Reading a diary entry dated May 1967: Jessie Buckley at the beginning The Blue Mile: The Edna O’Brien Storythe subject writes: “Oh, the trees, how they are tortured. If someone were to ask me about Irish character, I would say look at the trees. Crippled, rigid and misshapen, but extremely stubborn.” This observation quickly reflects O’Brien’s passionate love-hate relationship with his hometown. It also anchors this intimate portrait in nature, the refuge to which the author would return throughout his turbulent life and find more freedom in the fields of County Clare than anywhere else.

One of the many pleasures of Sinéad O’Shea’s engaging, compassionate and lovingly crafted documentary is hearing the author speak, countless archival interviews and even O’Brien’s extended interview with the filmmaker towards the end. life. Just like listening to music; his sentences flow like fully formed pieces of prose; vivid, precise and richly descriptive. He was a consummate literary stylist, even in conversation, but always thoughtful, down-to-earth, and unafraid to tell the truth, no matter how blunt.

Like many writers and artists, O’Brien began practicing his craft as an escape from unhappy reality, inventing more exotic lives in his mind during his childhood. His father was a hard-drinking man who gambled away his landowning family’s fortune, selling off most of the farm piece by piece until only the large house remained, running out of money by the time he was born in 1930.

Her mother, who would endure a married life of bullying and abuse, was in her 40s at the time. Edna was the youngest of four children. Looking back on his 90s, he says that his mother did not want him at first, but later moved in the opposite direction: “I became her protector, her shield, her reason for being, after all, she wanted me completely.”

O’Brien is forthright in her observations about childhood trauma and its lasting impact. A moving archival clip, shot long after the author fled to England in virtual exile and then reconciled with the religious parents he rebelled against, shows him perched on the living room window sill while his father sings softly in an armchair: “Danny Boy.” He admits that he cannot separate that comfortable family atmosphere from memories of the violence against him. Yet his reflections on it as he approaches his own death are the most poignant of the film’s personal reflections.

When he moved to Dublin in the early 1950s, he began to move away from his stifling family life and “one-horse, one-hotel, 27-bar town” and eventually began writing a weekly magazine column. He bought a cheap copy of TS Eliot’s Introduction to James Joyce and carried it with him everywhere. (Joyce became the gateway to her own fiction; she would publish a critically acclaimed biography of him in 1999.) But as one of our interviewees, Gabriel ByrneShe notes that the Irish literary scene at the time was “exclusive to men” and women were not welcome in gathering places.

O’Brien’s world opened up when she met cosmopolitan writer Ernest Gébler and began spending weekends with him at his country house. Gébler was 40, divorced and a Communist; his politics remained from his Czech roots. The violent intervention of his scandalized family, who learns of the affair through an anonymous note, is a shocking event. Nevertheless, O’Brien marries her.

This marriage, as well as her life with her father, would color what one interviewer later called “a depressing vision of men” featured in her novels. Her unfiltered answer is that men are often superficial and lying: “They expect a woman to be a goddess, a whore, a mother. And They are the breadwinners of the house, so their only good thing is the sexual pleasure they give us occasionally.”

O’Brien’s first novel was published in 1960, Peasant GirlsIt was the beginning of serious discord in her marriage, which only worsened as her success quickly eclipsed Gébler’s. They had two sons, Carlo and Sasha, who provide insightful commentary throughout. They describe their parents as “chemically unsuitable” and their relationship as volatile. He was supposed to be the famous writer, not himself; The feeling of being wronged haunted him.

Finding O’Brien’s diaries, Gébler began adding annotations that he claimed shaped O’Brien’s work, even claiming to have rewritten the entire draft. When books When she started making sales and checks came in, he would force her to endorse and deliver them, giving her only a small weekly amount for chores. His disdain for her is evident in the handwriting beneath a photograph of her with the boys in a family photo album: “Before they made her famous and the rot set in.”

As his home life became turbulent, O’Brien was hit by a wave of condemnation from both the Irish government and the Church. Depiction of women’s desire and sexuality Peasant Girls (the first part of the trilogy) caused both institutions to brand the novel as filth. A priest from his hometown collected copies for the bonfire and the book was banned. Irelandlike all of his works at some point.

An academic specializing in Irish Studies notes that O’Brien was seen as a betrayer of family values, revealing secrets about a still insular country largely kept from the outside world, and revealing Irish society’s radical inequality and deep fear of the father.

In book after book (she published 34 works of fiction, non-fiction and poetry in her lifetime) O’Brien refused to fear the patriarchal giants of Ireland at the time, which did not endear her to the country’s narcissistic male writers.

While her work includes the theme of women seeking freedom and love on their own terms, and suggests that classification is an important voice in feminist literature, it is interesting that O’Brien never positions herself in this way. The feminist movement of the 60s and 70s doesn’t seem to have embraced it either.

It was supported by leading American writers such as John Updike, J.D. Salinger, Philip Roth, and Henry Miller; British novelist Kingsley Amis Observer chose Peasant Girls as one of the books of the year. While female writers such as Louise Kennedy and Doireann Ní Ghríofa are among the speaking voices of the film, O’Brien’s support from the leading female writers of his time is not mentioned.

The Doctor goes into interesting detail about her years as a flamboyant socialite in London when she finally left Gébler and gained financial independence. After a decade of critically and commercially successful novels (outside Ireland), he wrote the screenplay. Zee and Co.A love triangle drama starring Elizabeth Taylor, Michael Caine and Susannah York. While he rejected the project (“he was battered by the producers”), the £39,000 payment enabled him to buy a mansion in Chelsea, where his parties became a magnet for celebrities.

O’Brien recalls such notables as Princess Margaret, Judy Garland, Harold Pinter and Jane Fonda among his guests. Paul McCartney visited the house and played a song for his sons, Shirley MacLaine read palms to trace past lives, and Marianne Faithfull walked around barefoot, setting music to Yeats. Her suitors included Robert Mitchum, Marlon Brando and Richard Burton.

“It still amazes me how I know so many people,” says O’Brien, wryly amused. Towards the end of the film and his life, as he enjoys this glittering social circle for a while, he thinks that what remains in his mind are not those years, but the moments from his childhood: women herding cattle, being alone on the street. the fields, his mother’s cough.

O’Shea’s extensive research and wealth of archival material (photographs, videos, newsreels, home movies) cover the thematic shifts in his subject’s writing in later years, as well as developments in his personal life.

According to one interviewer, O’Brien experimented with psychoanalysis and LSD with RD Liang; This loosened his language and revealed a latent violence in his work. An unsatisfactory six-year relationship with a married British politician led to a long gap in her output, and after years of lavish spending, she found herself broke and forced to sell the house.

In the late ’80s, he taught creative writing at the City College of New York. Among his students was Walter Mosley, who candidly acknowledged that O’Brien’s generous mentorship was instrumental in his transition from short stories to novels. Devil in a Blue Dress Around the same time, in a low point, O’Brien planned to commit suicide during a book tour, but a fortuitously timed message from Sasha caused him to reconsider.

The film touches on controversies in his later novels about the Troubles in Northern Ireland, and was criticized for its sympathetic portrayal of the Republicans. His defense was that all existing writings were from the opposing party’s point of view. His work, especially his penultimate novel, remained bold and vibrant until the end. Small Red ChairsIt follows the interactions of a fictional Balkan War criminal with the women of an Irish village.

The undercurrent of melancholy in O’Shea’s film comes less from O’Brien, who lacks self-pity, than from the evidence that his stature among the greats of Irish literature was only fully acknowledged at home towards the end of his life. . There’s also sadness in her poor choices with men, especially given how insightfully her work explores women’s experiences of sex and love. “There were nicer men there, no doubt,” he says. “But we are who we are.”

O’Shea and editor Gretta Ohle weave the author’s life into a fascinating portrait that gives O’Brien the recognition he deserves. But despite such a colorful and fiercely independent life, it wasn’t the achievements, prestigious awards or celebrity hustle that ultimately stayed with O’Brien. This was the indelible mark of his childhood.

For anyone who has had a conflicted relationship with a parent, the memories of their last interaction with their father when he was hospitalized will be heartbreaking. “It gets lonely sometimes, Edna,” she remembers him saying, and notes that it was the most honest thing he had ever said. “He was ill-tempered and stupid, but there was always a child inside him, as there is in all of us.”