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 comingof-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, both 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.
