{"id":7182,"date":"2007-10-30T12:00:14","date_gmt":"2007-10-30T16:00:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=7182"},"modified":"2010-07-18T08:27:00","modified_gmt":"2010-07-18T12:27:00","slug":"people-ask-me-who-was-baba-and-i-answer-a%c2%80%c2%93-baba-is-who-id-like-to-be","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=7182","title":{"rendered":"“People ask me who was Baba, and I answer – Baba is who I’d like to be”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Me too. Wonderful interview with Edna O’Brien<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Excerpt from interview:<\/p>\n

“I wrote The Country Girls in three weeks having blown the 50 quid advance. I was young, married with two small children, and whenever I met people, I was spouting poetry. I had this thing that writing was real -\u0080\u0093 I mean other people’s writing – literature, great literature, not rubbish. There’s so much rubbish written now, so much garbage, and it’s extolled. But writing was to me animate; it was real; it was as real as the people I knew.<\/p>\n

“I only thought of one thing -\u0080\u0093 the country, the landscape, my mother, the people I had left. Now I was dying to leave, this is not nostalgia, and I feel permanently, in life, quite isolated. I both belong very intensely to that place where I come from and I’m running from it still. So when I sat down to write, I was extremely emotional and yet the language is not emotional; it just came out. I didn’t have to call on memory. To use the cliche it wrote itself. And that is sometimes true for a first book.<\/p>\n

“I knew there’d be a storm. I was accused of betraying my country, my locality, my sex. The nuns in my convent went bonkers with rage. But the books survived. I suppose that’s what counts.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Me too. Wonderful interview with Edna O’Brien. Excerpt from interview: “I wrote The Country Girls in three weeks having blown the 50 quid advance. I was young, married with two small children, and whenever I met people, I was spouting … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[9],"tags":[244,35,917],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7182"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7182"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7182\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22467,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7182\/revisions\/22467"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7182"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7182"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7182"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}