Yesterday's Weather

INTRODUCTION

This collection brings together stories written over the course of nineteen years. It includes all of Taking Pictures (Cape 2008), much of The Portable Virgin (Secker 1991), and two stories from Faber’s First Fictions: Introduction 10, which was my first outing into print in 1989.

The stories are presented here in reverse chronological order, partly, it has to be said, for the comic effect. I may be the only one who is laughing, but it is a great and private joke to see myself getting younger — shedding pounds and wrinkles, gaining in innocence and affectation — as the pages turn. The stories have been very lightly edited, not because I did not want to rewrite them, but because I found that I could not. It is impossible to inhabit a former self. You can not be the writer you were in 1989, nor, in a funny way, would you want to be. Still, there is much to regret — the fact that the creative moment is not one that can be repeated, is both a wonderful and a melancholy one. The path your words make as you herd them across the page is the only viable route, after all.

Working on the stories, I was surprised by the pity I felt for my younger self — so assured and so miserable at the same time. The best kind of misery, of course — spiky, artistic, fullhearted — but still, it does make you blunder around a bit.

The irony is that so much of my early work is spent discussing the woes of middle age. I got most of them wrong. I didn’t imagine the many insults to your vanity that age brings, nor could I foresee the sense of urgency you get as the years go by, like typing faster before you hit the end of the page. No, I thought the most terrible thing about middle age would be marriage, in all its loneliness and hypocrisy. And I suppose marriage can be both of these things, but I have also discovered that these kinds of emotion are beside the point: the whole business has been been one of unexpected happiness, for me. Worst of all, the women in my early stories have children and say that the experience has not changed them. How wrong can you be?

It is interesting, but only in a sociological way, to see the sympathy two of my narrators have for men who have just lost their virginity. It is odd, but only to me, to read of the bitterness that exists between female friends, when my own girlfriends are so generous and important to me. These stories are not written by the person who has lived my life and made the best of it, they are written by people I might have been but decided against. They are written by women who take a different turn in the road. They are the shed skins of the snake.

None of this matters — my life, and how it is reflected or distorted in the stories here. I discovered, when I started to look at them again, that I had forgotten the content of some of these pieces. What I remembered, with great clarity, was their shape. I knew whereabouts on the page the thing shifted; I remembered the moment it stumbled or lurched toward an ending. I could turn it around in my head — almost in three dimensions. The stories played like music for me; the way music can give you a sense of space.

What I seem to be saying — a little to my own surprise — is that the person may change, but the writer endures. The writer wants a thing to be well made, because a well-made thing is a gift. This gift is presented not just to the reader, but also to the future — in my case, to an old woman called Anne Enright, who will read this too, with a bit of luck, and laugh.

A. E.

Bray, 2008