Off Air... with Jane and Fi - Welcome to The Jane Garvey Tribute Chamber (with Anne Enright)

Episode Date: September 12, 2023

Jane and Fi are having an unusual day... as per. They chat buttock revealing one pieces, what would happen if Robert Peston's last name was 'pesto' and provide some pension analogies. Plus, they're joined by Irish poet and author Anne Enright to discuss her new novel 'The Wren, The Wren'. If you want to contact the show to ask a question and get involved in the conversation then please email us: [e-mail] Follow us on Instagram! @janeandfi Assistant Producer: Eve Salusbury Times Radio Producer: Rosie Cutler Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Do you know what? That's the alternative spin-off podcast, isn't it, that everybody wants. Drinking with Helen Brazil. Do you think that his nickname at school was nuts? Well, I was just about to... It must have been. Obviously, he's Scottish, so...

That's my only question for him, Jane. Well, later in the week, we've got Robert Peston on our fair, in fact, and indeed on the live radio show. And I was, for some reason, in the middle of the night, the thought came to me that his surname is very nearly a popular food. So how different would his life have been if he'd been robert pesto i don't know well that's going to be my opening conversational gambit to him let's see how we okay i'm going to hold you to that because for a long long time pesto wasn't a thing in britain

so it wouldn't have been a problem but any child growing up now with the surname nearly pesto wasn't a thing in Britain so it wouldn't have been a problem but any child growing up now with the surname nearly pesto would probably or maybe it's just me just because I'm so posh and I have a lot of pesto I suppose I make my own oh yes I do it's ever such a big bunch of basil required homemade pesto is always a bit disappointing it's not very nice but I mean it doesn't stop me making it when that goes for almost all my cooking and I know that you've laughed at me about this before but pesto is my trigger food because there was

you know there's just a good kind of five years of early child rearing where you just really really really rely on the sacchar paste yeah and just I think I got to the stage where I was covering carrots in it just everything just covered in pesto and i really properly just can't bear i cannot bear the taste

of it now okay no well i won't bring you in a jar of my homemade pesto no please don't i don't think nobody nobody on this earth has ever asked for one of my jars of Homo Pesto, nor should they. Right, now our guest today is the Irish writer Anne Enright. Now, in the interest of transparency, you recorded this interview when I was on holiday. That's correct, isn't it? That is correct. Yes. Yes.

So I would just like to know a little bit more about her because I know she's highly acclaimed and her latest book is The Wren, The Wren. And my first idiotic question to you was, why is it called The Wren twice? So what is the answer to that? Because The Wren, The Wren is a poem within the novel that is written by Phil, who is one of the three main protagonists in the novel. And he is one of Ireland's greatest poets.

Greatest poets, darling. In his own mind in well in no he does quite he does quite well and his part in the book is I think quite a clever and perceptive examination of that kind of space that poets seem to need especially male poets where they just need a huge stage and they need everything to be sucked in around them into their ether and their creativity for them to then decide what it is, you know, the motes of dust that fall down

that they can capture and nobody else can. But in order for him to be this thing, he's left his family. So the book is very much about how you try and parent when you haven't been parented very well yourself so the central character is female so there are two other characters in the book carmel who is phil the poet's daughter and nell who is carmel's daughter and she is a young writer just trying to make her way in the world, doing travel pieces. And again, they're very perceptively observed travel pieces,

you know, about the joy of lying in a hammock on a deserted beach, which Nell knows. Actually, you know, people are going to read that article, they're never going to go and do it. So there's a nice kind of ironic twist all the way through the book. But Anne Enright, I think, writes really amazingly about parenting. That, for me, would be what marks her out as a writer I really enjoy. She is one of those writers, Jane, that I read one of her books,

I have to go and read some quite mildly entertaining crime fiction afterwards because they're quite dense novels yeah they're books that there are some writers that i hugely admire but whether or not i love them yeah it wouldn't it's not quite the same no it's not quite the same and and it's definitely uh you know it's it's the equivalent of very carefully crafted, well-made, laborious pesto sometimes, instead of the I've got it in a jar, I'm going to coat my carrots in it type of a book. There's a hint of the erotic there when you're talking about coating your carrots. And actually talking of writers who just bring me joy, I just mentioned to you earlier, I'm listening, it's my audio book, to the new Anne Cleaves.

And she doesn't need publicity from us because it's already, I think, number one in the chat. But it's the raging storm. And she is just so, I just, I'm so engrossed. I want to know who has been responsible for the murder of a strange adventurer. And is this Patrick? No, the central character here is Matthew Venn.

Matthew, sorry. Matthew Venn, yeah, in Devon. It's down in Devon. And, yeah, she's moved her character. She's got the Shetland books and then she's got the books about Vera in Northumberland. And so we're in a different setting. I think this is the third Matthew Venn book.

And it's just, you know, she isn't going to win any literary prizes. I'm not in any way being offensive here. But she should win all the prizes for driving along a narrative that makes me want to listen more. Oh, and deeply sympathetic characters. Yeah, really sympathetic. Sympathetically written.

She makes you care about them. It is a genius. It is a form of literary genius. And Matthew is gay and married, isn't he? He's married and he's a former member of the Plymouth Brethren. Yes, which is a sect, isn't it? A sect about which I knew absolutely nothing. Anyway, there we go.

It's a warm recommend if that's your kind of thing. So that's the book to read after you've done an Anne Enright? Yes. I mean, you say that as though I might be doing an Anne Enright. Are you not going to? Well, I'll listen to your interview and see whether I think it's worth exploring. Do you know, I've really...

So Anne Enright, I've seen her being interviewed by lots of other people. I'd never interviewed her myself. I was terrified because she is one of those incredibly direct speakers and I've seen her get really quite annoyed with interviewers when they've asked her a question that she doesn't want to answer or actually just kind of feels as a bit pointless. So I went into the interview kind of slightly girding my loins.

And also because she had written a non-fiction book called Making Babies after she had become a mum, which is brilliant actually. It's a collection of essays. They're so real, Jane, about the claustrophobia and the overwhelm of early motherhood. And I really liked them because I hadn't really managed to find very much

that I thought was honest enough about the maternal experience. And I wasn't finding it in you know the pages of magazines or whatever and uh you know 20 years ago there wasn't that much stuff that was really quite visceral about all the things that you know you might find joyful but also a bit you know a bit weird and a bit you know anxiety making about motherhood so I really really loved that book I was very grateful to her uh for writing it so I hope everybody really loved that book. I was very grateful to her for writing it. So I hope everybody enjoys the interview. I mean, I take your point.

You know, books, they are quite dense and they're serious books, Jane. They're very serious books. But she wins prizes, doesn't she? She does, yeah. And not everybody has to be in it for the laughs. Don't they? No, they don't. No, absolutely not.

They don't, Jane. Speaking of which, let's briefly return to yesterday's guest Rory Stewart no I mean he was he was a guest I was intrigued to meet genuinely and now I've met him I'm I'm still a little intrigued um uh Kathy from Hampshire I believe he has two young sons do you really think that him saying i might do in response to your question as to whether or not he'd think about sending his children to eton is in fact the truth or do you do you think as i do but in fact their names are already very firmly on the list well um kathy you might be right and actually my understanding is if you do want your child your son in fact because they don't take girls do they um if you want your son to go to eat and you do have to put

their name down um as more or less as soon as they're born and then of course i suppose you've got to rely on them getting in because i don't think they take everybody and then you've got to have 50 grand a year in order to send them so it's not something everyone could do it's not uh it's not it's not like the the deadline that you and i probably faced you know the october deadline for primary schools and secondary schools rising fives yes i do is it that time i know i've got my child into the local primary school nursery um i put her name down when she was two they said they'd take her on her third birthday and the woman says there's just one requirement. And I thought, oh my God, what is it?

And she said, well, she does have to be continent. And I said, right, well, and we were nowhere near it at that stage. I said, well, go home and we'll start working on it today. She said, I don't think you need to rush. Well, I bloody do, because I definitely want her to come here as soon as possible. Anyway, we got the job done.

But that was the only, that's the beauty of a primary education, nursery education. It's a wonderful thing. It truly is a wonderful thing. I always feel for nursery teachers in that first week, because I think there are just possibly 50% of the kids are turning up with the parents saying, oh, no, that's just a little accident. You know, little Johnny's usually so good. Never does it normally. Little Johnny hasn't got the faintest idea what a potty is this time of year is so uh there was i went to the shops really early yesterday morning so monday

morning and i think for some kids who'd just gone back or started secondary school it might be the beginning of like their they maybe started on thursday of last week and then Monday's reality had dawned. And there were kids trudging along on their own, wearing uniforms that were clearly brand new, dragging hockey sticks that were the same size as them. And I just, I felt some of them really had their heads down and were just, I don't think I'm going to like this very much. And I just feel so sorry for them. It does get better.

It really does get better. But it's not easy no and in London town uh because you know most of the kids are traveling to school on their own uh there just are lost kids who've got off the bus at the wrong place they've got off the tube at the wrong place and actually I do remember a kind of 12 13 year old boy I bumped into when we were working back at the mothership who had clearly, I was on my way into work, he was, you know when you can tell a kid's lost? Yeah. And he just looked quite panicky and I thought, I'm just going to do that thing

on the basis that I really hope if that's ever my kid, another mum does that thing of just walking straight up to them saying, are you okay? And of course he wasn't okay and he didn't really know where he was. And, you know, we walked to the place where he recognised and then he went back in and stuff.

And I've always thought, you know, I'm not a random giver of kindness on a daily basis. That's not what I'm saying at all. But you do a calmer thing, don't you? Where you just think, that could be my kid. So I'm going to just help that one out today. Or in my case, it could have been me. Frankly, it could easily have been me. I mean frankly it could

easily have been me and actually my favourite story of school mishaps was the father, yes it was a man, who dropped his child off at our primary school playground where everybody wore a red uniform and the kid was wearing a purple uniform but he still dropped them off. I think he was new to the dropping off at school game and the child was sent in a taxi with an appropriate adult to the correct primary school where everybody wore the same uniform as them i mean god loves a trier it was a primary school in fairness but also i think that you know that sometimes when you get to the end of a very very long summer holiday where you would just be any school will do is this a school let's find a peg find a name that looks like it was just hang your coat up go on in they'll notice uh this one um comes from kate who says about rory stewart his candle was

candle candor candor was appealing but is he really able to move beyond the persona of someone who feels more or less born to lead especially in a crisis and that was the thing that roy was very keen to say wasn't he that he loves a crisis the decentralization of power he wishes for is that just geographical spread of their chaps or is there a wish to see wealth and really fine education more fairly distributed so that different and more representative types of leadership could be allowed to flourish all over the country. Kate says, I genuinely can't tell from that interview, but here's a troubling giveaway. The only two questions, and we're now in capital letters, he asked you were ones to which he

already knew the answer. Yes, a couple of people noticed that. We didn't know the answer to the questions, incidentally. The question was, what is Zakir Starmer's economic policy? And I thought your answer was a very good one that we can't really tell because Zakir Starmer doesn't seem to know yet himself. But it did feel a bit like a gotcha moment, actually, that.

So, because there isn't an answer. We don't yet know what Labour's manifesto pledges on the economy will be. No, I mean, they don't dare make any, do they? I mean, in fairness, nor does anybody else. Another listener, female, and this is significant. She wants it to be mentioned that they are a female listener in this instance. I really like Rory Stewart and that has surprised me.

For one, he's a Tory or maybe more appropriate to say he was a Tory. He is extremely intelligent and considered, but probably more importantly, he does seem to be honest and reflective. I agree that his comment about possibly sending his boys to Eton was a bit surprising, maybe even disappointing, but he was at least again honest. His book sounds fascinating. You made a point about women probably being annoyed by their podcast because of the lack of women discussed or indeed included in politics. I'm somewhat embarrassed to say I'd hardly noticed, but I think you are right. Government is very much an old boys club even more so now after the last couple of years I feel. The department I work in is also an old boys club in

many ways. Maybe I too readily accept this as I would never aspire to one of those jobs and I also find the competitive nonsense rather pathetic. So I think this listener is a civil servant, but we probably shouldn't say any more about that. But that's interesting. I mean, there is no doubt that men sometimes pursue senior jobs and lots of responsibility. And women might be less keen to do those jobs. But that is often though not always because women have domestic responsibilities which they feel they probably ought to prioritize um it's never entirely straightforward this is it um are men better at senior jobs no are they more likely to get them yes but are they also more likely to put themselves forward also yes and they're also more likely to have the confidence to consider themselves appropriate for the role.

Yeah, but is there an inherent danger in constantly repeating all of those things because you just reinforce the stereotype? I think that's true, yeah. And I have to say, and I said this on the programme yesterday, that having read all of Rory Stewart's book, there really isn't a hint of misogyny in it. It's not like he tries to leave out the, you know, major

players, female players in the politics that he's encountered. You know, he talks in depth about the contributions made by Theresa May and by Liz Truss. And I didn't get I didn't get the feeling that I was reading a book that was deliberately excluding women from the arena at all. So that's worth saying. Yeah, yeah, I think it is. Shall we mention the email from an anonymous listener who was considering getting a ticket to see Rory Stewart at the Lowry Theatre. Earlier in the year, they say, that's the Lowry in Salford,

earlier in the year, they say, that's the Lowry in Salford, earlier in the year, they say, they had seen the comedian Stuart Lee there. I was shocked that seat prices to effectively hear Rory promote his book were over twice the price I paid to see Stuart Lee. Both were one-man shows by ex-Oxford men, so didn't need any fancy expensive stage gear. I'm fortunate in that I could afford the well in excess of 60 quid ticket price to hear Rory. And I get supply and demand and the right to charge what you like. And that his team would have set the prices. But it did seem to me a little expensive.

I emailed Rory to ask if some of the Lowry ticket price was going to charity. I didn't expect to get a reply and I didn't. But I experienced a little schadenfreude when Rory announced on his podcast 10 days before the Lowry event that he'd sold out the Albert Hall for two nights but there were still tickets available for the Lowry I told a colleague about this and he replied well Rory is a Tory um yes and maybe Tories aren't all that popular in Salford I think that's that's the point there but um yeah Stuart Lee Lee was obviously a reasonable price and our correspondent felt that Rory was a little pricey.

What were we? Let's move on to... We certainly weren't over 60 quid. No, we weren't over 60 quid. I think we usually chucked a free book in, didn't we? I've got some to spare if anyone would like some also yes i've got 15 so seriously i've lined them all up on one bookshelf i might just have in the drain jane garvey tribute room drain the jane garvey tribute chamber yes i've got with all my awards

and uh i should just have a shelf full of paperback and, let's face it, the ten hardback copies I've got as well. Good idea. And a leaking valve on the toilet up above and so some of them are slightly stuck to the wall, Jane. They may never come out. They'll be worth even more. You know, they've gone all bulbous at the back. What a lovely thought. God's sake.

Can I hark back to yonder times, please, because this is an email that I think very kindly you left on the pile when you were doing the podcast with Jane Mulcahy. Oh, yes. Because it refers to Stella, the name that our correspondent went by when she was doing some stripping.

That's right. Do you remember we had this fantastic series of emails about her time as a stripper. And I'd asked a question because I just wanted to know a little bit more about how she got into it. So she got back in touch. Just answering your question from yesterday. I am mostly okay, thank you for asking. It has been a bit of a process. I fell into stripping and sex work after my eight-month-old daughter died when I was 20 and I was in it for about seven years. There were some exciting times,

but there were also many dark and dangerous times too. I put it all behind me for many years, but around 2018, I had a bit of a breakdown and I found myself an amazing therapist. We've worked together to unpick all the trauma I experienced. My therapy is still ongoing and like I say, I'm now going into my third year of training to become a psychotherapist myself. So yes, I'm doing well and I now integrate the stellar days into my life now.

I'm not ashamed, rather I'm proud of all I survived. Thank you for getting back in touch with that. You have had a lot to contend with. So both Jane and I really wish you well going forward, to use a terrible modern expression, and it's good to hear from you. So thank you. Yeah, thank you very much, Stella, and take care of yourself.

And actually, that is just, isn't that an example of how everyone has a story? Oh, isn't it? example of how everyone has a story oh isn't it and also just do you know what jane so you know to to lose an eight month old uh baby when you're still so young i mean how on earth anybody how the world would expect you to try and cope with that i just don't know to find yourself so much further down the line doing something that actually puts your experiences back into the world to help other people is remarkable. And it's just one line in an email there, Jane, isn't it? But it's a whole bloody life. Yeah.

So, you know, wow. Yeah. It's Jane and Fee at times.radio. Can I just briefly refer back to my lovely trip to Sicily and what I referred to as a croissant yesterday. I bitterly regret it. I bitterly regret mentioning I've had any carbohydrates because, as you know, I am a stranger to carbs.

It was a very short-term lapse. And you're still doing the no bread thing. Do you remember about a year ago? I did it for ten minutes. You were off bread and then the next day you had a sandwich. I've had no bread since that baguette I finished at five to one.

This is anonymous. You see, other carb fanciers, like we like to keep ourselves anonymous. This listener says, The croissant-like pastries in Italy are actually called cornetti in central italy and brioche in the north and south did you know that i didn't no i nor did i so thank you very much they are never called croissant and they're very different to their french counterparts they're much less buttery and flaky and to my mind all the better for that and i just want to say thanks to jane for talking about having to position her swimming costume with a mine to her HRT patch.

I don't know why I mentioned that. But it is an ongoing issue for me. I never know, because I can't see myself from the back. I've got no idea how much of the buttock is revealed by the one piece. And so, therefore, I don't think we need any more detail. But I'm grateful to the correspondent for saying that they're glad that I have the same problems as them.

Yeah. Can I ask you about the patch? Because I don't do a patch, I do a lozenge. But with the patch, A, does it really properly stay on in water? I mean, if you went for a really long swim or you had a whole day. Well, that's not likely, is it? When you went in and out of the pool. Oh, yeah. I have lost a couple over the years, but actually it's very unusual for one to drop off. swim or you had a whole day. Well that's not likely is it? When you're in and out of the pool. Oh yeah, I have lost a couple over the years but actually it's very unusual for one to drop off.

Although having said that, I found one on the floor only yesterday. Where that had been and when I was last employing it I don't know. And are you told that you can only put it on certain parts of your body? I think it's below the, yes it's basically below the navel. Right, so you can't wear it on the parts of your body it's below the yes it's basically

below the navel right so you can't wear it on the top of your arm or somewhere sensible you can see that day i wore it on my nose and you said jane what are you wearing what is that wonderful novelty plaster you've got on i thought that was just a dream do you know what we'll save our dreams for another time but you've had some really weird oh, it's all gone quiet in my dream world. Has it? Nothing. I mean, you sound to be having a fabulous time. Mine have become unbelievably, almost unbearably vivid at the moment. It's the change in the seasons.

I think, yeah, or I just need to up my meds. Oh, can I just do a very tiny one before we do the cue to Anne Enright, technical term there. Jeff in France says, hello, Jane and Fee. Clement Attlee was bald. Best regards. Thank you. I am now completely baffled as to why that was relevant. There was a time when it was relevant. Oh, yes, we did talk about why we've never had a bald Prime Minister. Yes, because we were talking about Claire Balding's hair. Yes. Yeah.

Have you got more on that? I haven't. I haven't at all, though. Because my dad's 90th birthday, which I did refer to a couple of weeks ago, I just Googled who was the Prime Minister on the day my dad was born, because it's a long time ago. It was Ramsay MacDonald. Oof!

I know. And it's what I mean. I mean, he went on famously to open those lovely restaurants, but at the time he was in politics. OK. And, no, it really did make... I did ask him, actually, do you know who was Prime Minister on the day you were born?

And actually none of the relatively elderly folk in the room at the time could name the Prime Minister. And was it a good do? Yes, well, it was. It was one of three dos. There's another one this weekend. Blimey. With all the grandchildren, yes.

So I think he's enjoying it. I think it is a sort of responsibility being the centre of these events, isn't it? It must be a nightmare, because also it's a room full of people going, well, you know, might be your last. Well, of course it might.

Let's not beat around the old inevitability bush here. 90 is a very, very good age. And look, my mum and dad are very fortunate to have each other still and to be able to enjoy various parts of their life to the full.

And to have you, Jane. And to have both their daughters and their wonderful grandchildren. I still haven't got in touch with Alison yet, but I'm going to. She's actually coming to London next week. Is she? She's on a course.

Would she like to pop in and say hello here at Times Town? I'll dangle that prospect in front of her. I would like to meet her. No, I don't think I would. And I will give her a really, really firm handshake and I will linger just a couple of seconds too long on that one. I think the course is very full on and I very much doubt she'll have time to come anywhere.

Oh dear, Alison, I'll meet you round the back at about ten past five. Anne Enright is a talented writer. She's become the first laureate for Irish fiction and is the winner of the Man Booker Prize. That was for her fourth novel, The Gathering, and her latest novel, as Jane said, is called The Wren, The Wren. It covers themes that Anne writes so well about, the claustrophobia of motherhood,

the big stage that creative people can need to have, how one generation in a family can dominate all the others. So her main protagonists are three generations in that family, Phil, a poet, Carmel, a dedicated mum, Nell, a travel writer. And I started by asking Anne to explain a bit more about who they all are to each other. Yeah, so Nell, the wonderful Nell, is, I suppose you'd call her a millennial. I think actually the new term is a messy millennial. She's in her early 20s and she's just starting out in life, trying to get away from

her mother, Carmel, who is another type of person entirely. Nell thinks her mother is the most boring person in the world. But then we meet Carmel in her own childhood and see what her kind of story is. And her story basically is that her father, the great poet, Phil MacDara, left the family when she was 12 in order to go and complete his sort of identity as a poet and be himself in the largest sense of the word out in the wide world. So it's just those three. Phil is dead.

His poems are in the book. So he kind of persists as like poems and text. Nell talks in first person. She's very online. She's very now. Actually, I'm not going to say she's very now. That sounds terrible. That's the kind of thing that Nell herself would find a ridiculous.

Well, I love those little details about Nell, actually. And there's a moment quite early on when you introduce us to her. She's a writer, isn't she? And she notes that she's a little bit annoyed that day because she's just realised that she had built up a huge following on Twitter just when everybody had turned to Instagram. Yeah, that's very year-specific. I mean, I'd have to did my research, as they say.

But it's lovely little details like that that carry the reader through this huge story about generations. Is it possible to even know in your head who you thought of first as a character? Oh, very, very much so. I think Phil was kind of a gathering fog when Carmel arrived. So one character was a kind of atmosphere and his leaving, I mean I suppose that rupture. So it's not a character that arrives so much as a situation or a problem. And I was with Carmel for a very long time in the writing wondering, she's a very tough-minded, unimaginative sort of get-over-it sort of person. Get over yourself would be her mantra, although she doesn't actually say that in the book. Very pragmatic.

And I didn't know where to go with her in the writing. I mean, she wouldn't go away, so I knew I had to do something with her. And then I thought, well, what would happen if she got pregnant? I thought, this suddenly happen if she got pregnant? I thought, this suddenly now is really interesting and possibly moving. And, you know, there are aspects of tragedy there too. Yes, and we will come on to talk about those. But you say she's a bit boring. I didn't find her...

I found her pragmatic. I thought some of the things she knew about herself were actually very clever she's not a stupid woman she seemed to be a woman who just quite was just quite honest about how much

she struggled to get through things really which is quite a normal feeling isn't it? Yes so I you can't write a character without being on side so i was i'm very much on carmel's side um she is pragmatic she's literal minded and she's a bit closed off from other people perhaps so her boundaries are too good. She has too much of a buffer between herself and the kind of empathy that she could feel for other people.

So it's one thing her being sort of tough-minded on herself. It's another thing when she's lacking in, you know, sympathy for other people's plights, I suppose. What did you want the reader to really feel about her relationship with Phil? He's described sometimes in the book as being this wall this huge thing that just existed in her life which is I think it can happen can't it when a parent just wants to always remain the very largest person in the room. Well, it's funny. I've done a number of chats about the book now. And it's very distinctive if people have come from a relationship that's split up in the past,

that this moment of splitting is really bewildering in some way, on some level, something that needs to be resolved for them. His leaving transformed him into another kind of object. And the fact that he had a reputation in the world as a poet meant that the girls that he left behind,

Carmel and her sister Imelda, didn't have the chance to hate him. They didn't have the chance to say, look what you did. Society didn't even agree with them on any level that it was a terrible thing that he had done to them. So they didn't know how to express it themselves. So they kind of worship his poems or dismiss his poems or they have a relationship to his work

because they don't have a relationship with the man. It is still just a fact, isn't it, that it's just much easier for a man to leave their family than it is for a woman to? Do you think that will ever change? You know, I mean, Phil leaves because his wife gets sick and it's based on a little incident that happened in my own life. I was talking to someone and he was arranging custody or not custody pickups for his kids or

something and he said you know we split up my wife got sick and we split up and and three or four days after that conversation I realized that he he had left a woman who was sick with small children it just seemed so natural I thought maybe he meant she had lost her mind and kicked him out or been mentally unwell. Things get difficult in relationships for sure. But what happens when men are called on

to care for the women in their lives is actually an untold story. Because some of them just don't seem to have signed up for that. Whereas women don't have the choice whether to care for their people or not. It's an absolute given.

Sometimes it's a completely physical connection as in between a mother and a child. And the more that we strive for equality and the more that we achieve it, do you think the more that can be questioned or do you think that there is an innate caring, nurturing side to women that will always be played upon? I don't know.

I mean, I think pregnancy is a really interesting time of transition for not just for the brain changes as well in early motherhood. People are made different by these biological events in some way that isn't as impactful on the person who isn't carrying the baby put it that way but yeah um i i think that we're able to see things now and say things now that we wouldn't have been able to see or say 20 years ago so that's all to the good and i think that um men um have discovered i mean men love looking after their children now in a way that they would be laughed at um in my youth you know and so they see the upside to to it as well so the contract is changing for sure let's talk about the mother-daughter relationship because it is such a theme of your work and

there's a claustrophobia isn't there for Nell with her relationship with her mum. To quote back to you one of your beautiful sentences, and this is about Carmel, she could not hold her daughter and she could not let her daughter go. And that's just such a beautiful way of expressing that free sort of maternal love. Somebody told me that their teenage daughter would come into the bed with them on a Sunday morning the way she always used to, but they weren't allowed to hug her, touch her,

or talk to her in any way. So this drama, which is, you know, in the daughter, you know, mostly this drama of separation and reconnection then that happens towards the end of the novel, is the stuff of, you know, the novel as a form. Connection, distance and connection. But do you very deliberately keep going back to it because there's something about it that you don't understand

or completely the opposite? There's something about it that you just understand more and more that you want to put down on the page i think i probably understand it better for sure because i've looked on life on from both sides now to quote the song i have been both mother and daughter so uh that's the thing i find very mysterious and bouldering is actually um the relationship between daughter and father. And I haven't gone there very much. I would like to kind of get over that, whatever that is, and find a way of writing about that.

Anne Enright is our guest on the podcast today. And without giving too much of the book, The Wren, The Wren, away, there are some really visceral passages about violence. And in particular, there's one passage that Anne herself really struggled to get through when she was recording the audiobook. So I asked her about the depth of that feeling. So yes, there are three kinds of language in the book, okay? Phil talks in the language that's available to him. It's kind of lyrical, a little bit fake, a little bit sort of feels authentic, but also feels a little bit fake. Carmel seems quite normal, naturalistic style.

Anyway, these are historical kind of accents, you might say. So the things that were possible to say between Nell and Carmel wouldn't have been possible to say in Phil's time and Phil lives at a time of casual constant and gleeful violence so there's violence involving animals content alert there's violence between parents when Phil's mother goes off to get a teaching job, he says that her arm grows lean in the beating of children that were not her own.

So it's an absolute casual given. So then when Phil comes to go around clocking his kids over the back of the head when he gets a bad review in the newspaper, they also see it as almost comical and just like the weather, you know, it's like you just have to get out of the way of it. It's a given. It's a fact of life.

And that continues to the present day when there's an argy-bargy between Carmel and Nell, which shows that it's much more serious than that. It's devastating. It's an actually devastating event. And I found it very hard to read because it's Carmel's terrible moment. It's when, you know, she loves Nell. She's a single mother. Nell is all she has. And she has this astonishing abiding love for her.

So she feels it as a betrayal of her own love for her child, as well as everything else. But it makes it super real. I mean, it's very ordinary. It's actually on some levels much more banal than the other violence that's in the book. But it's much more affecting. Yeah. I mean, I thought it was a really... I had to read the passage twice, actually, just to make sure that I had really taken on the significance of it. Because also there's a moment, isn't there,

where Carmine isn't sure just how much she's hurt her child, which kind of catches you as the reader too. She says, what would you have to do to land a child in hospital? And you see how, in that sentence, you see what taboos are at play here. You see how normal and how hidden these things are, actually. Or not normal, how little understood, I suppose, these things are. Yeah.

And so when you actually come to write something like that, I mean, do you have to kind of gird your loins yourself? Does it come very easily to do that? Do you then do what I did as the reader, which is just kind of walk away from it for a bit, let it sink in? How does that work as the writer? It's the kind of moment that you're building up to

for the whole of that section or the whole of that book, for the whole of that character, actually. It's the real moment for the character. So by the time you get there you're ready to write it I think um but I mean I write everything a million times uh so um I was very interested in her there's a kind of falling apart that happens to her that she holds herself together so much she's all about holding herself together and that tumbles apart, that fragments in that moment. So that was interesting to catch. It was a kind of moment almost, I suppose, of psychosis

rather than of anything else. She seems to just fall, fragment. Yeah, obviously there are universal themes of motherhood throughout the book. But just to go back to the Twitter and the Instagram kind of generation, there's some very canny observation about what young women now go through in their lives. And particularly with regard to sex, the fact that it can be filmed, the fact that it could be made public, the fact that you know about your friend's sex. You know, there's something around it that wasn't there in previous generations. And I wonder how either fearful or optimistic you are for the young women of today. Yeah, I mean, just on the last point,

it's interesting that whatever the sexual violence of the book between Nell and her ghastly boyfriend, Phelan, actually he's not as ghastly as he seems, but her ill-advised relationship with this young man. And that kind of violence is very normalised and very glamorised in a lot of the narratives we see today, even without going online, which Phelan clearly spends a lot of time doing. And so how hopeful am I? Well, I am interested in change for my characters. I'm interested in growth for the characters. I think the 20ss people's 20s were always hard one way or the other um and there's an amount of blundering around that kind of goes on

but i worry and that you know my 20s they they didn't contain a kind of normalization of rough sex there wasn't a normalization of choking uh there wasn't a i don't think of normalisation of rough sex. There wasn't a normalisation of choking. There wasn't, I don't think, a normalisation of role play. There was none of that. And they were still bewildering. Sure. It's still quite difficult to get through. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And I wonder, actually, because some of these things come into the public discourse very kind of suddenly, when women are killed, for example, during sex. And consent is used as an argument in court. And that happens quite abruptly and then it's resolved in some way. So we kind of move a little bit further on. I think the conversation is more open than it used to be and I think people are just more aware maybe yeah I think it's always helpful when when fiction gives you an account of what's happening in the world as well because for lots of people fiction

is where you first meet very difficult concepts and where you can kind of work your way through them so do you feel the older you get you and I are the same age so I'm insulting myself in saying that Anne that you have you will retain the confidence to carry on writing about younger women do you ever feel too much of a distance might come on you know the funny thing is that I haven't been old yet but nobody would be surprised if I wrote an old character. They wouldn't say, how do you know that? Oh, my God, how do you know that? But young people regard their lives as a kind of separate country slightly

and not being understood is part of how they see themselves. So the idea that I can write about young people, even though I was myself once, a young person is uh you know makes makes people raise their eyebrows what would you know we've all been young um and and and I haven't yet been old I have I've no problem writing um I've no yeah I suppose I kind of thought maybe I should stop writing about sex soon. And is that a pleasing prospect or is that a sad prospect? Sorry. No, it's a very serious subject. I think a really formative time in my life was when Ireland was breaking free of repressive kind of bonds to do with sex and sexuality. And we thought it was going to be great.

From now on, everyone is going to have a really good time. So the idea that that will be turned around again to having a worse kind of time than anyone had envisaged. It's really interesting to me. And I think maybe it comes, not in cycles, but it kind of spirals outwards. It gets, you know... Yeah. I am hopeful. I am hopeful, yes.

I also have great faith in men. Anne Enright and her latest novel is called The Wren, The Wren. It's out now. Out now, yeah. And it's been a special day here, actually, in any number of ways. We had to come in early. But also because you and I attempted a short explainer

on the pension's triple lock to our younger colleagues, two of whom stayed awake right to the very end. So if anybody even mentioned pensions to you under the age of 30, you just glazed over, didn't you? To be honest, under 40, possibly under 45 feet, I mean, I just, I was as thick as mince about this. I really was. And now you can't afford any mince.

Well, as you know, I used to do nothing but thick as mince about this. I really was. And now you can't afford any mince. Well, as you know, I used to do nothing but make the mince since the vegan veggie days. Is that your league now, love? If you didn't do your compound interest over the last 30 years? Just define compound interest, please. So compound interest is when interest is paid. It is the amount that that interest adds to the original amount that then adds interest to the original amount.

And so it goes on. And so it goes on. It's like a cat returning to wee in the same part of your sofa. In other words, the more... It increases the smell every time, Jane. The more you have, the more you'll make. Yeah, that's a better way of putting it. I mean, you could go with a cat wee one if you want. Take your pick. We both went for Moneybox on Radio 4 and neither of us putting it. I mean, you can go with a cat, we one of you won't take your pick.

We both went for Moneybox on Radio 4 and neither of us got it. I don't know why. Right, some cracking guests coming up later in the week. Anne Enright was a good get, I should say. And before that, of course, we're certainly not embarrassed to have had Rory Stewart on board. But later in the week, it's only Clive Myrie and Robert Peston. Oh, the big boys.

They are swinging into town, aren't they? They really are. And I'm not seeing the testosterone whizzing around the studio. We'll be very, very tired, James, at the end of the week. And we'll be doing a little bit of tittering. Anyway, enjoy, because they're coming your way. Well done for getting to the end of another episode of Off Air with Jane Garvey and Fee Glover. Our Times Radio producer is Rosie Cutler and the podcast executive producer is Henry Tribe.

And don't forget, there is even more of us every afternoon on Times Radio. It's Monday to Thursday, three till five. You can pop us on when you're pottering around the house or heading out in the car on the school run or running a bank. Thank you for joining us and we hope you can join us again on Off Air very soon.

Don't be so silly. Running a bank? I know, ladies. A lady listener. I'm sorry.