Sinéad O’Shea’s documentary portrait of the author Edna O’Brien is a reminder that most writers – most people, in fact – don’t have lives anywhere near as exciting or fulfilling as hers. The film, with diary entries read by Jessie Buckley, shows us that O’Brien was always a witty, generous and good-humoured interviewee over the years; this film includes an extended interview with the author herself just before her death last year at the age of 93, in which she speaks with a softly sibilant but beautiful voice, her natural prose-poetry never deserting her.
This film really does have a staggering story to tell. As a young woman in rural Ireland, Edna O’Brien ran away with writer Ernest Gébler, a glamorous but authoritarian figure; their unmarried cohabitation so outraged everyone that he took her away to England where they got married and had two children. Her runaway success with her first novel The Country Girls in 1960 infuriated religious opinion in Ireland, and also Gébler, who appeared to go mad with envious rage; he became a grotesque abuser, harassing and menacing Edna and even scribbling sneering taunts in her diary.
