In charge of the remote control

It’s rare that I find myself in the house alone and in charge of the remote control for the television, but that’s exactly what happened last Saturday evening.  So I took the opportunity to catch up on what my children call my ‘boring book programmes’.  I had recorded two episodes of the Sky Arts Book Show filmed earlier this year at the Dublin Book Festival and, miraculously, they were still there, undeleted to make way for multiple episodes of The Simpsons or The X Factor. The programmes included interviews with some of my favourite Irish authors: Colm Tóibín, Joseph O’Connor, Roddy Doyle, but most exciting of all, Anne Enright. I should come clean now and say that, as far as I’m concerned, Anne Enright can do no wrong. Nor did she disappoint on this occasion. I think most writers suffer from crises of confidence. We go through periods of time when we feel like we’re entirely out of kilter with the rest of the world. What we want to write doesn’t seem fashionable, or relevant, or desirable, or marketable, even to ourselves. We look around at other writers and think: ‘How does (s)he manage it? How come they seem to know what they’re doing?’ And then, we’re reminded of how lonely the writing process is for everyone, even for a Booker-prize winner. ‘The public business of your writerly reputation…’ she said on the show, ‘is something that’s interesting to negotiate but finally not useful to you at the desk.’ In other words, (in my interpretation) writing is a solitary business. You’re alone with a book for a long time before anyone gets to cast an opinion on it. You don’t really know what you’re doing until it’s done and then it’s too late to do anything about it. You have to somehow find a way to keep faith with it until then and that’s a difficult thing. But we do it, and then we do it again, and then we keep on doing it. We must be mad. Anne Enright is a brilliant writer and she talks such good, sound, common sense. Anne Enright for President of Ireland, I say!