STATES OF MIND

This month we will be looking at Night Swim by Anne Enright. It’s a relatively short story but its clever structure means that it covers a lot of ground and captures aspects of the main character’s life vividly and memorably. As always, you will get the most out of this masterclass if you read the story for yourself: https://writ.rs/nightswim.

Firstly, what’s so clever about the structure? We have a present moment narrative that has our main character, Michelle, in a car with her son Ben as she drives him to the house of a new schoolfriend. Then, set within that narrative, we have two very revealing flashbacks into Michelle’s earlier life that are triggered by the journey.

Let’s look at how the time shifts with those flashbacks work. The first flashback is heralded by Ben asking his mother whether she would rather be strangled in the dark or drown in the dark (part of a