For 30 years, Anne Enright has been paying attention: casting her lucid and distinctive gaze across the world, literature and her own life, and gifting us with her precise insights. These essays, collated from across Enright’s career, take us from Galway to Honduras, from keen-eyed memoir to urgent political writing. Enright writes about the free voices and controlled bodies of women in society. She interprets Sophocles’ Antigone through the lens of the Mother and Baby Homes in Galway, writes on Ireland’s successful 2018 referendum on abortion rights, and offers new perspectives on writers including Alice Munro, Toni Morrison, James Joyce, Helen Garner and Angela Carter.

Nell McDaragh never knew her grandfather, the celebrated Irish poet Phil McDaragh. But his love poems seem to speak directly to her. Restless and wryly self-assured, at 22 Nell leaves her mother Carmel’s orderly home to find her own voice as a writer. As she chases obsessive love, damage and transcendence, her grandfather’s poetry seems to guide her home. Carmel knows the magic of her Daddo’s poetry too well. In his poems to her, Phil envisions his daughter as a bright-eyed wren ascending in escape from his hand. But it is Phil who departs, abandoning his wife and two young daughters. Carmel struggles to reconcile “the poet” with the father whose desertion scars her life, along with that of her fiercely dutiful sister and their gentle, cancer-ridden mother.

Katherine O’Dell is an Irish theater legend. Every moment of her life is a performance, with her daughter, Norah, standing in the wings. However, with age, alcohol and dimming stardom, Katherine’s grip on reality grows fitful. Fueled by a proud and long-simmering rage, she commits a bizarre crime. As Norah’s role gradually changes to Katherine’s protector, caregiver and, finally, legacy-keeper, she revisits her mother’s life of fiercely kept secrets. In turn, Norah confronts the secrets of her own sexual and emotional coming-of-age.

Spanning 30 years, THE GREEN ROAD tells the story of Rosaleen, matriarch of the Madigans, a family on the cusp of either coming together or falling irreparably apart. As they grow up, Rosaleen's four children leave the west of Ireland for lives they never could have imagined. In her early old age, their mother announces that she’s decided to sell the house and divide the proceeds. Her adult children come back for a last Christmas, with the feeling that their childhoods are being erased, their personal history bought and sold.

Enright was married for eighteen years before she and her husband Martin, a playwright, decided to have children. While each baby slept during their first two years of life, Enright wrote, in dispatches, about the mess, the glory, and the raw shock of motherhood.

Gina Moynihan remembers her affair with "the love of her life," Seán Vallely, while awaiting the arrival of Seán's fragile, 12-year-old daughter, Evie --- the complication, and gravity, of this second life.