Oops! I accidentally clicked on my own like and apparently there’s no way to undo it…Sniff…sniff
Anyway…here’s the post.
“You have to be lonely to be a writer,” says Edna O’Brien in an interview with Jane Martinson of The Guardian regarding her recent memoir Country Girl. “You wouldn’t go through the purgatory of writing unless you were a lonely person.”
Edna O’Brien published Country Girls (notice the difference from her memoir Country Girl) in 1930, which was banned in Ireland for its candid treatment of sex.
Author of The Sea, John Banville (2013) writes in the introduction to her short stories The Love Object “Here, as so often elsewhere, Edna O’Brien mourns for the plight of her wounded women and at the same celebrates their exuberance, their generosity, and ultimately, their indomitable spirit. She is, simply, one of the finest writers of our time.”
When I first laid eyes on her office a line from The Eagles’ Hotel California came to mind:
Such a lovely place
Photographer: Eamonn McCabe
Look, she even has a bouquet of fresh flowers.
Or maybe it was this quote of hers:
Writers really live in the mind and in hotels of the soul.
Carol Balawyder 