I first met Anne Enright on a balmy evening in October 2011, at Book Passage in Corte Madera, California, where she read from her sixth book, the novel The Forgotten Waltz. Enright is an expressive reader. She gripped the podium with one hand, holding the book in the other, balancing her foot on the tip of a high heel in such a way that it was possible to picture her as a girl, reading out her compositions to her mother in the kitchen after school.

A self-described “passionate writer” who brings all of herself to every book, Enright has the rare ability to draw the reader so scarily close to her characters that you sometimes find yourself pulling back. Her first book, a collection of short stories called The Portable Virgin, was published in 1991, followed by four novels, including What Are You Like? (2000), which was shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel Award. In 2012, The Forgotten Waltz was awarded the American Library Association’s first Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. Her best-known book is The Gathering (2007), for which she won the Man Booker Prize. In it, a young woman tries to untie her family’s tangled past as she brings home the body of her brother, who has committed suicide, to be buried in Ireland.

Enright was born in 1962 in Dublin, and currently lives in Bray, a seaside suburb of Dublin, with her husband, Martin Murphy, a theater producer, and their two children. She graduated from Trinity College with a degree in English and philosophy. After college, she worked in fringe theater as an actress and a writer, then worked as a television producer and director at RTÉ, Ireland’s national radio and television broadcasting station, which drove her to the edge of a breakdown. An essay on this experience is contained in her only work of nonfiction to date, Making Babies, published in 2004.

I caught up with Enright for tea and an interview on Skype after she returned home from her book tour. On paper, Enright can be sharp, but what is most disarming about her in conversation is her humor, sensitiveness, and directness. She was between books when we spoke, and at times she seemed a bit uneasy. This was offset by her soft Dublin brogue, which created a sense of cheerful spontaneity.

—Conan Putnam

I. WHAT YOU HAVE TO DO IS NOT LEAVE THE HOUSE

THE BELIEVER: Your new book, The Forgotten Waltz, is a novel about adultery in boom times. Can you talk about some of the ways adultery has changed since, say, John Cheever’s time?

ANNE ENRIGHT: I don’t...