall. I didn’t dislike it, but I didn’t feel as connected to it as I’d hoped.

For you if: You like Hollywood dramas and literary fiction.

Full Review

“Their eyes watch her from behind a mask of delight, and it is not about attraction, this look, it is more about disaster. There is a painful stretch to some of the smiles that is envy about to happen. Especially the women. There is no denying this — my mother made women, especially, difficult to themselves.”

I read Actress because it was longlisted for the 2020 Women’s Prize, and I try to read the whole longlist every year. I definitely didn’t dislike it or have any complaints about it, but for some reason it just didn’t hook me and I turned the last page feeling relatively agnostic.

It’s a strange feeling because the sentences in this book are gorgeous. Sentence by sentence, Anne Enright’s writing blew me away. But the arc overall felt unexciting; I kept waiting for the book to “start.” It’s narrated by the daughter of a Broadway and film star in Ireland as she tells her and her mother’s backstories. That’s kind of it. Of course there were hard things and insightful things and beautiful things and traumatic things in there, but somehow I never felt them merge together into something particularly compelling.

That said, if you love a Hollywood insider story, or learning about the private lives of famous people, maybe this book might be for you. It’s fiction, of course, but it still has those vibes and again, the prose is absolutely beautiful.

At the end of the day, if you loved this book, I’d love to chat with you about it, because you may be able to help me love it.