THE NEWYORKER, MARCH 16, 2020 89
“ You can leave now. I really just needed you to unzip me.”• •
careful observer of long-term monog-
amy—its uneven tempo, its alternat-
ing major and minor keys. “Even
though I have dragged you from your
dream, you are pleased to see me there,”
Norah says, of waking her husband up
in the morning. “It feels like forgive-
ness, every time.”
But her view of marriage is also un-
varnished. “There were times,” she says,
“whole years, perhaps—when you an-
noyed me, in one way or another.” She
and her husband have blamed each
other for their respective failures, wit-
nessed each other’s bodies sag with age.
It’s a candor that Norah struggles to
seize when describing her relationship
with her mother, and its effect is to
render marital love more real and, in
turn, all the more profound. With her
husband she has built a relationship
grounded in authenticity, a kind of
anti-celebrity experience.
“Actress” moves toward the moment
of Katherine’s desperate assault. The
man she shoots is the “movie impre-
sario” Boyd O’Neill; he survives, though
he never quite heals. She has been
working on a script, but when she offers
it to O’Neill, he sends it off to be re-
written, cutting her out of the process.
The aftermath of the crime has the air
of another performance. Dragged away
by the police, Katherine speaks in a
“pretend language for two hours, in-
terspersed with some phrases and slo-
gans used by Republican elements.”
Once she has been found guilty and
sent to an asylum, the real Katherine
seems to disappear completely, as if
she never existed at all. “Most of the
time,” Norah writes, “she was—I don’t
know how to explain it—only inciden-
tally my mother.”
It’s impossible not to observe this
episode’s resonances with the broader
reckoning taking place around issues of
gendered power and powerlessness. In
a recent essay on the men of #MeToo,
Enright wrote of friends who, in con-
versations about inappropriate encoun-
ters with influential men, especially
at work, spoke of feeling that “what
was violated was not their body, but
their gift.” Katherine, it seems, might
say something similar of her experi-
ences, in which her talent and ambi-
tion were marred by men more pow-
erful than she was. But it would also
be a mistake to reduce the novel to a
parable of women’s empowerment by
way of revenge. Being treated badly
by men does not, in Enright’s telling,
grant women carte blanche to mete
out justice.
The doctoral student who visits
Norah stokes her rage in part because
she wants to make Katherine into a
feminist hero. What her mother did
to O’Neill was “very wrong,” Norah
says. “She turned him into a fantasy,
and then she attacked this fantasy,”
blaming him for a lifetime’s worth of
injuries. For Norah, who, above all,
treasures authenticity, perhaps this is
an essential crime: “Boyd was a real
person, made of flesh and blood,”
Norah says. Was her mother too fake
to understand?
Toward the end of the novel, Norah
has a recurring dream. In it, she finds
a storage unit with her “mother’s ‘per-
formance,’ whatever that might mean”
inside. It contains autographed para-
phernalia and many awards, “big lumps
of glass or metal, heavy and often
pointed, one of them so vicious we put
it out in the shed for fear someone
might get themselves impaled.” Norah
wakes from these dreams to the truththat most of her mother’s belongings
have been given away, sold, or tossed
in the trash. She goes in search of one
of her mother’s props—a ring she
called her “black emerald,” a relic from
her Hollywood days—as if to prove
that Katherine is not just a dream, or
a myth.
Norah knows she put the ring
“somewhere safe,” but now she can’t
remember where that is. Recalling
all the “vital and very small” objects
that her daughter, Pamela, had stashed
away as a child—nail scissors, a single
shoelace—she wanders into Pamela’s
bedroom, rummages through her draw-
ers and coat pockets. She doesn’t really
expect to find the ring, but she stays
in the room a little longer: she has re-
treated from the space of her mother’s
performance and found something real.
She texts her daughter, and their brief
but sweet exchange—Pamela sends two
heart emojis—forces Norah to sit on
the bed to let her “love for her settle
back down.” In this short scene, in the
midst of loss, we glimpse how much
she has gained: a bond with her own
daughter that is perhaps sturdier, and
truer, than anything she knew with
Katherine O’Dell.