https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/feb/14/actress-anne-enright-review

The Booker winner’s seventh novel investigates a woman’s memories of her starry, damaged mother

In Anne Enright’s seventh novel, the daughter of an iconic actor thinks back to her mother’s years of fame, distraction and difficulty, trying at the same time to work out aspects of her own history that have never been clear. For instance: who was her father, the man she imagined as a lost hero? Why could he never be named, this “ghost in [her] blood”? In her late 50s, with her own children grown up and gone from home, she assembles and studies memories of her lost mother.

After the superbly expansive major chord of The Green Road, with its large Irish family pulled back by centripetal force to the Lear-like matriarch’s kitchen kingdom, Actress feels a more meditative, elusive, exploratory book. It is a study of sexual power and hurt in the glamorous, oppressive worlds of Hollywood and Irish theatre in the 1960s and 70s, told from the perspective of the 2010s.