“The Wren, The Wren” by Anne Enright is a family story about poetry and betrayal.

Phil McDaragh is a great Irish poet; he was also a bad husband and father, abandoning his family to pursue his writing. In Anne Enright's new novel, The Wren, The Wren, three generations of women in the McDaragh family confront the complicated legacy of the absent patriarch. Enright spoke with NPR's Scott Simon about writing fiction about a great writer and how the poet's bad behavior in his personal life impacts the McDaragh women's passions years later.

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