40 pages • 1 hour read
Anne EnrightThe Gathering
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2007A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Complexity of Memory
Content Warning: This section of the guide analyzes the source text’s graphic depiction of the sexual abuse of children, grief, addiction, and death by suicide.
The Gathering is structured as a journey into memory. Enright emphasizes that memory is complex and often unreliable, but crucial to how individuals understand themselves and others.
Veronica, the narrator, is consumed by the past in the wake of her brother Liam’s death by suicide. She wants to tell Liam’s story and knows she can’t tell the full story unless she goes back in time. But her memory is necessarily faulty and mired by family trauma. Regarding the past, Veronica says, “History is such a romantic place, with its jarveys and urchins and side-buttoned boots. If it would just stay still, I think, and settle down. If it would just stop sliding around in my head” (13). Veronica’s memory is a jumble because dealing with her past is difficult and retraumatizing. Veronica wants to use memory to help her understand the present. What she discovers is that memory can be freeing, but it can also bring up unexpected and unanswerable questions.
In the course of her journey into the past, Veronica touches upon a difficult memory: witnessing her brother Liam’s molestation at the hands of a family friend named Lamb Nugent. This experience was traumatizing, and she has repressed the memory of it for years, until Liam’s death by suicide forces her to finally confront it. But the more Veronica thinks about this memory, the more she wonders if she also was abused by Nugent. She has a memory of being abused by him, but that could be a dream—she isn’t sure. Memory is unreliable because it can be influenced by other people’s stories, time, experience, and knowledge.
As Veronica learns, “History is only biological […] We pick and choose the facts about ourselves—where we came from and what it means” (162). This revelation comes to Veronica because the more she mines her memory for truths and facts, the more uncertain she becomes. This lack of certainty impacts her marriage, her mothering, and her relationship with her living siblings. If history is a narrative that humans can pick and choose from, then memory is a way of navigating the person one wants to be, not necessarily the entirety of who they are. Enright’s exploration of this theme therefore also highlights the importance of storytelling. Whether memory provides a story that is more fiction than fact doesn’t necessarily matter—what matters is what we believe and what we choose to include in the story of ourselves. The title of the novel, The Gathering, is partly an allusion to the ways in which we gather memories to construct an understanding of who we are.
The Impact of Death and Grief
The impact of Liam’s death on Veronica’s character development is deep and significant. Veronica’s grief is so overwhelming that she can’t function in her normal life until she gets to the heart of Liam’s problems. Therefore she decides to narrate the story of how she came to lose him. Her subsequent exploration of death and grief ultimately serves as a celebration of life and a way of honoring the dead.
Liam’s death upends Veronica’s life. She becomes suspicious of her husband, overburdened by her siblings, and begins acting erratically. She stays up all night, goes out for long drives, and at one point even travels to England on an impulse only to be alone, away from Ireland so she can cry and sleep in peace. The trauma of Liam’s death also makes Veronica hyper-aware of human bodies, which become a reminder of her loss and of life’s precarity. Veronica is the one who claims her brother’s body, and she realizes that “dead or alive, you don’t spend time examining your brother’s body, its shape or parts, or the texture of its skin. So I can not recall Liam in any detail. All I know is that he looked completely different dead” (64). Being confronted with a wholly different, almost unrecognizable version of Liam makes Veronica look at everyone’s body much more carefully. She observes her husband, her daughters play, and she is even attentive to the bodies of strangers who sit next to her on the train or walk by her on the street. However, this hyper-awareness takes her out of life, making her feel as though she exists in limbo between the living and the dead.
Ultimately, the grieving process, though difficult, is necessary to Veronica’s character development. By the end of the novel, she realizes that “I have been falling for months. I have been falling into my own life, for months. And I am about to hit it now” (261). Veronica’s emotional turmoil as she processes her grief over Liam’s death ultimately liberates her. Veronica learns that no matter how difficult life can be, it is worth living and ought to be lived well. Veronica’s life is turned upside down by Liam’s death, but the grieving process helps her learn that she can and should keep living. Liam’s death is a reminder to Veronica that life is valuable, no matter what traumas of the past have informed the present. At the end of the book she reflects that she wouldn’t want her life to be any different.
The Influence of Family History
The Gathering as a title has a layered significance, but the primary gathering in the novel is the literal gathering of the surviving members of the Hegarty family. Now that the siblings have grown up, they rarely see each other; only a tragedy like Liam’s death can bring them together. While they are not close, Liam’s death shows them that they are still connected by their shared past and their family’s history.
Each sibling has their own unique experience of the Hegarty family, but they are united by their resentment toward their parents, especially their fragile mother. Veronica recalls: “Don’t tell Mammy. It was the mantra of our childhood […] Don’t tell Mammy, because ‘Mammy’ would—what? Expire? ‘Mammy’ would worry. Which seemed fine to me. It was, after all, her own making, this family” (9). The children’s inability to turn to their mother for help distanced them from her and each other, and in adulthood they are only superficially close. As they gather for Liam’s wake and funeral, they know one another chiefly through the shared memories of their childhood. They are inextricably bound together by the past and shaped by it. At the same time, family poses a challenge to each sibling’s identity. As children they kept to themselves and competed for their mother’s attention; as adults they keep their distance, physically as well as emotionally. Even Veronica, who looks after her mother and oversees Liam’s funeral, resents inheriting family problems and having no choice but to deal with them.
Enright’s message about family history is that it’s inescapable, insurmountably important to the development of identity, and also unchangeable. Veronica becomes hyper-aware of physical bodies, which symbolize among other things the unbreakable tie to family history. The human body houses the traumas that people inherit from their ancestors. Just as a person can’t escape their body except in death, so too is it impossible to completely free oneself of family history. Veronica explores her family history, starting with her grandmother, in an effort to understand her brother and herself. But because Ada is dead and there is no shared family “story” about her, Veronica has to imagine what Ada’s life was like and why Ada made certain decisions that, according to Veronica, doomed the Hegarty family. Although Veronica learns that she has agency in her own life, she also learns that each ancestor’s decisions have a profound ripple effect on their descendants. The many what-ifs that arise from searching through her family history only make Veronica more conflicted. Ultimately, she learns to accept her family’s history and its indelible influence on her own life.
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