Anne Enright’s best stuff for me is that clutch of impressionistic, unresolving pieces she had out in the New Yorker 2015ish or so. But I love the casual savagery of this one. Afterwards I felt like a tree branch cleft off by a storm – unsocketed, left hanging. Nobody does it like her.
First published in Taking Pictures, Jonathan Cape, 2008. Also available in Yesterday’s Weather, Vintage, 2009
An older sister roams back and forth in time, recalling various incidents from their shared childhood and youth, trying to understand the reasons for her younger sister’s death. She makes challenging statements like “anorexia was just starting then”, and “none of us liked my father, except Serena who was a little flirt from an early age”. Enright has an extraordinary ability to change focus. She describes the intimacy of a kiss where “All the sadness welled up into my face and into my lips”, and in the very next sentence she has zoomed right back out: “We went out for a while as if we hoped something good could come of it all.” The story is only eight pages long, but it becomes like a reel of cotton running away from the writer: “I am trying to stop this story, but it just won’t end.” The narrative voice is bitter as gall.
First published in Granta 75, Autumn 2001, and available to read online here [where, intriguingly or confusingly, it’s listed under Essay & Memoir – Ed.]. Collected in Taking Pictures, Jonathan Cape, 2008 and Yesterday’s Weather, Penguin 2017
There’s no such thing as a holiday when you’ve got young kids – it’s same shit, different location, with the added complication of being in unfamiliar surroundings (for them) and having to deal with the little buggers when they’re over-tired, over-excited, radged on sugar, or some deadly combination of all three, which they generally are for The Whole Fucking Time (you).
Anne Enright captures the experience in all its glorious misery in ‘Caravan’, which sees a mam, Michelle, going stir-crazy in the titular tin can as she attempts to deal with a Sisyphean pile of damp washing and keep her brood clean, fed, clothed and entertained, despairing all the while at how they pale in the shadow of the Perfect Family next door.
She’s a magnificent writer – incredibly subtle and perceptive, with a faultless ear for vernacular speech and an eye for the sort of tiny details that make her stories and characters feel 100% real; she’s also possessed of a devastatingly dry wit and wry sense of humour which she uses to excruciating effect here, especially in the conversation Michelle has with her kids in the car on the way home.
She’s best known for her novels (which are, it has to be said, astonishing in places), but her short stories are a treasure trove of tragi-comic delights and well worth seeking out.
First published in The Guardian, October 2007, and available to read online here; collected in Taking Pictures, Jonathan Cape, 2008, and Yesterday’s Weather, Vintage, 2009. Picked by Stu Hennigan. Stu is a writer, poet and musician from the north of England. His non-fiction book Ghost Signs: Poverty and the Pandemic is published by Bluemoose. You can read his individual Personal Anthology and other occasional selections here.
I read this story at a time when my children were of a similar age to the two children of the woman whose internal monologue carries it. ‘Caravan’ arrested me in an almost physical way. It was a kind of shock to me that a short story could capture so absolutely the push-pull and escaped-trapped feel of a family holiday with small children on a campsite in France.
There is much about this story that rang painfully true to me then, but still even now. It made we wince at the ordinary ache of it all. I have never forgotten the image it produced in my mind of Michelle backing out the door of their flimsy, temporary accommodation, cleaning cloth in hand, on their departure at the end. ‘Caravan’ has stayed with me from the moment I first finished it, and it lives on in my head.
First published in The Guardian, October 2007, and available to read online here; collected in Taking Pictures, Jonathan Cape, 2008
Anne Enright is unmatched when it comes to writing anger and forgiveness and getting on with things and the triumph of the everyday. In this story, a woman’s husband has been having an affair, as he has done several times before, each time returning home contrite and armed with suggestions for a weekend away. This time, however, the girl in question died in a car accident. The man is stunned, chiefly by his own ageing, while his wife is left to reassure the girl’s grave that she mattered to him.
The story shows how complicated ordinary life is. How savage, how careless we are with one another when we think we are invincible. How much we can hurt others in the pursuit of what we think we deserve. With typical Enright acerbity, the woman says, “It’s the great mystery, isn’t it? What men ‘want’. And the damage they might do to get it.”
It is possible to live and to love someone from within that crack between generosity and vengeance, the story tells us. Time may not heal, exactly, but it passes and we run out of steam, which can amount to the same thing. “How did we get through the next week?” the woman asks. “Normally, at a guess. We got through the week in a completely normal way.”
First published in Taking Pictures, Jonathan Cape, 2008. Also available in Yesterday’s Weather, Vintage, 2009
I actually only really like short stories with titles that remind me of REM songs. Probably should have led with that.
I could say a lot of stuff about this story, but it’s just really really good.
First published in The New Yorker, September 2020, and available to subscribers to read online here
I would like to be Anne Enright when I grow up, but I fear I may have missed my window. I love her sentences and perspicacity. I think she’s a short form artist really – her novels fall into segments, like oranges, and her essays are marvellous. ‘Here’s to Love’encapsulates many of the things I love best: the sharp dialogue, the unaffected, apparently artless structure, the gripping characters, the wit, and that pragmatic optimism which is also in the non-fiction.
“I still walk down the street most evenings. And every time I do this, I think about a bullet in the back – about the fact that most of the time, it does not happen to me,” says the protagonist: another mantra for me.
First published in The Guardian, December 2007 and collected in Taking Pictures (Jonathan Cape, 2008)
Post-Booker, when everyone was going on about The Gathering, I began my Anne Enright love affair in a roundabout fashion, via the short stories in this raw, funny, and take-no-prisoners collection. She knows all our secrets, and spills them.
First published in Taking Pictures (Jonathan Cape, 2008)
A Personal Anthology 