Actress - Anne Enright

Written by Anne Enright
Read by Anne Enright
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

Publisher: Recorded Books, Inc.
Release date: March 3, 2020
Duration: 08:04:22

A brilliant and moving novel about celebrity, sexual power, and a daughter’s search to understand her mother’s hidden truths.

Katherine O’Dell is an Irish theater legend. As her daughter, Norah, retraces her mother’s celebrated career and bohemian life, she delves into long-kept secrets, both her mother’s and her own. Katherine began her career on Ireland’s bus-and-truck circuit before making it to London’s West End, Broadway, and finally Hollywood. Every moment of her life is a performance, with young Norah standing in the wings. But the mother-daughter romance cannot survive Katherine’s past or the world’s damage.

With age, alcohol, and dimming stardom, Katherine’s grip on reality grows fitful. Fueled by a proud and long-simmering rage, she commits a bizarre crime. As Norah’s role gradually changes to Katherine’s protector, caregiver, and finally legacy-keeper, she revisits her mother’s life of fiercely kept secrets; and Norah reveals in turn the secrets of her own sexual and emotional coming of-age story. Her narrative is shaped by three braided searches—for her father’s identity; for her mother’s motive in donning a Chanel suit one morning and shooting a TV producer in the foot; and her own search for a husband, family, and work she loves. Bringing to life two generations of women with difficult sexual histories, both assaulted and silenced, either finding— or failing to find—their powers of recovery,

Actress touches a raw and timely nerve. With virtuosic storytelling and in prose at turns lyrical and knife-sharp, Anne Enright takes readers to the heart of the maddening yet tender love that binds a mother and daughter.

AudioFile..
“Listening is a real treat, especially for those who like to hear the author narrating. Man Booker Prizewinner Anne Enright’s delivery of her heartrending novel ranks with the best of author/narrator performances. Growing up with a beautiful mother is hard for any girl, but when her mother’s a famous, unpredictable actress, the psychological complexities are stunning. Enright voices Norah O’Dell, a novelist who is trying to capture the glossy enigma who was her mother. With Irish lilt in evidence, Enright is both mother–Katherine O’Dell, red-haired, troubled, golden voiced, “faux Irish”–and daughter–Norah, wife, mother, and novelist, who is trying to make sense of their terrible, wonderful mother-daughter relationship. Written with heart and intelligence, the story will carry listeners on a deeply emotional voyage”…. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award