![[Edna O'Brien]](edna2.gif)
"The minute you feel answerable,
you're throttled."
Recently, Irish novelist Edna O'Brien appeared onstage in San Francisco at an event sponsored by City Arts & Lectures, where she read from her new novel-in-progress, "Down By The River." The author of 14 novels and five collections of short stories, O'Brien also talked about who and what drives her to live in exile (in London), to write about war, and to throw herself so exultantly into the rhythm of language.
You come from a country that many writers seem to leave. Is it better or easier to write about Ireland from outside?
My first book, "The Country Girls," was a simple little tale of two girls who were trying to burst out of their gym frocks and their convent, and their own lives in their own houses, to make it to the big city. It angered a lot of people, including my own family. It was banned; it was called a smear on Irish womanhood. A priest in our parish asked from the altar if anyone who had bought copies would bring them to the chapel grounds. That evening there was a little burning. My mother said women fainted, and I said maybe it was the smoke. When I wrote my second book ("The Lonely Girls"), the opinion was the first was a prayer book by comparison. My mother had gone though the book and inked out any offending words.
So I was made to feel ashamed, made to feel I had done something wrong. It's hard enough to write a book at all; you have to dig and dig and dig into your unconscious, come up with some kind of story, and language, emotion, music. And you'd like a small amount of support from someone you knew. So if you have any degree of self-protection at all, you get out of that place, if you're going to keep writing.
James Joyce lived all his life away and wrote obsessively and gloriously about Ireland. Although he had left Ireland bodily, he had not left it psychically, no more than I would say I have. I don't rule out living some of the time in Ireland, but it would be in a remote place, where I would have silence and privacy. It's important when writing to feel free, answerable to no one. The minute you feel you are answerable, you're throttled.
You can't do it.
Next page: "Life is a raging sea, which we're all in."
