Edna O’Brien on the “eminently masochistic exercise” of making art
“It’s quite sick in the sense of normal human enjoyment of life.”
Welcome to the latest issue of Subtle Maneuvers. Previously: Sarah Kempa on making artwork with a day job (during a pandemic).
Edna O’Brien (b. 1930)
Tomorrow is O’Brien’s 90th birthday. In honor of this milestone, I spent some time looking through old interviews to see what I could find out about the Irish novelist’s writing process. There was plenty to be found. Instantly acclaimed for her first novel, 1960’s The Country Girls—which, like her next three books, was banned in her native Ireland—O’Brien subsequently achieved a level of celebrity that far exceeded the literary world. In the 1970s, she was known for dinner parties whose guests included Princess Margaret, Marlon Brando, and Sean Connery, hosted in her six-bedroom house on London’s Carlyle Square (which O’Brien purchased with her fee for the screenplay to a movie starring Elizabeth Taylor and Michael Caine. Those were the days.)
All of which is to say: O’Brien has been interviewed a lot over the years, and like any famous writer, she was frequently asked about her writing habits. My favorite reply of hers comes from a 1972 interview with The Irish Times: