I began filming with Edna O’Brien nearly a year ago, in August 2023.
She was initially reluctant. Her time, we all knew, was limited but she became more enthused about the project after we shot our first interview. A few days later she was admitted to hospital and began sending me ideas for the documentary via long voice memos recorded by a mutual friend.
I listened again to these on the night I was told she had died. I had decided against using them in our film but they are such wonderful artefacts of Edna’s way of being. She speaks beautifully but at such length that you wonder if she knows where she is going and then suddenly, seemingly from nowhere, she lands some brilliant observation.
She was keen that the film wouldn’t feel too morose or “stage Irish” as she put it. Title ideas followed. “Country Girl” was tempting but we needed something to differentiate ourselves. There were many scores she wanted to settle, some were hilariously petty. Others were more troubling.
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There are a few things that are hard to overstate about Edna. For one, she is exceptionally compelling. I had first interviewed Edna nearly a decade before on a grim December afternoon in her house in London. The encounter never left me. We laughed, we wept, we hunted for perhaps imaginary mice in her kitchen. I quoted her for years afterwards. This is standard procedure for many who meet Edna.
Conversely, another fundamental about Edna was that she inspired extraordinary ire in others.
Over the course of her career Edna’s books were banned and burned but I think something much worse happened. She was denigrated in an insidious but highly effective way.
It began partly, I believe, with her ex-husband’s insistence that he had written her first two books and told everyone else the same. The accusations now seem laughable given she would go on to write many more books to great acclaim after she left him but Ireland then deferred to the male perspective no matter how irrational.
Women may complain now, rightly, that it is difficult to be accepted in more than one role, as say a busy mother and a competent employee but the complexity that Edna represented was unthinkable in the 1960s.
She was glamorous yet earthy, sometimes imperious, sometimes vulnerable, she loved parties and books, philosophy and trees. It didn’t track. The coup de grace was her success. Nobody could compete and so she was eviscerated continually. Sketches were devoted to her. An Irish Times columnist, Kevin Myers, said he’d like to put a hatchet through her head. The nation would applaud, he added.
Edna was certainly not without flaws but in my experience, she wanted to own her misjudgments. She considered every accusation and told me that she wanted to relive the parts of her life where she made a mistake. Why, I asked.
“Because I’m a bit of a fanatic.”
It makes me sad to listen to those voice memos now and hear Edna anticipating new brickbats, warning me against certain approaches within the film. It had taken such resolve for her to keep going over the years.
We met several times on camera and on other occasions with just an audio recorder and these were the best encounters. Our conversations were mostly one-way. She was very deaf and found my voice particularly difficult to understand, she said.
I was delighted to just listen. The insights into literature and luminaries of the past were so enjoyable. Chekhov had taught her the “tenderness” permissible in writing. From Joyce she learned “dauntlessness”. Marlon Brando had come to her house once after a night out and she had offered him champagne or cake. Guess which he had chosen, she asked me. Cake, she tittered.
[ Carlo Gébler on his mother Edna O’Brien: Coming to the endOpens in new window ]
She decided I should read her diaries, the most “naked ones”, she said, were kept in an archive in Emory College, Georgia. By then I knew she had not long left and so began a race to transcribe and understand what she had written in enough time to work them into the film.
There isn’t the scope within this article to discuss those diaries, indeed I had to leave much out of our film. Edna had written thousands of pages over the decades. They were naked as she promised, so intense and detailed, full of gaiety and pain. They account for the missing years when she didn’t write a novel for more than a decade, a period that has always been misinterpreted.
Her health continued to decline. Just before I arrived for one interview, she told me she had lost her balance because she couldn’t feel her head any more. The last time she saw Beckett, she told me, he had described the same sensation to her. I’m about to die, she whispered. She would dream of her older, deceased sister and implore her to come back and tell her where she was going to go.
Once she asked me if I could stay for a few weeks. I said I couldn’t as I had a baby at home in Dublin and then she asked me if I knew any other Irish girls in London who could help her. Her request felt like a moment from Girls in Their Married Bliss, the longing for something familiar from home. She had a live-in carer by then but was overwhelmed constantly with correspondence and concerns that she wouldn’t finish the book she was trying to write.
Edna had so many natural gifts, the intelligence, the beauty, the charisma but I think her work ethic was always overlooked. She was obsessed with reading and writing. Her education, she said to me, was “patchy”. It was through books that she learned about the world.
“Life for me then and now and always lacks lustre compared with what I perceive when I read. My love of educating myself through language, has, if anything, magnified.”
In the end, she published 34 books of fiction and non-fiction, film scripts and plays. She wrote and rewrote. She triumphed and faltered and tried always. There was more she wanted to say.
Our final filmed interview took place in late April 2024. It was the most difficult encounter. She was in great discomfort and desperate to find energy enough to write again. We began nervily, I wasn’t sure if we could continue and then, somehow, from somewhere she summoned up the will to make statements about her experiences and beliefs that stunned every crew member into silence.
We had all hoped she would live long enough to see our finished film, Blue Road: The Edna O’Brien Story, the “opus” as she called it, but she began to slip in and out of consciousness in the last month. We received word that our film had been accepted by a major film festival. The news was apparently a source of cheer, a final say.
On the night I learned of her death, I went back to a diary entry I remembered from 1978.
Nighttime:
“If I should die, I would like it known that I was not prepared, not ready, not willing and that I have something better to do – yet.”
Sinead O’Shea’s documentary Blue Road: The Edna O’Brien Story is due for release later this year
