Anne Enright, The Gathering
I finished this while I was on holiday in Mexico, and it wasn’t what I expected. I thought it would be a heart-warming, rollicking, tragicomic family ensemble piece but instead it was much more interesting. Veronica Hegarty’s attempts to come to terms with her family’s history after the suicide of her brother, Liam, become a meditation on the relationship between memory, history, and story and the way we use all three to endure our lives.
Liam’s death challenges the stories that Veronica uses to prop up her life, and she needs to come up with a new acount of the past. The book we read is meant not only to describe but actually, in the fiction that she has written it herself, to be the path she takes to recover lost memories and discern the fictions she has told herself from the facts she must face. It recalled the process of therapy, in which a crisis has made an old narrative unusable, and the patient, by rendering an account to the counsellor, must come up with a new version of the past that can be taken into the future. The one who can survive the strongest, is the one who can come up with the best story.