The premise sounded interesting. However, it was a struggle to get through. There is very little action going on throughout the novel, and the characters are not well-developed. Still, I like the relationship between mother and daughter, which I found to be very touching.

This book is great! Would definitely recommend. Thanks so much to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC.

i enjoyed meeting Norah and her mother, it was a really well done book with an interesting storyline. Overall I look forward to more from the author as I really enjoyed reading this.

3.5 stars
A mother/daughter relationship with many angles. This was my first Anne Enright novel.
A little hard to get into, but overall a quick read with an interesting storyline.

DNF at 10%. Unfortunately this is just not the type of book I'm interested in reading. I was invited to view it, but the writing style isn't up my alley. Sorry!

Norah is the daughter of a famous Irish actress. Katherine O’Dell has met with success but at 45 she’s struggling. Her good days are over, and Norah becomes not just a daughter but must keep picking up the pieces as her mother sinks into alcoholism, madness and violence. And yet, Norah keeps loving her mother. Of all the people, real and fictional in the book, I find Norah the most interesting. The ending was without resolution. I wonder if that was intentional. Is there a resolution to a relationship of mother and daughter?

I received a free digital copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Beautifully written! I really enjoyed this. I had a horrible relationship with my own mother, so reading this beautiful story warmed my heart and left me longing for a relationship that I never had.

Thank you kindly to the author, the publisher, and NetGalley for this review copy.

Can you tell your mother's story? What would you say?

Norah faces these questions as she writes, in stream-of-consciousness form, about her mother Katherine, a famous actress whose charisma and allure made me think of Elizabeth Taylor and Rita Hayworth. Norah presents herself as both defender and prosecutor. It isn't that their relationship is fraught with anything--Norah understands, accepts, and embraces her role as the daughter of Katherine O'Dell--but rather that Norah, for however well she knows her mother, still has questions.

As Norah tells this tale, you sometimes wonder whom she addresses. Her husband, certainly, sometimes fans who reach out to her with their own questions about Katherine, and historians. The lack of consistent audience does help you find yourself in their midst, developing your own questions about Katherine O'Dell.

I also found myself wondering who the titular actress is. Norah discovers just how pervasive her mother's acting skills are, and part of me questioned if Katherine's talent wasn't perhaps passed down genetically. Norah doesn't try to present different faces of herself, but you see them nonetheless. As she relates her mother's history, you can't help but ask who Norah wants to protect, her mother or herself. Part of this likely is due to Norah's search for her father's identity. Like I said: Norah has questions.

You learn not just Katherine's history, but Ireland's and even some of the film industry's. And, of course, Norah's. She weaves herself into her mother's tapestry, discovering her own truths as she uncovers Katherine's.

Anne Enright crafts characters and stories that make you feel as if you're there, listening to Norah as she tells you about Katherine. Yet Enright leaves you with the sense that Norah stepped out for a cup of tea and will return later with more. Like Norah, you learn a lot, but there is still so much more you want to know.

This was a very different kind of book for me. Instead of a story being told in a timeline, it was more like sitting down and having someone tell you their memories of their mother. It was fairly interesting and easy to read but not what I was expecting.

Actress by Anne Enright is a highly recommended treatise displaying the love of a daughter for her legendary mother.

Norah, the daughter of renowned Irish actress Katherine O’Dell, tells the story of her mother's life and, thus, her own life. As the novel turns to a biographical style, Norah begins to recount her mother's upbringing and career while she examines the secrets both women have held. Her mother was not Irish at all, as she was born in London, and the apostrophe in her name was originally a typo. Norah retraces the complexities of her mother's life and her own life. Readers know the end result: Katherine's slipping grip on reality and a well-publicized, sense-less criminal act when she shoots a producer in the foot.

Ever present and at the forefront is Norah's love and support for her mother, even as she reveals the secrets both women have held. Norah's chronicle of Katherine's life also highlights her own search for love and family. The end result is a revealed commonality of experiences between mother and daughter that almost all women can share, one of sexual violations and abuses. But the biggest well-kept secret is the identity of Nora's father. At the same time Norah is writing about her husband and how close but precarious their relationship seems at times.

The writing is beautifully done in a stream-of-consciousness style, which makes sense because this is Norah reminiscing. The reader is in her head and she is narrating the story of her mother and her life to a changing third person - the reader, or a writer who came around, or her husband. It accurately depicts a person's thought patterns when telling their story in their head; the recipient differs based on where you are at in the recollections. The emotional impact is in the insights Norah shares and the observations she makes.

If you are looking for a linear plot to follow, disappointment will occur with Actress. The plot meanders and jumps around in time and subject matter due to the style in which Enright has chosen to write the novel. If you can embrace the idea of being inside a daughter's head as she tells the story, following along will be easier. Lives aren't usually a culmination of a huge event, but rather the many small events of varying consequence. We know almost from the start that Katherine's life will have a big event, and the journey is in finding out her backstory via her daughter's point-of-view. The result is a tender, honest, exquisite depiction of both a mother and daughter that is complex yet unfinished.

Disclosure: My review copy was courtesy of W.W. Norton & Company.
Review on Amazon and Barnes & Noble

This is the 1st book I have read by Anne Enright and what a journey it was. The mother/daughter novel can be a tired trope, but not this time.

The story starts with daughter Norah. reminiscing about her childhood as daughter of famous actress Kartherine O’Dell. The novel takes one on the journey of Katherine’s life amid the Hollywood and Theatre era before the #metoo movement changed that world as everyone knew it. It follows Norah on the journey of trying to find the real Katherine, not the Katherine that the world thought they knew and loved. Mother/daughter relationships are often fraught with misunderstandings and angst but this novel cover the genre with sensitivity, The writing is lyrical and the story poignant. I would highly recommend this novel to anyone who is looking for a novel of Hollywood and Theatre during the 70’s and 80’s and a mother/daughter relationship with heart.

Thank you to Netgalley, the publisher W. W.. Norton and Company, and the author Anne Enright for the chance to review this book.

Sometimes I find it difficult to review new novels. I recommend so many that fall by the wayside. If they are reissued years later, as they sometimes are, I feel vindicated.  But I ask myself two questions before I post a review: did I really like the book? And will it hold up for 10 years?  (I never know the answer to the latter.)

Anne Enright’s new novel "Actress" is a winner for our time–to the point that it might win the Booker.  (She won the Booker Prize in 2007 for The Gathering.)   "Actress" is a dream of a novel, not only lucid and nimbly-written, but a page-turner.  It is that rare thing:  a literary novel that is great weekend reading.

It was an odd book for me to pick up. I love movies but am uninterested in actors, because the press portrays them as mildly trashy and not very bright. When Huff Post publishes an article announcing that likable Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt smiled at each other at the SAG awards and touched each other’s hands, I was baffled. I looked at the photos–I suppose that’s the point–but could see nothing but two exes joking with each other.  Is that romance?  And of course it was about nothing.

There is none of that daffy caricature in Enright’s wonderfully sympathetic book. Enright’s poetic prose and telling details shape a realistic situation and portray a likable actress. The narrator, Norah, a writer in her sixties, still misses her mother, Katherine O’Dell, a movie star and stage actress who died in early middle age when Norah was 28. The two were very close:  they lived together in a house in Dublin, even after Norah grew up. And their camaraderie is endearing.  In a charming scene, Norah describes the two of them sitting together smoking cigarettes, not saying much, but enjoying themselves, as Norah tries to behave like a grown-up woman, talking about her men. One feels Katherine’s warmth, and her devotion to Norah and their home. 

There is nothing of "Mommie Dearest," though occasionally Katherine is overly-dramatic, and in her mid-forties, when she is considered washed-up, she spends more and more time transforming herself with makeup and clothes before she dares to go out. And there is a scandal about Katherine’s death. All I will say is that it involved madness, or possibly acting mad.

Norah is a reasonably contented woman to whom little happens. Her books sell, but she doesn’t think they are very good. Although she declares that she loves her husband and has an idyllic marriage, she is bored and lonely enough to agree to an interview about Katherine by a doctoral student writing a thesis.  Naturally, the student is not interested in who Katherine was: she wants Katherine to be a dramatic feminist symbol.  Norah was expecting something different.

And so Norah decides to write the story of her mother herself. She does research, travels, interviews old friends, and reads diaries and letters.  Katherine was adamantly Irish and supported the IRA, but never revealed to the press that she was born in England. And she was a child actor on the stage:  her parents were actors in a repertory company that toured Ireland.  Her whole life was about the theater (and, later. films).

Norah’s muted style makes her mother the star, and she stays in the background. Every detail is important, every image vivid. In the first chapter, which describes Norah’s twenty-first birthday party, all the important characters appear.  Norah and her friends stay in the corner, chatting about men, while Katherine plays the charming hostesss. After midnight Katherine’s friends arrive, “a shifting band of big, drinking men, all of them good company, some of them unknown.” 

Norah observes, "My mother’s crowd drifted up to the living room to be ignored by my own friends for being old. Or maybe all men were old in those days, with their baggy sports jackets and packets of fags, there was no difference between twenty-five and forty-five, everyone wore a tie."

(I do remember that old-man look.  And were they smoking pipes?) 

Both women suffer in their relationships with these “old” men, though they try to conceal it.  I did at one point think that perhaps women might cause their suffering, too, but that is a moot point, since there are few women in the novel.

Enright’s novel is dramatic and nearly perfect, as it reveals the power and tragic sadness of Katherine and Norah. This literary novel is fabulous.

Actress is a novel in the guise of a biography or perhaps a memoir. It is the story of Katherine O’Dell, famed Irish actress, sometime star of Broadway and Hollywood, as told by her daughter, Norah.

It begins with a long, beautifully meandering series of images as Norah attempts to capture the essence of her mother, the intersection between public and private, the intimate moments, and their shared place at the heart of the stylish parties in their Dublin home.

Then it shifts into the style of a conventional biography, beginning with Katherine’s grandparents. Norah visits her mother’s birthplace, which isn’t, it emerges, Ireland at all. The most Irish of Irish actresses is perhaps Katherine’s greatest creation. Norah looks for the origins of that myth, retracing her mother’s journey from touring Irish player to Hollywood and Broadway, before she returns to Ireland, the single mother of a baby girl.

More even than Katherine, Norah is elusive and fascinating. As she moves through her mother’s life story she is glimpsed at the margins, often seen but rarely present in the drama. There are only odd interruptions in the narration which hint at her present life and those around her.

Later, as she becomes an adult, Norah asserts herself, both in life and in her her account of her mother’s story. You sense that Norah is looking for herself as much as Katherine in the telling.

But who is she telling? There’s an old copywriting saw – ‘Who’s it from, who’s it to?’ This question of narration is artfully applied here. Who is the Norah who is telling this story? Daughter, reporter, biographer, critic? And who is she speaking to? There is a ‘you’ who appears from time to time in the narration. At first, it is ostensibly her husband, but it shifts throughout the book before returning to him. It is also the writers and researchers who contact Norah periodically, wanting stories to support their own theses. It is her fans, it is the unknowable future reader, the world.

The story brings in a number of fictional and real people from the period. It highlights the way artists are both of their time and place, and outside the norms, in its account of the tight-knit world of Irish media, arts and politics during Katherine’s life. Key events in Ireland’s recent history impinge on Katherine and Norah’s stories, from the aftermath of Bloody Sunday, to the bombing of Dublin and potential British involvement, to the paucity of contraception.

Norah the narrator seems incredibly clear-eyed about fame and its limitations, and this extends to her own memories, but of course there is that ambiguity there – is Norah mythologising her own past? Is Norah the character in the story as carefully crafted as Katherine O’Dell, Irish actress?

My one reservation about the book, which I’ve felt with all the Anne Enright novels I’ve read, is that I get to the end without any clear sense of resolution, of a story with an arc. There are two key elements in Actress – one around the theme of sexual violence, and another which defines the latter part of Katherine’s life – which should be dramatic but somehow feel like just more events. I also felt that the #MeToo element of the story felt a little too neat and not fully embedded in the novel.

Does that matter? Probably not. Enright’s prose is gorgeous, crackling with energy and dry wit. The sense of period and place are wonderful. The elusive but distinctive voice of Norah, the way she both debunks and re-energises the Irishness of the story, are wonderful.

What I particularly like about the mother-daughter relationship is that it defies the tropes of the Hollywood story. Norah’s description of her mother is neither a Mommie Dearest-style unmasking nor a hagiography. There is a sense of great affection between mother and daughter, a feeling of words that are never spoken, but at the same time a complicity, as if they recognise that the whole construct of fame is just an elaborate game which they both choose to play.

Then there is the tenderness with which Norah talks about her marriage and how love and passion can endure in a long-term relationship. Her husband, who is both barely present and central to the narrative, is the key to Norah’s sense of a life which is stable and calm and outwardly ordinary, but infused with true happiness and a profound connection which is quite different from the adoration that a fan feels for a star. Just as an author writes for everyone, no one and their first reader, you sense that her husband is the first listener at the heart of Norah’s life.

In Actress, Enright tells stories within stories about the complicated relationship between the performance that is life and the truth which is art.

A fascinating novel that I very much enjoyed. Strong.characters and a fascinating storyline make for an exciting read. Highly recommended.

This book is beautifully written, though the plot didn't keep me engaged. I got a little over halfway through before putting this down. I think there was a lot of promise, given Enright's obvious writing prowess, and someone who appreciates pure literary fiction might enjoy this story. However, in comparison to other efforts in the genre (The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, City of Girls, etc), it doesn't stack up.

ACTRESS is a beautiful stream of conscience, a love letter to mothers and daughters and husbands. Written from the point of view of the daughter of a very famous Irish actress (think Elizabeth Taylor-esque), the writing is the star of this book. It is lyrical and heartfelt, and will sweep you up in it.

Katherine O’Dell lives a large life - it’s a bit stereotypically actress, but so dictates the title of this book. She is an amazing character, and I also really liked her daughter Norah, our narrator. She is coming to terms with her mother’s legacy, her secrets, and her mental illness. It almost feels more like a biography at some points, so don’t expect a large plot, but when Norah’s story comes through is when the novel truly sings. A solid 4 stars, and a beautiful piece of literature.

The writing in this book was gorgeous, but the book moves very slowly.

The book offers the story of writer Norah, who is working on a book and attempting to tell the story of why her mother, famous actress Katherine, shot a man who had previously been a friend.

The book meanders through the mother and daughter relationship while touching on how our identities are formed in so many ways and by so many small details.

I really wanted to like this book much better than I did.

The writing is very good, and I would love to see the author offer a more plot-driven book.

Thanks to NetGalley.com, the publisher and author for my ARC.

A story of a daughter trying to make sense of her life by understanding the mystery of her famous mother's life. Love and life and survival with all the messy humanness of it.

*ARC provided via #netgalley ⁣
⁣
Norah’s mother is the legendary Irish actress of the stage and screen, Katherine O’Dell. It has been several years after Katherine’s death, and Norah is seeking to have some unanswered questions solved regarding her mother’s past. Katherine, like many actresses of past and present, fought battles of sexism and other cruelties of fame. The story shifts between Katherine’s life and early career and Norah’s life in the present. ⁣
As much as I love the theatre, there were references to plays and actors that I honestly couldn’t differentiate between which were real and fake, but that isn’t a fault, mind you. The writer’s passion for her home country of Ireland shines on the pages, with lush descriptions of the landscape and the Irish way of life.

A narrative of general fiction that presumptively focuses on the complex aspects between mother and daughter but is told through an intriguing and imaginative plot line. Anne Enright lets her literary competence shine through with the eloquence of her writing. The story is astute, descriptive, and downright alluring. 5 stars


Thank you to #NetGalley and @W.W.Norton for granting my "wish". #Actress was read and reviewed voluntarily. All thoughts and opinions are my own.
Tarrah Marie (@wayward_readers)