Today is the birthday of the great Irish writer Edna O’Brien, who just died this past summer at the age of 93. I came to her Country Girls trilogy fairly young. I was in college. I think that might be the best time to encounter those books. I didn’t read them. I inhaled them and lived them. Her writing is so pure and free, passionate, detailed: you literally don’t feel like it’s writing. It’s experiential. When I learned much later that she wrote the first of the trilogy in the matter of a couple of weeks, I was awe-struck but also not surprised. The thing poured out of her. She’s been very important to me. I’ve written quite a bit about her if you want to search around. She lived a long life, started publishing young, and wrote almost up to the very end. A prolific woman, not only not afraid of controversy but she kind of couldn’t do it any other way. It was her destiny, as an Irish writer, and an Irish woman writer at that.
Excerpt from a 2008 essay by O’Brien in The Guardian:
The Country Girls took three weeks, or maybe less, to write. After I brought my sons Carlo and Sasha to the local school in Morden, I came home, sat by the windowsill of their bedroom and wrote and wrote. It was as if I was merely a medium for the words to flow. The emotional crux hinged on Ireland, the country I had left and wanted to leave, but now grieved for, with an inexplicable sorrow.
Images of roads and ditches and bog and bog lake assailed me, as did the voice of my mother, tender or chastising, and even her cough when she lay down at night. In the fields outside, the lonely plaint of cattle, dogs barking and, as I believed, ghosts. All the people I had encountered kept re-emerging with a vividness: Hickey our workman, whom I loved; my father, whom I feared; knackers; publicans; a travelling salesman by the name of Sacco, who sold spectacles and sets of dentures; and the tinkers who rapped on the door demanding money in exchange for mending tin pots. There was the embryo poet, an amateur historian and the blacksmith who claimed to have met the film director John Ford on the streets of Galway and was asked to appear in The Quiet Man, but declined out of filial duty. The lost landscape of childhood.
Sinéad O’Shea’s new documentary Blue Road — The Edna O’Brien Story doesn’t have distribution yet, but it’s been wowing audiences at festivals over the last couple of months. There was bound to be a documentary about the life of O’Brien eventually – she was just so freakin’ famous – but O’Shea’s is the first, and – lucky for us – she began filming before O’Brien died, and interviewed her for it. Invaluable. Let this gossiped-about insanely famous writer tell her own story.
I just interviewed O’Shea for my column at Liberties: Edna O’Brien: Documentary of A Writer and A Star.
“I hear stories. It could be myself telling them to myself or it could be these murmurs that come out of the earth. The earth so old and haunted, so hungry and replete. It talks. Things past and things yet to be.”
― Edna O’Brien, House of Splendid Isolation
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