Anne Enright's Blog, page 7

'Alice Munro is one of the greatest living writers, but she has always seemed to be almost a secret. Now everyone will know'

AS Byatt

This is the Nobel announcement that has made me happiest in the whole of my life. I remember reviewing Alice Munro in the Toronto Globe and Mail and saying she was as great as Chekhov, and the Canadians were surprised but happy. She has done more for the possibilities and the form of the short story than any other writer I know. You can never tell what she is going to say next – or what you the reader are going to feel next – from line to line. She appears to be in perfect control of her writing, but I interviewed her onstage once and she described how she writes enormously long versions of stories and then cuts them into shape. I admire this immensely. One of my favourite moments in her fiction comes in a story where a woman thinks of her day and then of her life as a series of things that have got to be done and are done: "not much to her credit to go through her life thinking, Well good, now that's over, that's over. What was she looking forward to, what bonus was she hoping to get, when this, and this, and this, was over?" One of her great gifts is recognising these peculiar – in some ways ludicrous – rhythms of mental life.

I belong to a distinguished club of passionate admirers of Munro. We all knew that she is one of the very greatest living writers, but she has always seemed to be almost a secret. Now everyone will know.

Anne Enright

It is tempting, on reading her stories, to think that Alice Munro is a modest writer and a likable one, but how do we know? She might be steely, fierce, ambitious as hell: she certainly, as five decades of short stories demonstate, knows how to stick to her guns. Besides, "modest" and "likable" are too pious and too small, as words go, to describe Munro's humane presence on the page. She is, as a writer, constantly, thoughtfully there; able to see her characters in all their faults, and to forgive those faults, or wonder at the possibility of forgiveness. Her narrators are like people you know. They are like you, actually – or a heightened, more perceptive version of you – the way they think about life, and realise things late, and carry on.

Short stories do not make any grandiose claims about truth and society. Munro's work has always posed a larger question about reputation itself; about how we break and remake the literary canon. That question was triumphantly answered by the Nobel prize. If her life's work proves anything, it is that the whole idea of "importance" means very little. Her stories do not ask for our praise, but for our attention. We feel, when we read them, less lonely than we were before.

Colm Tóibín

Alice Munro's genius is in the construction of the story. She has a way of suggesting, both in the cadences and the circumstances, that nothing much is going to happen, that her world is ordinary and her scope is small. And then in a story such as "Runaway", she manages to suggest a fierce loneliness, and begins to dramatise the most unusual motives and actions. Slowly, there is nothing ordinary at all. I would love to see her drafts, or the inside of her mind as she works, because my feeling is that this takes a great deal of erasing, adding, taking risks, pulling back, taking time. Her stories can be shocking and unnerving. I remember a few years ago arriving in Halifax and being told, as though it were hot news, that there was a new story by Munro in a magazine. A friend photocopied it for me and told me not to read it until I was in a comfort zone. This story was "Child's Play", which is forensic in its tone, at ease with cruelty and guilt, and tough, tough, but yet written using sentences of the most ordinary kind, and constructed with slow Chekhovian care.

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This account of Irish girlhood is an instant classic, says Anne Enright

About a third of the way in, I was discussing this book with my husband, who asked: "So is the author a genius or is she just very good?" "Well, she is definitely a genius," I said. "But I don't know how good she is, yet."

"Genius" was always a term that contained arguments about art and order and the relationship of the writer to society – whether he (there were no female contenders) was sacrifice or magus, mad artist or Great Novelist. There may be another argument here, if we had time to unpack it, about modernism and the rise of the middle classes. These days the middle classes are in decline and the term has gone out of fashion, though we still retain the sense of the genius as someone who is brilliantly "beyond"; who breaks the rules and plays the edge.

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This account of Irish girlhood is an instant classic, says Anne Enright

About a third of the way in, I was discussing this book with my husband, who asked: "So is the author a genius or is she just very good?" "Well, she is definitely a genius," I said. "But I don't know how good she is, yet."

"Genius" was always a term that contained arguments about art and order and the relationship of the writer to society – whether he (there were no female contenders) was sacrifice or magus, mad artist or Great Novelist. There may be another argument here, if we had time to unpack it, about modernism and the rise of the middle classes. These days the middle classes are in decline and the term has gone out of fashion, though we still retain the sense of the genius as someone who is brilliantly "beyond"; who breaks the rules and plays the edge.

Eimear McBride is that old fashioned thing, a genius, in that she writes truth-spilling, uncompromising and brilliant prose that can be, on occasion, quite hard to read. Here, for example, are the opening lines: "For you. You'll soon. You'll give her name. In the stitches of her skin she'll wear your say." If this kind of thing bores or frightens you, then there are many other wonderful books out there for you to enjoy. The adventurous reader, however, will find that they have a real book on their hands, a live one, a book that is not like any other.

A ranting, Catholic mother, a disabled brother and a pervy uncle: these may be bog-gothic standards of any Irish book season, but McBride brings passion and and distance with the voice of her highly dissociated protagonist, whose name we never get to hear. The "you" of the book is her older brother, whose brain was damaged by the removal of a tumour in infancy, and the love she has for him is a clean space in a soiled world. She imagines a strange underground, pre-sexual life for them together, "In burrows rabbits safe from rain … You and only me." The brother's condition makes him both cause and cure of all her guilt – and this is a novel soaked in guilt.

"Morning noon and night and this is what you do to me?" You can almost hear the blows in the rhythm of the words. The narrator's mother is deeply troubled and her childhood both chaotic and cruel. Puberty brings a power that is scarcely hers to control. After a sexual encounter with an uncle, she becomes that figure much loved by male fiction writers – the girl of uncertain background who lifts her skirt at school. The events of the book are simple and not so much described as powerfully evoked. Her grandfather dies, her brother's life goes downhill. Meanwhile, our heroine goes to college and pursues a career of shame and abandonment, seeking damage and defilement in a trail of sexual encounters that are anonymous, aimless and finally, horribly masochistic. "The answer to every single question is Fuck." Drink may be involved, but the way the narrator inhabits – or fails to inhabit – her own account feels more French than Irish. Marguerite Duras and Catherine Millet come to mind as much as Sean O'Reilly or Edna O'Brien. She is affectless and highly transgressive – in her attraction to an older man, in her need to become a debased object; to break through pleasure and protect herself from the disaster that is desire.

Or perhaps that disaster is present throughout, in the constant fragmentation of the syntax. There are moments when you long for the style to settle down, or evolve; the prose at 18 is just as broken as it was at five. But the style is also direct, simple and free of intertextual tricks and, after a while, the language becomes its own kind of object. The narrator is better at hearing things than telling them: there are riffs of reported speech and scraps of banter, and these are put to virtuoso use in building scenes and describing action. There is also, surprisingly, a strong storyline when, at the grandfather's funeral, what seemed aimless becomes completely gripping. This book is hard to read for the best reasons: everything about it is intense and difficult and hard-won.

The result is an instant classic – an account of Irish girlhood to be set alongside O'Brien's The Country Girls for emotional accuracy and verve, and the sense of its overwhelming necessity. A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing is completely modern in its sensibility and completely old-fashioned in the way it triumphantly ignores the needs of the book market. It took nine years, apparently, to find a publisher. Who forgot to tell Eimear McBride about the crisis we are in and about the solution to that crisis: compromise, dumb down, sell your soul?

• Anne Enright's The Forgotten Waltz is published by Vintage.

FictionAnne Enright
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Diana Athill, Margaret Atwood, Julian Barnes, Anne Enright, Howard Jacobson, Will Self and Lionel Shriver reflect on their own disappointments in life, love and work

• Diana Athill: 'It is possible to make use of failure, and forget it'
• Margaret Atwood: 'Get back on the horse that threw you'
• Julian Barnes: 'Success to one person can be failure to another'
• Ann Enright: 'Failure is what writers do. It is built in'
• Howard Jacobson: 'You have to see failure as an opportunity'
• Will Self: 'People say my writing is dreadful and pretentious'
• Lionel Shriver: 'No one wants to buy a book about disappointment'

Diana Athill

From the age of 22 to that of about 39 I knew myself to be a failure. For many of those years I was not positively unhappy, because I was doing work I enjoyed, was fond of my friends and often had quite a good time; but if at any moment I stood back to look at my life and pass judgment on it, I saw that it was one of failure. That is not an exaggeration. I clearly remember specific moments when I did just that. They were bleak moments. But they did lead to a subdued kind of pride at having learned how to exist in this condition – indeed, at having become rather good at it.

The reason for it was banal. Having fallen in love when I was 15, and become engaged to marry the man I loved three years later, I had known exactly what my future was to be. As soon as I finished my education at Oxford (not before, because I was enjoying it so much) we would be married. I would join him wherever he happened to be stationed (he was an officer in the RAF) and my life as a wife would begin. I didn't doubt for a moment that it would be happy. My childhood and teenage years had been very happy so I was a young woman who expected the answer "Yes". And then, not suddenly, but with excruciating slowness, I got the answer "No".

He was stationed in Egypt. After three months he stopped answering my letters. His silence endured for month after month, reducing me to a swamp of incredulous misery, until at last a letter came, asking me to release him from our engagement because he was marrying someone else. Like, I am sure, most young women at that time, I had seen giving my life over to a man, living his life, as "happiness". Doing that was what, as a woman, I was for. And this I had failed to do. I did, of course, see that the man had behaved badly, cruelly in fact, in leaving me in limbo without any explanation for so long, until (I guessed) being advised that he ought to guard against me "making trouble". But I was so thoroughly the victim of current romantic attitudes that, in spite of that recognition, I was unable to withstand a sickening feeling that a woman worth her salt would have been too powerfully attractive to allow this disaster to happen. And I was not that woman.

I was saved from total loss of self-confidence by the solid happiness of my childhood and teens; but my sexual self-confidence was wiped out. For most of my 20s and 30s I equated love with pain, plunged into hopeless relationships and staggered out of them further reduced, so that I became almost invisible to men. Though presentable, my looks had never been those of a "trophy" woman, so I needed to make an impression in other ways – and I didn't do so. Many years that might have been good ones were turned grey, but they did force me into some very useful knowledge: I learned that it is perfectly possible for a woman to live her own life, not someone else's, her value does not, in fact, depend on how she is seen by a man. And the clearer this became to me, the more colour was restored to my life. Bit by bit, enjoyable sex crept back into it. A romantic commitment to passion never came back, but physical pleasure did, and then the reliable warmth of friendly love – and something else happened, just as important or perhaps even more so: I discovered that I could write.

It was the writing that really put an end to failure. In the early 1960s nine stories "happened" to me. I say "happened" because I did not decide to write them, but suddenly felt a peculiar sort of itch, which produced them. One of them won the Observer's short-story prize. I was told that I'd won it on my birthday, in December, and having submitted the story in March I had forgotten about it. The news was astounding, and became even more so when I went to collect my cheque and they kindly offered to show me the room in which all the entries were stored: two thousand of them. Two thousand stories, and mine had been judged the best! I understood at once what had happened, and it was by far the best part of a lovely experience: that dreary bedrock under the surface of my life was no longer there, and off I could go into happiness. Almost at once I started the most satisfying relationship of my life, which lasted for 40 years until it was ended by the illness of the man I was living with. When sometimes during those years I stood back and passed judgment on my life, I saw it as happy. And that is still true, because when love-happiness faded out, writing-happiness took over. I had enjoyed writing three books during the 1960s and early 70s, and had then, with only mild regret, ceased to write. After retiring from my job as a publisher I started again, and the three books – plus a collection of letters that I have written and published since I was 80 (I am now 95) – have gone surprisingly well, well enough to astonish me, and to please me a great deal. Success in old age, when things have stopped really mattering, has a frivolous sort of charm unlike anything one experiences in middle age. It feels like a deliciously surprising treat. Perhaps as one advances into second childhood one recovers something of first childhood's appetite for treats. Whatever the nature of the feeling, it allows me to state that it is possible to recover from failure: to digest it, make use of it and forget it. Which is something to remember if you happen to be experiencing it.

Margaret Atwood

Failure is just another name for much of real life: much of what we set out to accomplish ends in failure, at least in our own eyes. Who set the bar so high that most of our attempts to sail gracefully over it on the viewless wings of Poesy end in an undignified scramble or a nasty fall into the mud? Who told us we had to succeed at any cost?

But my own personal failure list? It's a long one. Sewing failures, to begin with. The yellow shortie coat with the lopsided hem I crafted when I was 12? It made me look like a street waif, and caused my mother to hide her eyes every time I ventured out the door in it. Or maybe you'd prefer a few academic failures? My bad Latin mark in Grade 12, my 51 in Algebra? Or my failure to learn touch-typing: now that had consequences.

But such adolescent slippages come within the normal range. Something more epic, perhaps? A failed novel? Much time expended, many floor-pacings and scribblings, nothing achieved; or, as they say in Newfoundland, a wet arse and no fish caught.

There have been several of those. Let's take Blakeney, Norfolk, in the winter of 1983. We'd gone there to write and watch birds; the second activity was most successful, but the first was a washout. I had some complicated fictional scheme in mind, and was pursuing it in a cobblestone ex-fisherman's cottage with cold stone floors, a balky Aga, and a tiny, smoky fireplace I never did master. My plot involved various time layers and improbable interweavings of badly realised characters, and the digging up of Mayan eccentric flints – that's what they're called – in a part of Mesoamerica I knew little about. What had set me off on this track, a track that became narrower and narrower and finally petered out in a field bestrewn with burdocks and cow pats?

I soon gave up on the eccentric flints, but I had to put in the time somehow because I had such a lovely (though cold) workspace. So I would read through the accumulation of Jean Plaidy novels left by generations of summer visitors, thus adding to my already excessive stock of Tudor lore. Then I'd walk back to where we were living – a rectory haunted by nuns, allegedly – and put my chilled feet up on the fender, thus developing chilblains. Perhaps it was those six months of futile striving, tangled novelistic timelines, rotten Tudors, and chilblains that caused me to break through some invisible wall, because right after that I grasped the nettle I had been avoiding, and began to write The Handmaid's Tale'.

Get back on the horse that threw you, as they used to say. They also used to say: you learn as much from failure as you learn from success.

Julian Barnes

When I was growing up, failure presented itself as something clear and public: you failed an exam, you failed to clear the high-jump bar. And in the grown-up world, it was the same: marriages failed, your football team failed to gain promotion from what was then the Third Division (South). Later, I realised that failure could also be private and hidden: there was emotional, moral, sexual failure; the failure to understand another person, to make friends, to say what you meant. But even in these new areas, the binary system applied: win or lose, pass or fail. It took me a long time to understand the nuances of success and failure, to see how they are often intertwined, how success to one person is failure to another.

I was a tardy arrival in literary London – in my late 20s when I started freelancing, my early 30s when I got my first desk job. It was a largely male environment, and far more competitive than I had imagined from the outside. I looked around and fairly soon identified those I admired and those I didn't. I needed both role models and failure models: one sort to imitate, another as warning. There were a fair number of failure models on view: the drunk, the incompetent, the placemen and the pompous. I was astonished to find that it was possible to spend your life surrounded by great literature and remain (or become) paralysed by snobbery. One senior literary gent took me to his club for lunch, and on the steps afterwards, apropos of nothing except a display of his own worldliness, explained that one should never "pursue an illicit liaison" within the space "from the Embankment to the Euston Road, and from the Gray's Inn Road to Regent Street". It was for such advice, I reflected, that young men take up book reviewing.

I used to whisper to myself, "Don't fuck up like X, don't fuck up like Y." Early on, I knew that the primal sin of the artistic life was the sin against your own talent. There was a particular X whom I didn't want to fuck up like. He was a generation above me, and I probably took him as a counter-example because he too had been a scholarship boy and a Francophile. In his early years he had published very good poetry and some fiction; he was handsome and witty. By the time I met him, he was a just-about-functioning alcoholic, who used to say – the old drunkard's excuse – that life was simply more interesting when you drank; sobriety was boring. His prose remained elegant while his life became crumpled. His diet appeared to consist mainly of vodka, Special Brew and Gauloises. His marriage had "failed" – by now I was putting the verb in quotes, as some of my own contemporaries' marriages were already collapsing. He had two children, lived on his own in a council flat, and eked out a living from a weekly column. He could be charming company; he could be a pain in the arse to work with. Don't fuck up like X, I would repeat to myself.

Our ways parted. Occasionally he would telephone, usually when drunk, always for a trivial purpose – help with a crossword puzzle or competition clue – though also (I guessed) with the deeper purpose of combating loneliness. After one long, rambling, solipsistic intro, he finally asked me, "Why am I ringing you, love? Why am I ringing you?" Exasperatedly, I replied, "Because you've reached B in your address book."

More years passed. He got the sack from his weekly column. His byline appeared sporadically. I heard that he had quit the booze, and was trying to quit smoking. He was down to 17 a day, and to encourage self-discipline used to keep a note of each time he lit up. He had become increasingly hermetic, using any excuse not to leave his flat. Then there was silence; then I heard that he had died – alone of course. They worked out the probable hour of death from the last entry in his smoking log.

I went to the funeral. Some of his early, highly skilled poems were read out, and I was saddened again by the subsequent offence against his talent. Then others spoke. Finally, his son and daughter addressed the small gathering. They had turned out well; both were charming and intelligent. They spoke with proper roundedness and affection for their father; the daughter described how he had coached her to get into Cambridge, how patient and helpful he had been. It was very touching. And I had been wrong, or had only partly understood. As I left the crematorium for the wake, I was saying to myself – and to him – "No, you didn't fuck up after all."

Anne Enright

I have no problem with failure - it is success that makes me sad. Failure is easy. I do it every day, I have been doing it for years. I have thrown out more sentences than I ever kept, I have dumped months of work, I have wasted whole years writing the wrong things for the wrong people. Even when I am pointed the right way and productive and finally published, I am not satisfied by the results. This is not an affectation, failure is what writers do. It is built in. Your immeasurable ambition is eked out through the many thousand individual words of your novel, each one of them written and rewritten several times, and this requires you to hold your nerve for a very long period of time – or forget about holding your nerve, forget about the wide world and all that anxiety and just do it, one word after the other. And then redo it, so it reads better. The writer's great and sustaining love is for the language they work with every day. It may not be what gets us to the desk but it is what keeps us there and, after 20 or 30 years, this love yields habit and pleasure and necessity.

So. All this is known. In the long run we are all dead, and none of us is Proust. You must recognise that failure is 90% emotion, 10% self-fulfilling reality, and the fact that we are haunted by it is neither here nor there.The zen of it is that success and failure are both an illusion, that these illusions will keep you from the desk, they will spoil your talent; they will eat away at your life and your sleep and the way you speak to the people you love.

The problem with this spiritual argument is that success and failure are also real. You can finish a real book and it can be published or not, sell or not, be reviewed or not. Each one of these real events makes it easier or harder to write, publish, sell the next book. And the next. And the one after that. If you keep going and stay on the right side of all this, you can be offered honours and awards, you can be recognised in the street, you can be recognised in the streets of several countries, some of which do not have English as a native language. You can get some grumpy fucker to say that your work is not just successful but important, or several grumpy fuckers, and they can say this before you are quite dead. And all this can happen, by the way, whether or not your work is actually good, or still good. Success may be material but is also an emotion – one that is felt, not by you, but by the crowd. This is why we yearn for it, and can not have it, quite. It is not ours to hold.

I am more comfortable with the personal feeling that is failure than with the exposure of success. I say this even though I am, Lord knows, ambitious and grabby, and I want to be up there with the rest of them. Up! There!

The sad thing is, when the flash bulbs do pop and fade, you are left, in the pulsing after-light, with a keen sense of how unhappy people can be with what they have achieved in life. Perfectly successful people. With perfectly good lives. And you come to appreciate the ones who have figured all that shit out. Meanwhile, and briefly, you are a "success", which is to say an object, whether of envy or acclaim. Some people like all that, but I, for reasons I have not yet figured out, find it difficult. I don't want to be an object. I find jealousy unpleasant (because it is unpleasant). I resist praise.

The writer's life is one of great privilege, so "Suck it up", you might say – there are more fans than trolls. But there are two, sometimes separate, ambitions here. One is to get known, make money perhaps and take a bow – to be acknowledged by that dangerous beast, the crowd. The other is to write a really good book.

And a book is not written for the crowd, but for one reader at a time. A novel is written (rather pathetically) not to be judged, but experienced. You want to meet people in their own heads – at least I do. I still have this big, stupid idea that if you are good enough and lucky enough you can make an object that insists on its own subjective truth, a personal thing, a book that shifts between its covers and will not stay easy on the page, a real novel, one that lives, talks, breathes, refuses to die. And in this, I am doomed to fail.

Howard Jacobson

It starts early. You can come into the world smugly trailing clouds of glory, already sainted in the life before life, or you can enter it reluctantly and ashamed, helpless, naked, piping loud – Blake's baby not Wordsworth's, at the first sight of whom your mother groans, your father weeps. I was a Blake baby. I failed birth. I kept my mother waiting, arriving not just late but at a peculiar angle. I caused her pain and disappointed my father, who didn't weep exactly but would have liked his first child to have a more relaxed attitude to existence, though this was made plain to me only gradually, after years of his entering me in talent contests whenever we went on holiday to Morecambe, or pushing me up to join other kids on stage at the end of pantomimes, or shouting "Here!" and pointing to me when magicians asked for volunteers.

Success for him didn't mean making money or excelling at anything in particular – it simply meant being at home in the world and fearing nothing. So it wasn't because he wanted me to be a footballer or a cricketer that he objected to the notes my mother wrote every Wednesday, requesting I be excused from games. He would just have liked me to be everybody's friend, the way he was. And I failed him. I failed my mother too by taking far too precocious an interest in sex. And I failed myself by not knowing how to get any.

But you have to see failure as an opportunity. I took the route favoured by all worldly failures and became a spiritual success. That might be an inflated way of putting it, but failures are nothing if not grandiose. If the world doesn't value us, we won't value the world. We seek solace in books, in solitary and sometimes fantastical thinking, in doing with words what boys who please their fathers do with balls. We look down on what our fellows like, and make a point of liking what our fellows don't. We become special by virtue of not being special enough. I doubt many writers were made any other way.

Art is made by those who consider themselves to have failed at whatever isn't art. And of course it is loved as consolation, or a call to arms, by those who feel the same. One of the reasons there seem to be fewer readers for literature today than there were yesterday is that the concept of failure has been outlawed. If we are all beautiful, all clever, all happy, all successes in our way, what do we want with the language of the dispossessed?

But the nature of failure ensures that writers will go on writing no matter how many readers they have.You have to master the embarrassments and ignominies of life. And, paradoxically, one of the best ways of achieving this mastery over failure is not to drown it in alcohol, not to take pills or see a shrink, but to relive it, over and over, in words. It isn't that the words enable you to change the outcome and exact revenge – that invariably makes unsatisfactory reading. You can tell when writers are reinventing their experience vaingloriously. What writers at their best achieve is a saturation of shame, triumphing over it by excluding or extenuating nothing, possessing it as theirs, and handing it back again, depersonalised, in comedy of one sort or another.

The first novel I wrote had failure as a subject. My hero was failing to write a book about it. Had he succeeded in finishing I'd have had to write about success and I knew I never wanted to do that. It would have been a kind of sacrilege. Success as the worldly estimate it is, is rarely a subject for literature. Gatsby cannot possibly get Daisy. Dorothea Brooke cannot be allowed to change the world. Thus does art get its own back on those without the imagination to fail.

Will Self

To attempt to write seriously is always, I feel, to fail – the disjunction between my beautifully sonorous, accurate and painfully affecting mental content, and the leaden, halting sentences on the page always seems a dreadful falling short. It is this failure – a ceaseless threnody keening through the writing mind – that dominates my working life, just as an overweening sense of not having loved with enough depth or recklessness or tenderness dominates my personal one. It follows that to continue writing is to accept failure as simply a part of the experience – it's often said that all political lives end in failure, but all writing ones begin there, endure there, and then collapse into senescent incoherence.

I prize this sense of failure – embrace it even. As a child I loved a John Glashan cartoon that showed a group of meths drinkers lying around on the floor of a squat. "Anyone can be a success," one of them was saying, "but it takes real guts to be a failure." Clearly I intuited what was coming. When anyone starts out to do something creative – especially if it seems a little unusual – they seek approval, often from those least inclined to give it. But a creative life cannot be sustained by approval, any more than it can be destroyed by criticism – you learn this as you go on.

People say my writing is dreadful, pretentious, self-seeking shit – they say it a lot. Other people say my writing is brilliant, beautifully crafted and freighted with the most sublime meaning. The criticism, no matter how virulent, has long since ceased to bother me, but the price of this is that the praise is equally meaningless. The positive and the negative are not so much self-cancelling as drowned out by that carping, hectoring internal voice that goads me on and slaps me down all day every day.

It follows, I'm afraid, that what we might call institutional success – prizes, fellowships, honours – also seems pretty irrelevant to me. I may think those who accept them gladly are being hopelessly infra dig, but I still envy them: to believe that worldly success is the great desideratum is, in one way at least, to be at home in the world – something I am not. And then there are those who both believe in the verdict of posterity, and also believe – somewhat paradoxically – that they have already achieved it. In the literary world this consists in having your works taught on school and university syllabuses, and a body of secondary critical literature beginning to coalesce around them. Some poor fools, at this point in their careers, get a pharaonic delusion that they are being interred in the canonical Cheops while they yet breathe. We've all seen the symptoms of this: a tendency to the oracular appears both in print and in person; the writer also is tempted to speak about themselves in the third person – or write memoirs in the second. An unavoidable sequel of the posterity delusion is the death of the writerly self, which depends too much on incoherence and inconsistency to remain pompous for long. And of course, the vast majority of today's mummified immortals are tomorrow's Ozymandiases.

No, this is the paradox for me: in failure alone is there any possibility of success. I don't think I'm alone in this – nor do I think it's an attitude that only prevails among people whose work is obviously "creative". On the contrary, it often occurs to me that since what successes I do manage are both experienced and felt entirely in solitude, there must be many others who are the same as me: people for whom life is a process to be experienced, not an object to be coveted. There may be, as Bob Dylan says, no success like failure, but far from failure being no success at all, in its very visceral intensity, it is perhaps the only success there is.

Lionel Shriver

As if the story of the book itself were fated to duplicate the story inside the book, my sixth novel, Double Fault, was purchased by Doubleday in 1997 with great fanfare, yet in hardback sold so poorly that no house bid for the paperback until many years later. At core, that book is about failure – a subject about which, as a struggling writer, I'd grown depressingly expert. Hungry for both fantasy and inspiration, readers crave protagonists who, after overcoming seemingly insurmountable obstacles, triumph at the end of the day. No one wanted to buy a book about disappointment.

Yet most people fail. In the big picture, few of our careers live up to the dreams we nursed when we were young. In fact, one underside of success is that it's nearly always penultimate, and so every accomplishment merely raises the bar. Each new success conjures new standards we can't meet, thereby inventing ingenious new ways to fail. I've not been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, and may never be. My latest novel missed the Times top 10 bestseller list by 46 copies. Most of the reviews were good, but they weren't all good. It's a doddle to locate a perspective from which I am still failing.

Even in the little picture, failure is commonplace. Our team loses the pub quiz, or we're slaughtered in a game of squash. A job interview goes badly, or we burn the lasagne. A joke falls flat. Letting ourselves down in some fashion is such an integral part of daily life that the paucity of literature on the subject is baffling. There are scads of self-help books on how to succeed, but I've never come across a single one on how to contend with not succeeding – which is more the form for practically everybody, right?

I'm fascinated by failure, a far more difficult experience to ride out with grace than victory, which tends to bring out the best in all but gloating arseholes: magnanimity, generosity, ease, confidence, joy, relaxation, energy, festivity, and a positive outlook. In contrast, failure naturally elicits bitterness, resentment, dolour, enervation, listlessness, pessimism and low self‑esteem – a pretty ugly package.

Yet, against the odds, it's possible to fail well – to rise above the unpleasant basket of emotions that come with the territory and to not allow disappointment to sour one's very soul. I am bowled over by the massive number of remarkable people who face down the fact that no, they are not going to be film directors, famous artists or billionaire entrepreneurs and still come out the other side as cheerful, decent, gracious human beings. As emotional achievements go, that is much more impressive than making a go of something and avoiding becoming a complete jerk.

The trajectory of my own career as a novelist is sometimes held up as an example of perseverance, since six commercial duds were finally followed by a proper bestseller. Looking back, I'm torn on whether for a dozen years I "failed well". I was often glum, and I nursed my share of resentments. But I guess I still made my partner a decent dinner every night, and I wasn't relentlessly crap company. I kept writing books, even if no one bought them. Because my black years were artistically productive, it's tempting to romanticise them. That would be a mistake.

I do think that very early success is more bane than boon, and not having had my career handed to me on a plate must have been good for me, not only as a writer but as a person. Nevertheless, those were dark times – getting my hopes up for one manuscript after another and having them dashed. It wasn't ennobling. True, after having carved out a little place for myself in the world, I am probably a warmer woman with a lighter spirit, but that may not be to my credit. We celebrate success, hope for the best, and admire determination. So we shy from acknowledging that there's a point at which it's pretty clear that whatever it is we're so determined to achieve is not going to happen. In which case, why keep beating our heads against the wall? There's something to be said for giving up. Hell, maybe there's such a thing as "giving up well", too.

FictionMargaret AtwoodLionel ShriverDiana AthillJulian BarnesAnne EnrightHoward JacobsonWill SelfDiana AthillJulian BarnesAnne EnrightHoward JacobsonWill SelfMargaret AtwoodLionel Shriver
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Anne Enright on Alice Munro's collection of subtle short stories

I remember a conversation I had about Alice Munro with a Canadian, 30 years ago, that was, for reasons I could not quite figure, a bit sticky. It took me a while to realise he thought Munro wrote about the lives of women in rural Ontario – which she did, of course – and this was why he didn't like her work so much. He didn't like it because of Ontario.

It stayed with me, as a kind of deliberate smallness about what writers do. Thirty years ago, in Canada, people thought Munro was writing about what it was like to be a woman in rural Ontario, and that this was territory they knew something about. Because rural Ontario was not just a flat place with some farmers and small towns, it was a set of ideas about itself, and these ideas could be owned and disputed and placed in the balance. Is this what Ontario is actually like? Are there, perhaps, more important things to be said about Ontario – or, indeed, about being a woman, in 1982? Also, by the way, are there more important books to be written about being Canadian: ones about men and grizzly bears, ones about immigrant communities in Toronto?

No disrespect to the good people of Ontario, but it is now pretty clear that Munro was just using them in order to write about the human condition. Her work is, in this regard, steadfast. Her characters are bare and true. It is also the case that she could not have done this so well without rural Ontario, in all its ordinary, fascinating particularity.

Before anyone calls a lawyer, it is important to say that the Ontario woman whose life she plunders most is herself. It is a chilly business, writing well: even the writer does not know how much is selfishness and how much generosity. Munro has calibrated to perfection the intimate distance that exists between writer and reader. She holds back in order to give us more.

Although she has lived in other cities, Munro returned many years ago to the landscape of her childhood, and her home is 20 miles from where she went to school. She lives, like her characters, in a stable, small-town world, where it is possible to know certain things about people and to be surprised by what they do next. Here she is, talking to an interviewer about a plane, spotted in a local field: "The man who owned that farm," she says, "had a hobby of flying planes, and he had a little plane of his own. He never liked farming so he got out of it and became a flight instructor. He's still alive. In perfect health and one of the handsomest men I've ever known. He retired from flight instruction when he was 75. Within maybe three months of retirement he went on a trip and got some odd disease you get from bats in caves."

This description is – almost – already a short story. You can see how a life like this might linger in her writer's mind, waiting for the extra thing, the alchemy. Or you can see her working on a story and stalling; waiting for the emotion, or gesture, or turning point, to which a farming flight instructor is the suddenly obvious key.

In a known landscape, every house asks and answers the question "what happened here?" By leaving and then returning to the countryside of her childhood, Munro has stocked and then restocked her mind with other people's choices, fates, furniture, budgets, realisations and regrets. The "natural" shape of her stories comes from a sense of the way life goes. Time reveals. Things "turn out". We know how they turn out because people do not disappear, or not for long. In fact, you can't get away from people, in these stories. Even the ones you thought had wandered off show up again, if only to be avoided, if only as a voice in the next room.

This sense of circumference is possibly one of the reasons she writes stories and not novels. There is also an uncertainty about how things are. Munro is interested in how we get things wrong. Age she says, changes your perceptions "of what has happened – not just what can happen but what really has happened". One of the ways her stories "turn out" is simply "different to what the main character thought all along". The story forms a new circumference, but it is not a new trap. "I feel so released," says Belle, in "Train", when the strangeness and ether of a hospital operation makes her remember and then tell the story of her father's death. "It's not that I don't feel the tragedy, but I have got outside the tragedy, is what I mean. It is just the mistakes of humanity."

Munro is now in her 80s. The timelines in her stories have become longer, and the sense of fatedness has stretched to match. Some of the stories in her new collection, Dear Life, begin with the cultural and economic shift that happened after the second world war and end anytime around now. It is as though the events of that time loosened peoples lives up just enough to make them their own.

The past resurfaces constantly in these tales; there is no escaping it, or its sense of consequence. But the past doesn't just catch up with Munro's characters, it also exists, quite peaceably, behind the present. A character, walking down a street, sees what used to be there very clearly. "Housewives who had finished washing the dishes and sweeping up the kitchen for the last time that day, men who had coiled up the hose after giving the grass a soaking." In fact, the present is slightly less vivid to her since "every single person is inside with their fans on or their air conditioning".

Munro is amazed by the effects of time. It is not difficult to remember the past so much as to believe that things were like that once. Belle talks about her warm sponge bath as an adolescent, how she washed in a basin that had no plumbing, so the plughole drained out to a bucket. In "To Reach Japan" Greta tries to explain what it was like for women in the early 1960s, when having a serious idea "or maybe even reading a real book, could be seen as suspect, having something to do with your child's getting pneumonia".

We can never fit back in to our former selves. Change may be the central mystery in Munro's stories, but her approach is pretty secular (or at least low church). Although she shares Flannery O'Connor's interest in the gothic, there is very little use of epiphany, transcendence, metamorphosis or even metaphor. Although her characters suffer the occasional interventions of fate, Munro is most interested in the slow changes that time itself wreaks; the difference a new road makes, the reality of wooden houses giving way to brick and brick to concrete. She is interested in how we make our lives, as much as how we escape them; the degree to which we are connected, or alone.

This swirl of people around each other – where no character is truly lost – is a cause of both fascination and anxiety for Munro. This anxiety becomes critical when it comes to children, who disappear with some frequency in her work, and sometimes die. One of her most anthologised stories is "Miles City Montana", first published in 1985, in which a father hauls his baby daughter from the water, after a moments's inattention by a swimming pool. The baby's sister is distracted by the lifeguard and her boyfriend, who are kissing. The baby's mother, stretching her legs after a long drive, is distracted by the "poorest details of the world" in this strange town; "their singleness and their precise location and the forlorn coincidence of your being there to see them". She is, let's face it, "being" a writer, or at least thinking like one, when the "ever ready guilt" causes her to startle and check for her daughter. "To Reach Japan" in this collection is also about maternal guilt and a wandering toddler. This time the mother is doing the kissing (adulterously, on a train) as well as the imagining and noticing and writing. Greta has run off for a few months to be a poet, or a bohemian, or to sleep with a newspaper columnist, which in the 60s was all sort of the same thing.

Munro has spoken about her need to write when her children were small. "Some part of me was absent for those children, and children detect things like that … When my oldest daughter was about two, she'd come to where I was sitting at the typewriter, and I would bat her away with one hand and type with the other. I've told her that. This was bad because it made her the adversary to what was most important to me."

It is not clear why a child should be threatened by the work a writer does, as opposed to, say, the work a cook does (who might just as easily bat a child away), or why a mother's imaginings are, in Munro's fiction, such an invitation to disaster. There is no reason why a child should be on the same hierarchy of importance as a story, they are not the same kind of creature. But there it is. Munro makes fiction from her anxiety about making fiction, that mixture of distraction and attention, absence and desire.

But more than this, a kind of absence is essential to Munro's work. It would be wrong to say there is an absence at the heart of it – that would sound aggrieved – but there is nothing wrong with holding yourself a little in reserve. A slight sense of withholding gives Munro's prose its gracefulness, and allows intimacy without danger. After many years, many collections and many wonderful stories, readers may feel they know everything about Alice Munro, especially as so many of her characters lead lives similar to her own. In fact, we know very little about her. This is one of the reasons readers become dizzy with love for Munro. This other reason is that she is so damn good.

These stories are difficult to read because the writer is so alert to her own mortality, and as honest as ever. The last section of the book, which is "autobiographical in feeling, though not, sometimes, entirely so in fact" has a sombre preamble. "I believe they are the first and last – and the closest – things I have to say about my own life."

These four short autobiographical pieces are beautifully written and give some insight into Munro's formation as a writer. The uncanny doubling of the title piece "Dear Life" makes us think of lives we might have led, or endings we might have endured. "The Eye" shows how reality cedes to imagination in the face of death. Munro tells us a little about her process; how real life throws up details that are too loud for fiction, such as a loose woman's orange dress, or details that lead nowhere, such as the man from her childhood who bore the "troll's name" of Roly Grain. We see her as a child, rehearsing her skills with her younger sister, taking on the role "of sophisticated counsellor or hair-raising story-teller". These are fascinating pieces, but they are also, as she says herself, "not quite short stories" and though I count myself as one of the people most interested in this writer on planet Earth, I find, to my surprise that they do not hold me in the same way – it is Munro's stories that I want; not her, after all.

• Anne Enright's The Forgotten Waltz is published by Vintage.

FictionShort storiesAlice MunroAnne Enright
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Anne Enright on Alice Munro's collection of subtle short stories

I remember a conversation I had about Alice Munro with a Canadian, 30 years ago, that was, for reasons I could not quite figure, a bit sticky. It took me a while to realise he thought Munro wrote about the lives of women in rural Ontario – which she did, of course – and this was why he didn't like her work so much. He didn't like it because of Ontario.

It stayed with me, as a kind of deliberate smallness about what writers do. Thirty years ago, in Canada, people thought Munro was writing about what it was like to be a woman in rural Ontario, and that this was territory they knew something about. Because rural Ontario was not just a flat place with some farmers and small towns, it was a set of ideas about itself, and these ideas could be owned and disputed and placed in the balance. Is this what Ontario is actually like? Are there, perhaps, more important things to be said about Ontario – or, indeed, about being a woman, in 1982? Also, by the way, are there more important books to be written about being Canadian: ones about men and grizzly bears, ones about immigrant communities in Toronto?

No disrespect to the good people of Ontario, but it is now pretty clear that Munro was just using them in order to write about the human condition. Her work is, in this regard, steadfast. Her characters are bare and true. It is also the case that she could not have done this so well without rural Ontario, in all its ordinary, fascinating particularity.

Before anyone calls a lawyer, it is important to say that the Ontario woman whose life she plunders most is herself. It is a chilly business, writing well: even the writer does not know how much is selfishness and how much generosity. Munro has calibrated to perfection the intimate distance that exists between writer and reader. She holds back in order to give us more.

Although she has lived in other cities, Munro returned many years ago to the landscape of her childhood, and her home is 20 miles from where she went to school. She lives, like her characters, in a stable, small-town world, where it is possible to know certain things about people and to be surprised by what they do next. Here she is, talking to an interviewer about a plane, spotted in a local field: "The man who owned that farm," she says, "had a hobby of flying planes, and he had a little plane of his own. He never liked farming so he got out of it and became a flight instructor. He's still alive. In perfect health and one of the handsomest men I've ever known. He retired from flight instruction when he was 75. Within maybe three months of retirement he went on a trip and got some odd disease you get from bats in caves."

This description is – almost – already a short story. You can see how a life like this might linger in her writer's mind, waiting for the extra thing, the alchemy. Or you can see her working on a story and stalling; waiting for the emotion, or gesture, or turning point, to which a farming flight instructor is the suddenly obvious key.

In a known landscape, every house asks and answers the question "what happened here?" By leaving and then returning to the countryside of her childhood, Munro has stocked and then restocked her mind with other people's choices, fates, furniture, budgets, realisations and regrets. The "natural" shape of her stories comes from a sense of the way life goes. Time reveals. Things "turn out". We know how they turn out because people do not disappear, or not for long. In fact, you can't get away from people, in these stories. Even the ones you thought had wandered off show up again, if only to be avoided, if only as a voice in the next room.

This sense of circumference is possibly one of the reasons she writes stories and not novels. There is also an uncertainty about how things are. Munro is interested in how we get things wrong. Age she says, changes your perceptions "of what has happened – not just what can happen but what really has happened". One of the ways her stories "turn out" is simply "different to what the main character thought all along". The story forms a new circumference, but it is not a new trap. "I feel so released," says Belle, in "Train", when the strangeness and ether of a hospital operation makes her remember and then tell the story of her father's death. "It's not that I don't feel the tragedy, but I have got outside the tragedy, is what I mean. It is just the mistakes of humanity."

Munro is now in her 80s. The timelines in her stories have become longer, and the sense of fatedness has stretched to match. Some of the stories in her new collection, Dear Life, begin with the cultural and economic shift that happened after the second world war and end anytime around now. It is as though the events of that time loosened peoples lives up just enough to make them their own.

The past resurfaces constantly in these tales; there is no escaping it, or its sense of consequence. But the past doesn't just catch up with Munro's characters, it also exists, quite peaceably, behind the present. A character, walking down a street, sees what used to be there very clearly. "Housewives who had finished washing the dishes and sweeping up the kitchen for the last time that day, men who had coiled up the hose after giving the grass a soaking." In fact, the present is slightly less vivid to her since "every single person is inside with their fans on or their air conditioning".

Munro is amazed by the effects of time. It is not difficult to remember the past so much as to believe that things were like that once. Belle talks about her warm sponge bath as an adolescent, how she washed in a basin that had no plumbing, so the plughole drained out to a bucket. In "To Reach Japan" Greta tries to explain what it was like for women in the early 1960s, when having a serious idea "or maybe even reading a real book, could be seen as suspect, having something to do with your child's getting pneumonia".

We can never fit back in to our former selves. Change may be the central mystery in Munro's stories, but her approach is pretty secular (or at least low church). Although she shares Flannery O'Connor's interest in the gothic, there is very little use of epiphany, transcendence, metamorphosis or even metaphor. Although her characters suffer the occasional interventions of fate, Munro is most interested in the slow changes that time itself wreaks; the difference a new road makes, the reality of wooden houses giving way to brick and brick to concrete. She is interested in how we make our lives, as much as how we escape them; the degree to which we are connected, or alone.

This swirl of people around each other – where no character is truly lost – is a cause of both fascination and anxiety for Munro. This anxiety becomes critical when it comes to children, who disappear with some frequency in her work, and sometimes die. One of her most anthologised stories is "Miles City Montana", first published in 1985, in which a father hauls his baby daughter from the water, after a moments's inattention by a swimming pool. The baby's sister is distracted by the lifeguard and her boyfriend, who are kissing. The baby's mother, stretching her legs after a long drive, is distracted by the "poorest details of the world" in this strange town; "their singleness and their precise location and the forlorn coincidence of your being there to see them". She is, let's face it, "being" a writer, or at least thinking like one, when the "ever ready guilt" causes her to startle and check for her daughter. "To Reach Japan" in this collection is also about maternal guilt and a wandering toddler. This time the mother is doing the kissing (adulterously, on a train) as well as the imagining and noticing and writing. Greta has run off for a few months to be a poet, or a bohemian, or to sleep with a newspaper columnist, which in the 60s was all sort of the same thing.

Munro has spoken about her need to write when her children were small. "Some part of me was absent for those children, and children detect things like that … When my oldest daughter was about two, she'd come to where I was sitting at the typewriter, and I would bat her away with one hand and type with the other. I've told her that. This was bad because it made her the adversary to what was most important to me."

It is not clear why a child should be threatened by the work a writer does, as opposed to, say, the work a cook does (who might just as easily bat a child away), or why a mother's imaginings are, in Munro's fiction, such an invitation to disaster. There is no reason why a child should be on the same hierarchy of importance as a story, they are not the same kind of creature. But there it is. Munro makes fiction from her anxiety about making fiction, that mixture of distraction and attention, absence and desire.

But more than this, a kind of absence is essential to Munro's work. It would be wrong to say there is an absence at the heart of it – that would sound aggrieved – but there is nothing wrong with holding yourself a little in reserve. A slight sense of withholding gives Munro's prose its gracefulness, and allows intimacy without danger. After many years, many collections and many wonderful stories, readers may feel they know everything about Alice Munro, especially as so many of her characters lead lives similar to her own. In fact, we know very little about her. This is one of the reasons readers become dizzy with love for Munro. This other reason is that she is so damn good.

These stories are difficult to read because the writer is so alert to her own mortality, and as honest as ever. The last section of the book, which is "autobiographical in feeling, though not, sometimes, entirely so in fact" has a sombre preamble. "I believe they are the first and last – and the closest – things I have to say about my own life."

These four short autobiographical pieces are beautifully written and give some insight into Munro's formation as a writer. The uncanny doubling of the title piece "Dear Life" makes us think of lives we might have led, or endings we might have endured. "The Eye" shows how reality cedes to imagination in the face of death. Munro tells us a little about her process; how real life throws up details that are too loud for fiction, such as a loose woman's orange dress, or details that lead nowhere, such as the man from her childhood who bore the "troll's name" of Roly Grain. We see her as a child, rehearsing her skills with her younger sister, taking on the role "of sophisticated counsellor or hair-raising story-teller". These are fascinating pieces, but they are also, as she says herself, "not quite short stories" and though I count myself as one of the people most interested in this writer on planet Earth, I find, to my surprise that they do not hold me in the same way – it is Munro's stories that I want; not her, after all.

• Anne Enright's The Forgotten Waltz is published by Vintage.

FictionShort storiesAlice MunroAnne Enright
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We challenged well-known writers – from Ian Rankin and Helen Fielding to Jeffrey Archer and Jilly Cooper – to come up with a story of up to 140 characters. This is their stab at Twitter fiction

Geoff Dyer

I know I said that if I lived to 100 I'd not regret what happened last night. But I woke up this morning and a century had passed. Sorry.

James Meek

He said he was leaving her. "But I love you," she said. "I know," he said. "Thanks. It's what gave me the strength to love somebody else."

Jackie Collins

She smiled, he smiled back, it was lust at first sight, but then she discovered he was married, too bad it couldn't go anywhere.

Ian Rankin

I opened the door to our flat and you were standing there, cleaver raised. Somehow you'd found out about the photos. My jaw hit the floor.

Blake Morrison

Blonde, GSOH, 28. Great! Ideal mate! Fix date. Tate. Nervous wait. She's late. Doh, just my fate. Wrong candidate. Blond – and I'm straight.

David Lodge

"Your money or your life!" "I'm sorry, my dear, but you know it would kill me to lose my money," said the partially deaf miser to his wife.

AM Homes

Sometimes we wonder why sorrow so heavy when happiness is like helium.

Sophie Hannah

I had land, money. For each rejected novel I built one house. Ben had to drown because he bought Plot 15. My 15th book? The victim drowned.

Andrew O'Hagan

Clyde stole a lychee and ate it in the shower. Then his brother took a bottle of pills believing character is just a luxury. God. The twins.

AL Kennedy

It's good that you're busy. Not great. Good, though. But the silence, that's hard. I don't know what it means: whether you're OK, if I'm OK.

Jeffrey Archer

"It's a miracle he survived," said the doctor. "It was God's will," said Mrs Schicklgruber. "What will you call him?" "Adolf," she replied.

Anne Enright

The internet ate my novel, but this is much more fun #careerchange #nolookingback oh but #worldsosilentnow Hey!

Patrick Neate

ur profile pic: happy – smiling & smoking. ur last post: "home!" ur hrt gave out @35. ur profile undeleted 6 months on. ur epitaph: "home!"

Hari Kunzru

I'm here w/ disk. Where ru? Mall too crowded to see. I don't feel safe. What do you mean you didn't send any text? Those aren't your guys?

SJ Watson

She thanks me for the drink, but says we're not suited. I'm a little "intense". So what? I followed her home. She hasn't seen anything yet.

Helen Fielding

OK. Should not have logged on to your email but suggest if going on marriedaffair.com don't use our children's names as password.

Simon Armitage

Blaise Pascal didn't tweet and neither did Mark Twain. When it came to writing something short & sweet neither Blaise nor Mark had the time.

Charlie Higson

Jack was sad in the orphanage til he befriended a talking rat who showed him a hoard of gold under the floor. Then the rat bit him & he died.

India Knight

Soften, my arse. I'm a geezer. I'm a rock-hard little bastard. Until I go mushy overnight for you, babe. #pears

Jilly Cooper

Tom sent his wife's valentine to his mistress and vice versa. Poor Tom's a-cold and double dumped.

Rachel Johnson

Rose went to Eve's house but she wasn't there. But Eve's father was. Alone. One thing led to another. He got 10 years.

Short storiesTwitterFictionIan RankinJeffrey ArcherJackie CollinsBlake MorrisonDavid LodgeAL KennedyAnne EnrightHari KunzruHelen FieldingJilly CooperRachel JohnsonCharlie HigsonSimon ArmitageInternetGeoff DyerIan RankinJames MeekAndrew O'HaganBlake MorrisonDavid LodgeAM HomesAL KennedyAnne EnrightPatrick NeateHari KunzruRachel JohnsonSimon Armitage
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The taboo-breaking, the men, the fabulous prose – there's no one like Edna O'Brien. By Anne Enright

The day she visited the piece of land in Co Donegal on which she would build a house, Edna O'Brien saw a rainbow over it, looping from Mount Errigal to the sea. This is what she writes: "It faded slowly, with such cadence, getting fainter and fainter, the orange tint being the last to fade, a kind of tangerine." Look at that sentence. Just look at it. No one else could have written this: it is purest Edna O'Brien. Every rise and fall of it, every lift and sigh. The yearning in the word "such", the passion in the word "cadence", the fading of the word "fade", the lingering, scooping, last couple of clauses, giving us a colour that is not just orange but a surprising – almost contentious – "tangerine". This is a sentence that trails its fingers on the edge of the set as it leaves the stage. So get ready to applaud, ladies and gentlemen, because there is no one like her. O'Brien, in her 80s, may look like an icon and talk like an icon, but she writes like the thing itself, with prose that is scrupulous and lyrical, beautiful and exact.

It is important to praise O'Brien because she has taken enough insults in her day. John Broderick, in the literary periodical Hibernia, "quoting my husband's exact words … said that my 'talent resided in my knickers'". Broderick, a novelist whose work was also banned in Ireland for sexual content, is 20 years dead, and whatever resided in his own knickers is long since turned to dust. It is easy, now, to see his misogyny but in the 1960s these things were not so simply understood. In her memoir, O'Brien says her supposed "fault" was not that she was a woman, but that she was thought "glamorous". Who could blame her for making this elision, of trying to rise above? The problem was not one of sex but of beauty, charisma, style. The problem was not the truths she told in those first novels – the ones that caused all the fuss – but of the fame those novels brought her because, for those years, fame and notoriety were a plane journey apart.

O'Brien was not just a floozy, she was a floozy who lived in England, a floozy who was hugely successful in America; she was a standing annoyance to the small-town Irish literary male. The accusations shifted over the years – their content changed – but the emotion behind them remained somehow the same. Country Girl is far from being a bitter book, but O'Brien remembers these other slights too. Men suspected her of being "an Amazon", she says, while feminists tore into her for her "supine, woebegone inclinations". Hugh Leonard, another writer who is now dead, called over a restaurant in Dublin, for all to hear, "the sneering insinuation that I was 'sleeping with Provos'".

In 1994, 30 years after the first furore, liberal Ireland was deeply unsettled when O'Brien interviewed the Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams, glowingly, for the New York Times. She used Michael Collins, hero of the Irish war of independence, as a natural point of comparison: "Whereas Collins was outgoing and swashbuckling, Gerry Adams is thoughtful and reserved." This was a fabulously transgressive take on Northern Irish politics; one that was not enhanced by the sexualisation of Adams, a "lithe, handsome man" whose eyes she describes in this memoir as "vulpine".

The curious thing about the Adams article was the way it appeared at the darkest hour, two months before the surprising dawn that was the IRA ceasefire of April 1994. A secret tide had begun to turn in Northern Irish politics – how did O'Brien catch it so well? In this memoir, she does not discuss Dominic "Mad Dog" McGlinchey, the IRA separatist whom she interviewed in prison as part of her research for the book The House of Splendid Isolation, and this is a pity. History might thank her for a few concrete details here, though we do not need them to admire the sensitivity of O'Brien's cultural barometer – talking to Gerry Adams, like having premarital sex, is now a respectable thing to do. O'Brien is attracted to taboos just as they break, to the place of greatest heat and darkness and, you might even say, danger to her mortal soul. She may not always escape free of what the journalist Fintan O'Toole calls "moral fault", but that's as may be. You cannot make someone a pariah and then complain when she goes rogue.

O'Brien does not see herself as being in control of her muse. "It had written itself," she says of her first novel, "I was merely the messenger." And later, in middle age: "The words would not come," as though she was just a conduit for writing, not a writer at all. This may be a kind of abnegation, but it is also an astonishingly vulnerable and courageous way to live. O'Brien is the great, the only, survivor of forces that silenced and destroyed who knows how many other Irish women writers, and her contradictions – her evasions even – must be regarded as salutary.

She is a woman unafraid of sex, who is terrified of swimming; a woman who defied the Catholic church, but who cannot do thunderstorms, driving, being alone. She reserves the right to be both fabulous and infuriating. Why, you might ask, does someone of her verve and achievement, financially independent, someone who did so much for the cause of sexual self-realisation, only fall for married men? Maybe it was for the books – at least, books were the end result of her seeming confusions. "It was easier," she has said in interview, "to be a writer and a mother than a writer and a wife."

There are two great shadows in this memoir. The first is her father, a drinker, shouter and gambler, and the second is her husband, Ernest Gebler, a controlling and disappointed man who was jealous of her talent. "It was as if by writing I had taken the ground from under his feet," she writes, though this is not the first instance she gives of a dispute over land. The memoir opens with an unseemly wrangle during her mother's last illness over who would inherit the family farm. It goes to her brother – the only son – leaving O'Brien outraged in her grief. In fact most of the land is already gone, gambled away piecemeal by their father, decades before. The childhood section of Country Girl is littered with objects that were lost, or stolen, or given away, all of them remembered with great particularity. A silver spoon, from a set of six is kept in a velvet-lined case, "the velvet faded and milky". A china doll, purloined by O'Brien's teacher when she lends it for a school nativity play, wears "an ivory satin dress strewn with violets". Her mother's shoes, taken by a passing Traveller woman, are recalled down to the "little worms of shoe cream in the punched holes along the toe cap". A court case to recover them brings nothing but shame when her mother is "jeered and laughed at by two warring tribes of tinkers". The shoes, she says, "were never the same after that".

The O'Brien homestead, Drewsboro, was a house in decline: the remnants of its grandeur are given as sops to the persecutory peasantry that surrounded it. This unequal trade continues in O'Brien's early sexual adventures. After an episode in the bushes, she gives the girl who led her astray "a georgette handkerchief with a pink powder puff stitched into it". The man who deflowers her is sent "the one book I treasured", a copy of The Charwoman's Daughter by James Stephens – a moving gift he in no way deserves. Anonymous, denouncing letters appear at key moments in O'Brien's story, and the sense of persecution by locals is repeated when she builds her "large" house in Co Donegal. "Each evening, after they left the site, the cement blocks they had put up were being removed, before they had hardened, and thrown down in defiance."

O'Brien does not forget the many kindnesses offered to her when she was lost and alone in London, and though she found a new kind of grandeur among the famous, she still manages to namecheck her babysitter – 50 years after the fact – in the same sentence as she mentions Paul McCartney. There is a difference between her daily life and the dark tides that shaped her creativity, but it might be said that she faced losses and persecutions that were both mythic and real and that the books she wrote were, as a result, great acts of reclamation. One after the other, we stumble across them in her prose; the perfect object, perfectly recalled: "a baby's matinee coat with picot edging", "a linen napkin in a bone ring", a dressing gown that is "fawn and hairy", a chop with "a plump red kidney attached", a bunch of altar chrysanthemums that had "a sad smell of clay". When the farm help, Carnero, arrives at a house in which she is being tormented as a child, he is holding "a cushion to put on the bar of the bicycle on which he would bring me home".

O'Brien knows the precise emotional weight of objects, their seeming hopefulness and their actual indifference to those who seek to be consoled. She is in thrall to artifice, the way it holds desire. As a child she gazes with "rapture" at a "great amphora of artificial tea roses in yellow and red, far more beautiful than the dog roses on the briars". As an old woman, she sits in the wreck of that same house, looking at the wallpaper in her mother's bedroom where she can just discern "the dipping branches on which tiny pink rosebuds hung, so lifelike on their thin stalks that I used to believe they would bloom".

On one of her earliest manuscripts, Gebler wrote a fatal note. "There is no such thing as a blue road." To this she replies – she has been replying, one way or another, all her life – "I knew there was. I had seen them … Roads were every colour, blue, grey, gold, sandstone and carmine." Is this the root of the (usually male, let's face it) unease about O'Brien; the worry she might become untethered from the real? It is the tension between the actual and the metaphorical that gives her sentences their enormous energy and restraint, though in her middle work, the balance does not always hold. RD Laing, "half-Lucifer, half-Christ", filled her full of LSD and then "sent me packing with an opened scream". As a result, there is a whole section of this memoir where she describes her dreams as you might describe the evening news. When she told Norman Mailer the gist of a novel she planned to write, he shook his head, said it was too interior, "then repeated it, 'You're too interior, that's your problem.'"

The influence of Joyce is everywhere in O'Brien's work, and her discussion of his style is a manifesto for her own: "the lush descriptions of corpses and steers and pigs and kine, and sea and sea stones, and then the extraordinary ascensions in which worlds within worlds unfolded." He was such a girl, Joyce. Mailer might have found him too interior, though he would never have kissed him, shyly, in a church in Brooklyn while sheltering from the rain. It was a funny time, the late 20th century, when men wrote like men, and women wrote like women, and then everybody said mean things about who was right and who was just whoring around. And if you ask me, it wasn't Edna.

• Anne Enright's The Forgotten Waltz is published by Vintage.

Edna O'BrienFictionAnne Enright
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The taboo-breaking, the men, the fabulous prose – there's no one like Edna O'Brien. By Anne Enright

The day she visited the piece of land in Co Donegal on which she would build a house, Edna O'Brien saw a rainbow over it, looping from Mount Errigal to the sea. This is what she writes: "It faded slowly, with such cadence, getting fainter and fainter, the orange tint being the last to fade, a kind of tangerine." Look at that sentence. Just look at it. No one else could have written this: it is purest Edna O'Brien. Every rise and fall of it, every lift and sigh. The yearning in the word "such", the passion in the word "cadence", the fading of the word "fade", the lingering, scooping, last couple of clauses, giving us a colour that is not just orange but a surprising – almost contentious – "tangerine". This is a sentence that trails its fingers on the edge of the set as it leaves the stage. So get ready to applaud, ladies and gentlemen, because there is no one like her. O'Brien, in her 80s, may look like an icon and talk like an icon, but she writes like the thing itself, with prose that is scrupulous and lyrical, beautiful and exact.

It is important to praise O'Brien because she has taken enough insults in her day. John Broderick, in the literary periodical Hibernia, "quoting my husband's exact words … said that my 'talent resided in my knickers'". Broderick, a novelist whose work was also banned in Ireland for sexual content, is 20 years dead, and whatever resided in his own knickers is long since turned to dust. It is easy, now, to see his misogyny but in the 1960s these things were not so simply understood. In her memoir, O'Brien says her supposed "fault" was not that she was a woman, but that she was thought "glamorous". Who could blame her for making this elision, of trying to rise above? The problem was not one of sex but of beauty, charisma, style. The problem was not the truths she told in those first novels – the ones that caused all the fuss – but of the fame those novels brought her because, for those years, fame and notoriety were a plane journey apart.

O'Brien was not just a floozy, she was a floozy who lived in England, a floozy who was hugely successful in America; she was a standing annoyance to the small-town Irish literary male. The accusations shifted over the years – their content changed – but the emotion behind them remained somehow the same. Country Girl is far from being a bitter book, but O'Brien remembers these other slights too. Men suspected her of being "an Amazon", she says, while feminists tore into her for her "supine, woebegone inclinations". Hugh Leonard, another writer who is now dead, called over a restaurant in Dublin, for all to hear, "the sneering insinuation that I was 'sleeping with Provos'".

In 1994, 30 years after the first furore, liberal Ireland was deeply unsettled when O'Brien interviewed the Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams, glowingly, for the New York Times. She used Michael Collins, hero of the Irish war of independence, as a natural point of comparison: "Whereas Collins was outgoing and swashbuckling, Gerry Adams is thoughtful and reserved." This was a fabulously transgressive take on Northern Irish politics; one that was not enhanced by the sexualisation of Adams, a "lithe, handsome man" whose eyes she describes in this memoir as "vulpine".

The curious thing about the Adams article was the way it appeared at the darkest hour, two months before the surprising dawn that was the IRA ceasefire of April 1994. A secret tide had begun to turn in Northern Irish politics – how did O'Brien catch it so well? In this memoir, she does not discuss Dominic "Mad Dog" McGlinchey, the IRA separatist whom she interviewed in prison as part of her research for the book The House of Splendid Isolation, and this is a pity. History might thank her for a few concrete details here, though we do not need them to admire the sensitivity of O'Brien's cultural barometer – talking to Gerry Adams, like having premarital sex, is now a respectable thing to do. O'Brien is attracted to taboos just as they break, to the place of greatest heat and darkness and, you might even say, danger to her mortal soul. She may not always escape free of what the journalist Fintan O'Toole calls "moral fault", but that's as may be. You cannot make someone a pariah and then complain when she goes rogue.

O'Brien does not see herself as being in control of her muse. "It had written itself," she says of her first novel, "I was merely the messenger." And later, in middle age: "The words would not come," as though she was just a conduit for writing, not a writer at all. This may be a kind of abnegation, but it is also an astonishingly vulnerable and courageous way to live. O'Brien is the great, the only, survivor of forces that silenced and destroyed who knows how many other Irish women writers, and her contradictions – her evasions even – must be regarded as salutary.

She is a woman unafraid of sex, who is terrified of swimming; a woman who defied the Catholic church, but who cannot do thunderstorms, driving, being alone. She reserves the right to be both fabulous and infuriating. Why, you might ask, does someone of her verve and achievement, financially independent, someone who did so much for the cause of sexual self-realisation, only fall for married men? Maybe it was for the books – at least, books were the end result of her seeming confusions. "It was easier," she has said in interview, "to be a writer and a mother than a writer and a wife."

There are two great shadows in this memoir. The first is her father, a drinker, shouter and gambler, and the second is her husband, Ernest Gebler, a controlling and disappointed man who was jealous of her talent. "It was as if by writing I had taken the ground from under his feet," she writes, though this is not the first instance she gives of a dispute over land. The memoir opens with an unseemly wrangle during her mother's last illness over who would inherit the family farm. It goes to her brother – the only son – leaving O'Brien outraged in her grief. In fact most of the land is already gone, gambled away piecemeal by their father, decades before. The childhood section of Country Girl is littered with objects that were lost, or stolen, or given away, all of them remembered with great particularity. A silver spoon, from a set of six is kept in a velvet-lined case, "the velvet faded and milky". A china doll, purloined by O'Brien's teacher when she lends it for a school nativity play, wears "an ivory satin dress strewn with violets". Her mother's shoes, taken by a passing Traveller woman, are recalled down to the "little worms of shoe cream in the punched holes along the toe cap". A court case to recover them brings nothing but shame when her mother is "jeered and laughed at by two warring tribes of tinkers". The shoes, she says, "were never the same after that".

The O'Brien homestead, Drewsboro, was a house in decline: the remnants of its grandeur are given as sops to the persecutory peasantry that surrounded it. This unequal trade continues in O'Brien's early sexual adventures. After an episode in the bushes, she gives the girl who led her astray "a georgette handkerchief with a pink powder puff stitched into it". The man who deflowers her is sent "the one book I treasured", a copy of The Charwoman's Daughter by James Stephens – a moving gift he in no way deserves. Anonymous, denouncing letters appear at key moments in O'Brien's story, and the sense of persecution by locals is repeated when she builds her "large" house in Co Donegal. "Each evening, after they left the site, the cement blocks they had put up were being removed, before they had hardened, and thrown down in defiance."

O'Brien does not forget the many kindnesses offered to her when she was lost and alone in London, and though she found a new kind of grandeur among the famous, she still manages to namecheck her babysitter – 50 years after the fact – in the same sentence as she mentions Paul McCartney. There is a difference between her daily life and the dark tides that shaped her creativity, but it might be said that she faced losses and persecutions that were both mythic and real and that the books she wrote were, as a result, great acts of reclamation. One after the other, we stumble across them in her prose; the perfect object, perfectly recalled: "a baby's matinee coat with picot edging", "a linen napkin in a bone ring", a dressing gown that is "fawn and hairy", a chop with "a plump red kidney attached", a bunch of altar chrysanthemums that had "a sad smell of clay". When the farm help, Carnero, arrives at a house in which she is being tormented as a child, he is holding "a cushion to put on the bar of the bicycle on which he would bring me home".

O'Brien knows the precise emotional weight of objects, their seeming hopefulness and their actual indifference to those who seek to be consoled. She is in thrall to artifice, the way it holds desire. As a child she gazes with "rapture" at a "great amphora of artificial tea roses in yellow and red, far more beautiful than the dog roses on the briars". As an old woman, she sits in the wreck of that same house, looking at the wallpaper in her mother's bedroom where she can just discern "the dipping branches on which tiny pink rosebuds hung, so lifelike on their thin stalks that I used to believe they would bloom".

On one of her earliest manuscripts, Gebler wrote a fatal note. "There is no such thing as a blue road." To this she replies – she has been replying, one way or another, all her life – "I knew there was. I had seen them … Roads were every colour, blue, grey, gold, sandstone and carmine." Is this the root of the (usually male, let's face it) unease about O'Brien; the worry she might become untethered from the real? It is the tension between the actual and the metaphorical that gives her sentences their enormous energy and restraint, though in her middle work, the balance does not always hold. RD Laing, "half-Lucifer, half-Christ", filled her full of LSD and then "sent me packing with an opened scream". As a result, there is a whole section of this memoir where she describes her dreams as you might describe the evening news. When she told Norman Mailer the gist of a novel she planned to write, he shook his head, said it was too interior, "then repeated it, 'You're too interior, that's your problem.'"

The influence of Joyce is everywhere in O'Brien's work, and her discussion of his style is a manifesto for her own: "the lush descriptions of corpses and steers and pigs and kine, and sea and sea stones, and then the extraordinary ascensions in which worlds within worlds unfolded." He was such a girl, Joyce. Mailer might have found him too interior, though he would never have kissed him, shyly, in a church in Brooklyn while sheltering from the rain. It was a funny time, the late 20th century, when men wrote like men, and women wrote like women, and then everybody said mean things about who was right and who was just whoring around. And if you ask me, it wasn't Edna.

• Anne Enright's The Forgotten Waltz is published by Vintage.

Edna O'BrienFictionAnne Enright
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A highly accomplished debut story collection is full of tiny pleasures

Mary Costello has written for many years with an occasional story published, but no great encouragement to keep her at her desk. If she is an emerging writer, then she has emerged with great slowness and care. This first collection has the feel of work that refused to be abandoned; of stories that were written for the sake of getting something important right. A few, perhaps the earliest, have an old-fashioned, derivative air, but when she breaks into the world of contemporary Ireland, Costello's work is true, her problems distinctive and the voice all her own.

This is a writer unafraid of the graveside, or the bedside, of filling the space of the story to the brim. Large events happen in small lives – people die, for a start, they fall in and out of love, they have children and affairs. The slow leaking of love out of a relationship is described in particular and terrible banality, as Costello's characters move about their ordinary rooms. There is a kind of immaculate suburban sadness in many of these tales.

Costello's characters are lonely, especially when they are in a relationship. This loneliness is almost precious; it is certainly made sweeter by infidelity. Sexual betrayal is a recurring theme, not just as escape, but as transcendence. In "Sleeping With a Stranger", a school inspector recalls an extramarital episode while sitting with his dying mother. There is no guilt; in fact he experiences something like the opposite of guilt, and the rhapsodic ending recalls the surging epiphanies of Flannery O'Connor.

But though she sometimes likes to sing it out, Costello's best effects are quiet. After his mother stops breathing, the man looks down at her slippers on the floor. "The sight of them, their patient waiting, moved him. He bent down and took them on his lap and put a hand inside each one." This precision, which is so moving, is not only gestural, it is found in the texture of Costello's prose. Leaving his hotel encounter, the man "rose and dressed and went down in the lift, his legs barely able to ferry him". The word "ferry", so natural and particular, unhinges the sentence and lets emotion flood in. It is the accumulation of tiny pleasures such as this that makes The China Factory such a satisfying and accomplished debut.

In "Little Disturbances", a farmer avoids going to the doctor, knowing his test results can not be good. Dying is not a concern; it is life that makes him tremble. He walks the land, steering clear of the "swallow holes" in the bog because he is afraid of "the pull" of water. "There was something in him and he thought the water knew it." When he asks his wife to go to the surgery in his stead, she looks away. "She has a way of being distant that makes him think he is already invisible. One day at the dinner she turned to him and said, 'Can you not chew any quieter?' In winter her eyes are bluer – he used to think the cold got in."

Death is always present in these stories, and it brings a sense of fate that is quite unashamed. Like Alice Munro, Costello is not afraid of a good car accident, a cancer diagnosis, the arrival on the scene of a roaring madman. Like many Irish writers, she does not eschew the child given away in adoption. She writes things that happen all the time but get labelled as "gothic" – perhaps because they happen to most people only once, if at all. Her talent is for placing them in the quotidian. In "The Patio Man" a builder is obliged to drive the woman of the house to hospital as she suffers a miscarriage. To distract themselves along the way, they talk about the house he will build himself someday in the west. "They'll think you're the father," she says, as he parks outside the hospital. As he drives away, alone, he "thinks of things he has not thought of before, about women's lives. It is not the same for men at all."

There is a country cadence in Costello's sentences; her characters yearn westwards towards the Atlantic and the hills and fields of their childhood homes. But she remains true to a dislocation that is more than geographical and is wary of "the landscape solution" so prevalent in Irish prose. Costello insists on the distance between lovers and on the connections between strangers. Her writing has the kind of urgency that the great problems demand – call them themes; they are the kind of problem that make a writer. With a bit of luck, they could keep her at the desk for the rest of her life.

• Anne Enright's The Forgotten Waltz is published by Vintage.

Short storiesFictionAnne Enright
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