Anne Enright

In​ 1985, Helen Garner picked up the Oxford Anthology of Australian Literature in a bookshop in Melbourne and examined its index to confirm that she was not in it. On finding she was right, she felt the world seesaw and walked away wretched. ‘I am crude, a beginner. People must laugh at me behind my back. I posture as a writer and at 42 I can’t even get into the Oxford...

In​ the first Covid lockdown of spring 2020, people in Ireland were confined to a two kilometre radius from home. Exemptions were made for carers and, if I went to see my elderly mother in the middle of the afternoon, the roads were empty of traffic and the suburban paths near her house filled with people walking to the edge of their allocated space and then back home. A handy app showed a...

The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison’s first novel, published in 1970, opens with a brief, antic mash-up of a child’s first reading primer. ‘Here is the house. It is green and white. It has a red door. It is very pretty. Here is the family.’ These lines are not familiar to me and then they are, sort of – it’s like seeing a person across a room and wondering if it’s someone you know.

A postmodernist would not hesitate to stroll across his own page with his future wife on his arm. Did modernism turn ‘post’ when Borges put himself in ‘The Aleph’? And I don’t know if my sense of sudden insight (yes! of course it did!) is just what happens when a person reads Ulysses: they experience large, elusive thoughts; they feel very stupid or foolishly, vertiginously clever.

When​ my grandfather died of a heart attack in 1927, he was the father of three young children and did not know that a fourth child, my mother, was on the way. This strangeness – the growth of a baby after the death of its parent – was both tragic and miraculous. It made my mother feel odd about her existence, I think, which is not the same as feeling odd about herself. She was...