I first met Edna O’Brien through a family friend, Abba Schwartz, who had invited her to a party at my parents’ house. I was only a teenager but completely enamored with this hauntingly glamorous literary femme fatale.
Being a Catholic schoolgirl, I was aware of Edna’s legend; that her first six books were banned in Ireland and, rumor had it, even burned for their explicit sexual passages. In The Country Girls trilogy she spoke the unspoken language of female longing, which made her an irresistible read.
Forty years after our first meeting, she appeared again in the form of a letter that was dropped on my doorstep written in distinctive purple ink. The taxi driver who was driving her mentioned my name as they passed my house, and she was back in my life asking me to read her play of The Country Girls. She wanted to have it performed and was looking for a producer.
Charmed by her tenacity and chutzpah, I arranged to meet her at her house on Ovington Street [in Chelsea, southwest London] and became completely infatuated with her all over again as I heard the stories of her extraordinary life.
It had led her from rural Ireland to Dublin to train as a pharmacist, to the showbiz world of London in the swinging sixties. She dropped acid with her psychoanalyst RD Laing, dined with Princess Margaret and Jackie Onassis and captured the attention of Richard Burton, Robert Mitchum and Marlon Brando, to name a few. She was later interviewed by Queen Camilla.
Despite this feverous lifestyle, Edna was slavishly devoted to her boundless talent as a writer and she never stopped striving to capture just the right word for the current book or play that she was writing.
Herbert Mitgang, the American writer, described her as the cardiologist of broken hearts and, by God, her heart had been broken — by her childhood, her men, her critics and her homeland, but it only made her more determined to strive for excellence. Edna wrote continuously, had more than 30 books published and was translated in multiple languages.
It was in 2022, at the wedding of my dear friend John Carney, that I met the documentary filmmaker Sinéad O’Shea, whose film Pray for your Sinners had just premiered. Our conversation inevitably turned to relationships, and she whispered to me: “Edna O’Brien once told me that when you have a taste for the chaos of bad men, you always return to that pattern.”
I told her that Edna was a close friend and that she should be the subject of her next documentary. Several months later, I got an email from Sinéad asking me to approach Edna, whose response was: “Will she skewer me?” I insisted that she wouldn’t, and that I would make sure of it.
Sinéad’s first interview with Edna was conducted in August 2023. By then, Edna was very ill with cancer and over the following months she would record voice memos for Sinéad outlining her ideas for the documentary. In one of those, Edna told Sinéad: “You must read my diaries.”
She had sold them to Emory College in Georgia alongside letters from an incredible array of people including Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, Ted Hughes, Saul Bellow and Sir Ian McKellen.
Sinéad began to read the diaries and shot some compelling interviews with Edna’s two sons, Sasha and Carlo Gébler. She and her team gathered such extraordinary pieces of archive, including some powerful footage of a short film Carlo made at the age of 16 of Edna and her father.
There was also a brilliant moment with Melvyn Bragg [on Read All About It in 1976] where Edna remarks: “In my experience with men — I may have chosen the wrong ones but I do think they are shallower than women. I don’t think they have nearly the same grasp on truthfulness and they expect a woman to be a goddess, to be a whore, to be a mother and, nowadays, to be a breadwinner.
“So, the only thing I think that is nice about men is the occasional sexual pleasure they give us. And nothing else.”
As the film was coming together, Edna agreed to one final interview, in April 2024, which provides a profound climax to our film. I told her that Blue Road had been selected to premiere at the Toronto Film Festival and she was delighted.
Since its completion, the film has opened Doc NYC and won the Best New Irish Feature Award at the Cork Film Festival.
Sadly, Edna was unable to ever see the finished film, or learn of these accolades, as she passed away on July 27, 2024, at the age of 93. In true, spectacular Edna style, she had been planning a magical funeral since childhood and so she returned to where her life had begun: Tuamgraney in Co Clare.
During the service, the bishop apologized on behalf of the whole of the Catholic Church about its treatment towards her, which resulted in the most thunderous applause I have ever heard, led by President Michael D Higgins and his wife. The entire town came out to pay their respects, and friends who loved her sailed in a flotilla of boats across the waters to Holy Island, where she was laid to rest.
Edna never gave up her taste for champagne. Up until the last few days of her life she would enjoy sipping it whilst writing. Knowing this, it was imperative that it be flowing at the wake — imagine my horror when the hotel manager told me they only stocked prosecco.
Fortunately, Bollinger came to the rescue and supplied 60 precious bottles at the last minute. Her presence was strongly felt as we toasted her. It was a glorious celebration of a life well lived.
Barbara Broccoli is the executive producer of Blue Road: The Edna O’Brien Story, in U.K. cinemas now
