It may depend on your age whether you know the actress Kate Mulgrew best as the willful beauty Mary Ryan of "Ryan's Hope," the cool-headed Captain Kathryn Janeway of "Star Trek: Voyager," or the gravely-throated convict Galina "Red" Reznikov of "Orange is the New Black." Mulgrew has had a long career as well as a dramatic personal life, which she recounts in her recent memoir, "Born With Teeth."
BOOKS: What are you reading currently?
MULGREW: I am in Ireland writing my next book, so I'm reading all things Irish. I just finished Colum McCann's recent short-story collection, "Thirteen Ways of Looking." I like him very much and have read a lot of his books. He's a little more unpredictable in this collection. Then I read Joyce Carol Oates's memoir "The Lost Landscape," which at first I didn't think I would like at all. Then I settled into it, and I loved her observations about growing up on a farm and becoming a writer. I always have the critic John Berger's collection of essays "The Shape of a Pocket" with me. He writes a lot about the great painters who interest me. But the one I'm intoxicated with and was up until almost dawn reading is "Ireland" by Gustave de Beaumont. He went to Ireland in the 1830s and recorded what he saw.
BOOKS: Do you stay up late reading often?
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MULGREW: I go on terrible binges. I've done this all my life. They don't do me any favors. Some people have heroin, and I have books. It gets very uncomfortable when there's a man, like my boyfriend, who needs attention, but I can't give it to him. I try to explain it, but people don't get it that you'd rather be in a book than with them. That's how bad it gets with me when a book is really good.
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BOOKS: What's the last book you read like that?
MULGREW: Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan series. I read the four books in three weeks. I read them like I was starving. Now they are doing a mini-series. I called my manager and said, "Get me a part.''
BOOKS: Did you read memoirs as research for your own?
MULGREW: I've always read biographies and memoirs, but I would say that I disengaged from that genre. I did read Edna O'Brien's memoir, "Country Girl." I found that kind of unsettling because I had come to know her so well as a novelist. It was almost as if she was taking off her clothes. I was happy when I finished it. I picked up "The Little Red Chairs," her most recent novel. That is brilliant.
BOOKS: What have been your favorite memoirs?
MULGREW: Without a question Tolstoy's "Childhood; Boyhood; Youth," but none so great as Nabokov's "Speak, Memory." It changed the way I think about memoir and writers.
BOOKS: What kind of book won't you read?
MULGREW: I won't read junk. I will bypass any kind of celebrity baloney. It's not going to deepen me. I'm very rigorous about my reading. I've read most of the classics. I'm a devotee of Proust. I've read "Remembrance of Things Past" twice, first as a young girl. I grew up in an environment where people read voraciously. We grew up without a TV. It was all about books.
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BOOKS: Do your acting roles influence what you read?
MULGREW: Never. I separate the two deliberately unless I'm doing a one-woman show as I did about Katharine Hepburn. Then I read everything about her to educate myself. But playing "Red'' on "Orange is the New Black," I'm not going to read about the Russian peasantry.
BOOKS: What's the last book that made you cry?
MULGREW: "Ireland" is making me cry. Last night I was reading about Cromwell marching through Ireland and his grotesque butchery of these people. He'd flushed them out of the woods, naked and running, and just cut them down. I cried. That's not so hard to do when you are 60. You cry a lot.
AMY SUTHERLAND
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