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| Illustration by Alan Vest |
My writing day: Anne Enright
‘I am at the stage where everything is connected to this book, I keep bumping into it. I love this feeling’
Anne Enright
Fri 22 Apr 2016
9.00 Cup of coffee on the night table. Thank you!
9.20 Wake to drink cup of cold coffee. I am in Brooklyn. I have recovered from the jet lag, the winter vomiting bug and the stress of getting us all here, but it is still a bit of an adventure opening my eyes. I lie there, and try to figure out how to get my dressing gown out of the laundry basket upstairs without getting out of bed. Not as easy as you might think.
10.00 After a bit of exercise I go downstairs for scrambled eggs and a chat with daughter which starts well, takes a wonderful turn, and ends a bit teenaged. Run away to the study. I haven’t worked in a study for eight years, I have just been in the middle of things, or to one side. There’s a lot of guff written about Being Alone.
10.30 Email. Sort domestic crisis at home in Ireland, and teaching stuff in America, where the bureaucracy is endless: French translator, travel in the autumn, various requests. Shower, dress, do laundry, back to email. I never manage to write fiction in the morning. This is why I think mornings are wasted, and panic every afternoon.
12.30 Start back into my lecture on Maeve Brennan, due in two weeks. Am at the reading and dreaming stage. Rosalyn Tureck on the speakers, playing Bach. Ah, the life of the mind.
13.00 Start to write this instead. Much of my writing is done as a way of avoiding writing. This only works if you are always working, though.
13.30 Domestic crisis continues with spate of emails about two sets of the wrong keys 3,000 miles away. I text, make phone calls, email.
14.30 Kill internet.
14.45 Look out the window at thunderstorm. Four hours at the desk, no work done.
15.06 Go out and post keys to Ireland, express. Come back and find – bizarrely – another key crisis with child who, for some reason, is not at school.
15.40 Put music on, start to read Maeve Brennan, fail to read Maeve Brennan. Do laundry. Eat almonds and emergency, fuck-this chocolate. Child who is never at school stomps around looking for keys. Finds keys.
17.00 I appear to be reading properly and taking notes. Maeve Brennan was, in her later life, a borderline bag lady, either demented or psychotic. I am interested in when and how that future instability shows up in her smooth New Yorker prose. She did not have children – who drive me mad in a hundred small ways, I think, but also keep me, in the larger sense, sane.
17.32 Happy house. Happy writer. I follow a thought about Frank O’Connor, and another about envy – Brennan felt her father was jealous of her career as a writer, but the envy of a father for his daughter does not seem possible to me. I look up some old notes about envy for a novel that won’t get written – it is a great subject but it eats itself up, somehow. Distract myself into the very scant notes for another novel I have on a sheet of paper on the desk. Four words, each big with meaning. I don’t add a fifth.
I work out a chronology of Brennan’s life to set against the publication dates of her stories, so I can map the decline, and I feel lonely for the novel I am not writing yet. A stray reference pushes me back to it. I am at the stage where everything is connected to this book, I keep bumping into it. I love this feeling. I have learned how to put a book away for later, though there is always a slight anxiety it will be lost. Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart. Hope deferred makes the heart sick. Not my heart. I keep the book safe.
20.00 Sounds of dinner, child singing and playing ukelele. Internet restored after dinner in return for two wonderful songs.
21.00 Back to the study to read the papers and for general tooling about online but end up reading Brennan’s 1955 portrait of Siobhan McKenna and browsing the New Yorker archive. I write 100 words or so of something that isn’t anything. Maybe 200.
22.00 Bedtime stuff with offspring.
23.00 Dishes. Netflix. Two bottles of IPA. Chill.
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