Edna O'Brien

My friend Katie and I joke that our favorite genre of media is “woman on the brink.” The woman in question is usually (and sometimes unconsciously) seeking a much-needed shock to her mundane existence, culminating in an ill-advised (but hopefully sexy) love affair. However hot and life-changing this jolt of desire may be, it’s rarely simple boredom that drives the woman to the edge. Usually, she is pushed there by disapproving people in her life or a society that requires her to tamp down her natural desires. It’s no surprise that those who benefit from these heteronormative gender roles and suffocating sexual mores seek to censure anyone who chafes against them. One writer who has weathered controversy and censorship while gifting us some truly great “women on the brink” stories is Edna O’Brien.

Ninety-three and still working at the time of writing, O’Brien established herself as an icon to horny girls who make devastating decisions with her 1962 novel The Country Girls, which was swiftly condemned and banned by the Catholic Church in Ireland. Following two friends from a rural western county as they move to Dublin and struggle to find satisfaction, The Country Girls and its sequels, The Lonely Girl and Girls in Their Married Bliss heralded a kind of modernity that could be nothing but terrifying to the powerful and puritanical Catholic Church and its most devoted congregates.

In the flow of her hallucinatory writing, wrong and self-serving decisions seem natural, inevitable, and even liberating. The Catholic tenant of self-sacrifice, twisted through gender conformity to make women suffer indignities at the hands of their families, husbands, and laws, holds no sway over her characters’ decisions. Perhaps that’s why conservative Ireland balked at her writing. A culture and religion that prized denial and silent suffering would never celebrate the luxurious amount of pleasure and pain in O’Brien’s novels and stories.

While the offending women do not escape unscathed, (in fact, O’Brien can be a little blood-thirsty, especially in her later books: see The Little Red Chairs) the affairs themselves are not the problem–the crucible of a conservative society is. She does not condemn her characters for their actions, even if she does love concocting punishments for them. These characters regret the fallout, which often results in ostracization of the protagonist and any children nearly taken away by the husband (mirroring O’Brien’s own life). But they’re never torn up about the betrayal of supposed holy vows of matrimony, or the self-righteous condemnation of one’s mother and neighbors.

Most of her early protagonists’ lives echo her own, detailed in her 2012 memoir Country Girl. Her novels are with populated with rural childhoods, moves to big cities, alcoholic fathers, and disapproving and estranged mothers. But looming largest are the older husbands resembling to various degrees the possessive and vindictive Ernest Gebler, who claimed he plucked O’Brien out of obscurity and sacrificed his own writing talent to cultivate her’s. According to her autobiography, Gebler constantly belittled her talent and when the marriage fell apart, tricked her into legally surrendering her two young sons only for the boys to choose to live with her during the court battle.

Chapters name-dropping the who’s who of London’s Swinging Sixties chronicle O’Brien’s tenure as the Literary It Girl who threw star studded parties in her fashionable townhouse. (A wry aside chronicling how she fucked Robert Mitchum while he was in town filming a movie after she and Gebler separated is a fantastic entry in the “Good For Her!” cannon.) Bad financial decisions compounded by serious bouts of depression-induced writers’ block cost her the house in Chelsea and began a new chapter of writing to pay the bills.

Many of these later books widen her scope from the autobiographical and feature controversial ripped-from-the-headline plots based on real stories (Down by the River, Into the Forest, Girl). However, highly personal struggles remain central–the knotty-ness of relationships between friends (The Country Girls trilogy), between parents and their children (The Light of Evening, August is a Wicked Month, Time and Tide), between spouses and lovers (pretty much all of her oeuvre), between oneself and one’s home (A Pagan Place, Wild Decembers), between a person and their mind (Night).

A lot has changed over the 93 years Edna has been with us. Ireland has made strides towards gender equality: it finally legalized abortion (up to 12 weeks) in 2018, same-sex marriage has been legal since 2015, and it was one of the first nations to permit trans people to self declare their gender on government documents. Not utopia by any means, but the US (never a paragon of gender equality to begin with) feels as if it’s regressing to the Ireland of O’Brien’s early life and novels, the one that condemned objectionable women to work in slave-like conditions at Magdalene laundries. Reading the 1997 book Down by the River, a novelization of the case that spurred long-needed change to Ireland’s abortion ban, is just as enraging today in America as I imagine it was 25 years ago in Ireland.

One line from her 1974 story “A Scandalous Woman” rattled around in my head over the past few years every time a spate of anti-abortion rhetoric and legislation flared up in the US, and again when republicans gutted Roe v. Wade in 2022. “‘Ours,’” the narrator muses as she observes the eponymous, maligned woman, “‘is a land of shame, a land of murder, and a land of strange and sacrificial women.’”

In America, now, like in Ireland, then, it’s perfectly acceptable if people die from pregnancy and birth complications, or from the crushing weight of raising or being raised in a forced family, or from the despair of not living as your true self, as long as we never have to have uncomfortable conversations about sex or autonomy. Or if we absolutely must, any discussion should be shrouded in condemnation and denial of pleasure. Edna O’Brien dared to talk about sex, in all its facets. The awkwardness, the troubling encounters, the regret, and the white-hot need and explosive ecstasy. She lays it all bare, viscerally and unflinchingly.

It would probably be insulting to O’Brien to label her works as strident political statements, as she herself has rejected the idea that she’s ever written with an agenda. But she has spent her life chronicling what she sees in all its unsettling detail, and sometimes merely pointing out uncomfortable truths rankles people in power. That hasn’t changed in 93 years.

Will history always cycle through periods of intense repression that strangle progress? I hope not. As much as I love reading about women making devastating (and sexy! never forget sexy) decisions, I look forward to one day getting my kicks elsewhere because those decisions won’t be devastating anymore. To be able to say, “wow remember when someone getting pregnant meant there was a good chance their life was effectively over?” That’s the dream.