I first read Anne Enright in 2008, the year after she won the Booker Prize for her novel The Gathering. What I read was her short story collection Taking Pictures, still one of the very best Irish short story collections. At home with two small kids, her story 'Caravan' (I wrote about it here) never left me. The Gathering was next, and wow. With Enright, you know from the get-go that you are in resolutely uncompromising, startlingly wise, unapologetically sticky hands. Attention, her second book of non-fiction, gathers lectures and pieces of journalism written between 2007 and 2025.
From her opening "little riff" on the gendered nature of readers’ responses to words, to her description of reading James Joyce’s Ulysses as "a kind of strenuous dreaming, very like writing fiction", it is a book of deft and considered thoughts. Enright is revealed as a person of endearingly confident humility, always more co-conspiratorial than faux modest (Angela Carter gave her her phone number and said, ‘We must have lunch’; Enright writes, "this was Angela Carter – there was no way I was going to ring her."). She bought her first copy of Ulysses aged fourteen: "This was, of course, a precocious thing to do." Her mother put the book in the attic until Enright was eighteen and what’s amazing to read is that she waited: "At which time I climbed the ladder… and read the thing." Of course, she might be misremembering, as her introduction to ‘Dublin Made Me’ lists the errors "my fact-checking siblings pointed out" she has gotten wrong about the time of her own birth in 1962. Writing, or at least writing from memory, is as slippery as it is sticky.
Attention highlights Enright's deep writerly interest in family, society, identity, trust, hurt, faith, truth, and words, always words.
Attention contains essays on writers and the work of writers including Joyce, Margaret Atwood, Helen Gardner, Angela Carter, Toni Morrison, Samuel Beckett, Alice Munroe and more, and it reveals much about Enright’s own becoming as a writer, which is also to say her becoming as a human being navigating the world, via the subjects considered. "Sometimes I envy the feminists of the 1960s and 1970s their iconoclastic clarity," she writes, "And I regret that my own work is so mired in the problem of the self and of the body, and not the body as object or image, but the seeing, desiring, penetrated, pregnant, mortal and happy body: also the fragmented body, the body that contains the eye." But her remarkable eye is what gives Enright her particular angle of attention.
She is a slam-dunk genius at a terse one-liner and targeted darts of truth. She also writes with the kind of necessary distance that paying useful attention requires, all the while getting close enough to make it personal. ‘Priests in the Family’ is about her maternal grandmother’s connection to Joyce’s sister Eileen, and also Irish literature: "I am talking, I think, about what it means to be part of a tradition, which is not just a question of reading some books and recognising the accent." Enright is of us and observing us, all the while thoroughly observing herself in response to whatever topic is under her pen. Her essay on Morrison is also about her own mother’s dementia. Her writing on Carter is also an essay about love. Oh, to have been in the room when she lectured an embarrassment of obstetricians and gynaecologists on childbirth, language and Ulysses at a medical conference in 2010, or a group of doctors at a conference in 2022: "Is the man inside the woman, fixing her, or is he all around, making her sick?"
We need your consent to load this rte-player contentWe use rte-player to manage extra content that can set cookies on your device and collect data about your activity. Please review their details and accept them to load the content.Manage Preferences
Listen, via RTÉ Arena: Anne Enright and Paul Muldoon on the joys of poetry and prose
She describes John McGahern as "hiding in plain sight, in the high Irish style", and Edna O’Brien as "the lightning rod: her work cleared the air." In 2016, she wrote "Maeve Brennan didn’t have to be a woman for her work to be forgotten, though it surely helped." Enright is deadly serious and frequently funny. One seven-sentence paragraph in an essay set in Vienna contains six, separate laugh out loud moments. In many ways, this is a collection about what she has learnt from reading, and from writing itself. Although it is subtitled Writing on Life, Art and the World, with pieces previously published in London Review of Books, New York Review of Books, the Guardian, the Irish Times, Yale Review and elsewhere, it is mostly about art as in writing, and briefly towards the end, theatre and painting. The essays are divided into three sections: Voices, Bodies and Time. Bodies takes off with an essay on the Tuam babies and a tribute to the work of local historian Catherine Corless.
As an ode the kind of long-form, belle-lettres reportage most journalists no longer have the time or supports to write, Attention highlights Enright’s deep writerly interest in family, society, identity, trust, hurt, faith, truth, and words, always words. She is curious about how and why we might tell stories to others and to ourselves, and about the legacy of actions: individual, public, communal, societal, intimate, political, private, secret. Her 2015 Tuam essay has dated not in its urgency or intelligence but simply because the story has moved, somewhat, on (there is one footnote with updates). Yet, Enright’s response still feels fresh and horribly pertinent, as does her 2019 Me Too essay. Her 2018 essay on the Irish abortion referendum reads as urgently re-relevant now, worldwide.
The task of a brilliant essay writer is to write about the thing and something bigger than the thing, all the while considering the very notion of examining that thing, in and though the writing – and all of this without ever letting the reader get bogged down in the knots the writer has had to untangle in writing it. Enright places herself both inside and outside the story on which she is reporting. 'Addictions' is probably the flimsiest of the selection here, and yet it still stitches itself to the page and into post-reading memory with unexpected persistence. It begins, "So I am in a small town in Honduras having my cigarette, because if there is one thing I love when I am away from my children it is killing myself with Marlboro Light. Though there are quicker ways to get killed, here in Honduras, where I am writing a piece about land tenure for an Irish aid agency." This is quintessential Enright: personal and political, humorous and curious, arm’s length wry and really full of a particular kind of attention.
These are essays still worth reading long after the (now, near obsolete) print version has been used to wrap the (proverbial) next-day’s chips. Enright lays the whole story out like a richly complicated, endlessly layered landscape. She takes you on a tour of the territory examined, and then drops you at the border again, stunned, one eye still looking over your shoulder at what you’ve just been shown.
Attention, Writing on Life, Art and the World is published by Jonathan Cape.
Cristín Leach is an art critic and author of the memoir Negative Space
