In The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde wrote, “One should never make one’s debut with a scandal. One should reserve that to give an interest to one’s old age.” Lucky rare Edna O’Brien, who died this past July at the age of 93, did both. She exploded onto the world scene in 1960 with her debut novel, The Country Girls, based loosely on her own adolescence in County Clare, a place she described as “enclosed”, claustrophobic with sexual repression, patriarchy, and gossip. The book was both a smash hit and a scandal. It was banned in Ireland (many of her subsequent books were as well, putting O’Brien in a long tradition of the country banishing its geniuses, only to claim them proudly decades later). “Scandal” closed out O’Brien’s writing career, but the controversy around her final novel, 2019’s Girl, about a girl kidnapped by Boko Haram, was tepid in comparison with the storm surrounding The Country Girls. Still, perfect in its symmetry. Edna O’Brien was still ruffling feathers at the age of 89.
Over the course of her long life, O’Brien wrote 18 novels, 8 short story collections, 8 plays and 1 screenplay, 8 nonfiction books (including a memoir, and 2 biographies), 4 children’s books and 1 book of poetry. A dazzling output, even with a 10-year period where she couldn’t write at all. She didn’t repeat herself much. Well into her 70s and 80s, she wrote three books – In the Forest (2002), The Little Red Chairs (2015) and Girl (2019) – often referred to as the “state of the nation trilogy” – about various forms of oppression and political corruption. She was still daring and bold. The experimental Night (1972), narrated by a Molly-Bloom-esque insomniac, shows how willing she was to step out onto the limb of exposure every single time.
She became a celebrity (rare for any writer), but was also shunned, scorned, and mocked for telling the truth about an Irish girl’s life in The Country Girls, and its two follow-ups, The Lonely Girl, and Girls In Their Married Bliss (the twisted sarcasm in that title hurt the people it was meant to hurt). What she describes in the trilogy is localized but eternal: the restlessness of adolescence, yearning for more from life, the danger of being a girl in the world, and the taste for danger that threat inspires. These books remain urgent and relevant, but it is the writing that stuns. Her prose is not self-conscious. There is no strain for effect. You could drop open the book on any page and find a gem. For example, at random, on page 142:
“Will you fit on the brassiere, Miss Brady?” the shopgirl asked. Pale. First Communion voice; pale, pure, rosary-bead hands, held the flimsy, black sinful garment between her fingers and her fingers were ashamed.
It’s breath-taking how much O’Brien slips into those two lines.
O’Brien told the country’s secrets and she was punished. She lived a glitzy life, and she was not forgiven for that either. Much of this was complicated by the stifling maleness of the Irish literary scene. American male writers like John Updike celebrated O’Brien, but Irish male writers were slower to come around. Irish men wrote about boyhood which they and their readers considered glorious and universal. She wrote about girlhood and it was considered frivolous and silly. Women writers still know this fight.
O’Brien paid frank tribute to her influences. Early in her time in London, she went to a lecture on Fitzgerald and Hemingway given by Arthur Mizener. O’Brien was educated in a convent school where literature was pushed to the back of the priorities pack. Mizener read the first paragraph of A Farewell to Arms, and in her 1984 interview with The Paris Review, O’Brien recalled: “I couldn’t believe it — this totally uncluttered, precise, true prose, which was also very moving and lyrical. I can say that the two things came together then: my being ready for the revelation and my urgency to write. [The Country Girl] wrote itself, so to speak, in a few weeks.”
She was eager to give credit to the men who inspired her. Alas, many of her stingy male contemporaries could not bring themselves to do the same.
Blue Road — The Edna O’Brien Story is the new documentary from Irish writer and film-maker Sinéad O’Shea, in perfect time for those for whom O’Brien’s passing is still fresh to mourn. It is a detailed look at this extraordinary artist’s near-century of a journey, including interviews with contemporary Irish authors like Anne Enright, Doireann Ní Ghríofa, and Andrew O’Hagan (a friend of O’Brien’s). Gabriel Byrne, who knew her, provides essential contextual commentary. There’s a very moving interview with Walter Mosley (Devil in a Blue Dress), who studied with Edna as an undergraduate. O’Shea has carefully woven together snippets of old documentary footage of Edna in the first flush of fame, her provocative television interviews, footage of her famous parties (where people like Marlon Brando stopped by). O’Shea used O’Brien’s copious eloquent journals as a through-line (read in voice-over by Jessie Buckley). Blue Road is not just a portrait of the artist as a young woman, but a portrait of the artist from start to finish. Even more crucial for posterity, O’Shea interviews O’Brien herself. Elderly and frail, speaking often on a long exhale, O’Brien is eloquent, thoughtful, surprising. She speaks as she writes: piercing and poetic, never losing connection to the earth.
The film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, and recently played at DOC NYC (to a rapturous response).
No one lives forever but Edna O’Brien’s books are evergreen, and will be discovered by generations to come. I was so happy to meet up with the very busy Sinéad over Zoom and discuss Blue Road with her.
I didn’t know how much I needed something like this documentary until I watched it. Edna O’Brien died this summer, and to me the film is like a wake. I am sorry my dad isn’t here. He said to me when I was in college, “You really should read Edna O’Brien.” He connected her to Joyce, because Joyce’s books were banned also, and he had to leave Ireland too.
That’s interesting he said that because Edna felt a kinship with Joyce. And because of the state of the contemporary Irish literary scene, it was seen as an unspeakable thing for her to suggest a kinship with him.
Can you tell me about your discovery of Edna and how the project came about?
I studied English in university and there was no trace of Edna in the syllabus. I used to write profiles for Publishers Weekly and about ten years ago I was assigned Edna O’Brien. I finally read her books and I was shocked and shamed and humbled. Not only did the books articulate her adolescence, they were talking about mine as well, with all the same things, the toxic friendships, the terrible older men, the sense that adventure was happening everywhere else. That was adolescence in the 1990s in Ireland! I couldn’t believe how timeless they were, how funny, and of course how eloquent. So I went to meet her.
In the documentary, she was on her deathbed, so just imagine the charisma 10 years ago, or 60 years ago when she first broke onto the scene. Within minutes of meeting her, I was in love with her. I never got over that interview. I was always thinking about it. Two summers ago I was at a wedding, very pregnant, and I struck up a conversation with a lady I didn’t know, and at one point I quoted Edna O’Brien to her and she said, “Oh, she’s one of my best friends.” That lady was Barbara Broccoli who makes the James Bond films. Barbara said, “You should make your next documentary about her.” For a full year, I couldn’t get to Edna. Eventually I contacted Barbara and she went to Edna’s house and asked her herself to do the documentary. Within weeks, we did the first interview, the one with the black background. Edna is so electrifying, all you need to do is to put the camera on her. She was so physically weak. In the end she’s just a voice and a mind and a spirit, still going. She was still determined to say what she had to say.
How did you approach the black background interview?
The black background interview was the starting point of my relationship with Edna. I tried to ask her things which I thought I could use in the film. I asked her about trauma, for example. At the end of the interview, she said she felt very weak, but just before we walked her out of the room, I showed her the little piece of archive footage on my laptop, the one from British television, which shows her and her father and mother. It’s this perfect piece of pantomime. They’re all pretending. The mother is saying, “I don’t mind about her books at all!” Her dad’s playing the role of the avuncular older Irish man, singing “Danny Boy.” And poor Edna. Even though she knows they’re not going to erupt while the cameras are there, she’s still traumatized, she retains that discomfort. Showing it to her was quite zealous of me, because she was about to collapse. She went into hospital the next day. But she was so taken by that piece of archive, that she emailed me and said, “Whatever you do, make sure to use that in the film.” Her interest was aroused because I think she felt I was going to be rigorous and intrepid about this. She would send me long voice mails with ideas for the film, people I should interview, people who should not be interviewed. She directed me to her diaries, which are kept in three different locations. She said the ones at Emory College in Georgia were the most naked ones and I had to read those. She had this amazing trust in me.
It’s wonderful she lived to be able to participate in this documentary.
I had this adrenaline. I had to do it in this way in this time, and the timeline lined up with what Edna might have envisioned. She lived long enough to hear that the film got into Toronto and then she died, but she died soon enough that we could include the funeral in the film. [Laughing] The funeral, which she’d planned since childhood!
I want to go to that grave.
Oh you should. It’s a place called Holy Island, and you get to it by a little boat. Edna set her sights on this spot in childhood. The whole day was so Edna. The mass was lengthy, but absorbing and beautiful. And then a relay of people carrying the coffin across the island. By the graveside, there was singing and poetry. And then afterwards, champagne. She loved champagne, it comes up all the time in her diary. Edna’s sense of plenty and grandiosity undid her. She ended up renting, constantly worried about money. In our first meeting, I remember looking for mice in her kitchen. She seemed so vulnerable. She was very extravagant, but if you look at the deprivation she came from, you’ve got to see she associated extravagance with stability. She considered it the antithesis of the precarity she grew up in.
People criticize young stars for their excess, but if you come from deprivation, being able to buy things means you’re not going to be hungry.
A lot of people had a problem with it. She annoyed a lot of people here in Ireland, mostly middle-class people. Edna was not quite middle-class. She came from a big house, but they were dirt poor and the house isn’t part of the landed gentry. It’s a weird big house her grandparents built, a folly. She wasn’t “old money. She wasn’t “new money” either. People didn’t know how to place her. She made them feel bad. She was very threatening to the prevailing social order of the time, which was so patriarchal, all about propping up the weak man, the father, a stupid violent alcoholic. So many women devoted their lives to preserving this mirage.
Gabriel Byrne said, “Irish literature was a male preserve.” Anne Enright has said similar things in interviews.
It has been that way for so long despite there being so many excellent female writers. There is a default maleness about the Irish literary tradition, and it’s quite boozy and patriarchal. Men shouting at each other in pubs is a big trope of the Irish male literary tradition. It can be quite charming and fun, but if you are trying to be their equal and you’re not one of them, they will find ways to undermine you.
I wonder, too, if … I don’t know how else to say this. Edna O’Brien was such a babe.
Yes. It was a real problem. She was beautiful and clever and she succeeded in exactly the places they wanted to flourish. Her existence antagonized them. And then, of course, we have [husband] Ernest Gébler in the background the whole time. It’s not enough he was abusive during the marriage. He also claimed for the rest of his life that he actually wrote her books, that she slept her way to the top. She only wrote two books within their marriage. People wanted to believe it because the flip-side was painful, which is that a woman could be clever and beautiful.
I consider myself a liberated woman, but I was watching the Question Time interview, where she was so angry and sexual and flirtatious, and I found myself thinking, “She’s being so provocative, she’s going to get in trouble!” I am telling on myself here. I too was thinking she needed to tone it down.
I thought the same. “Oh, Edna, don’t say that!” With that sequence, it’s comprehensible when you know the backstory, which the film now provides. The guy she was having an affair with was a senior politician, well known to everybody in the U.K. She knew she was communicating directly with him. In her interview with me, she said, “Yes, I was quite brazen.” She said, “I shouldn’t have done it, but I’d been locked up for so long in a cage and I wanted to speak. Anyway, the person I am on the inside is different. What’s important is I got to write.” Edna the Persona is separate from Edna the Writer. The persona is so charismatic it’s like electricity. In some ways it’s a little contrived, but in other ways, it’s a live performance and it changes every time.
She was a star.
She had star quality. People accept this in actors, but it made people uncomfortable with Edna, and it was used to undermine the seriousness of her writing and her intent.
She experienced the scandal of her books being banned and denounced from pulpits. Her attitude makes sense to me.
Yes. When you look at early diary entries which her husband annotated, he’s saying all these things about her that haven’t happened yet. He is gaslighting her, telling her she’s a shallow person who wants to hang out with movie stars. At the time she was just cooking dinners at home. But he clearly saw her charisma and wanted to squash it. He was a grotesque, a cartoon villain, except it was real, and the impact on his children was tragic. He criticized her so much and she’d internalized that criticism. Anyone who’s ever had a bad relationship, or who feels like they’ve lost their mind over a man – Edna was like that times ten. The affair with the British politician was so damaging. She couldn’t write for ten years, she lost her house. She was only interested in certain kinds of men. I’ve left out so many of them.
The Robert Mitchum encounter! I was excited to hear they connected. He sounded sweet.
That’s a great one because it doesn’t have darkness in it. She had no expectations with him, it was a fun, exciting diversion during a tough time in her life, post-divorce and struggling for custody of her children. But other encounters get really dark. She was so obsessive, and definitely had addiction issues which were channeled into men. It’s grim. They treated her very badly and she let them.
There’s that extraordinary moment in an early interview where she said, “I wish my life had been funnier.”
It’s so over-the-top. They’re in Scarriff and she’s in this huge fur coat. She was such a diva! I hope the film doesn’t seem like I’ve sugar-coated her too much. She can be hard work. But she was a genius. I really do believe she was.