The other evening I was in such a mood. I am in such a mood. Various factors at play, some related by blood, others as distant from each other as dying stars from alive - for now - us. I think the mood arrived with the start of that day, pulled from sleep and thrown into the rain to wait for a bus, realising how much of my life has been spent so, will be spent so again. And then a misunderstanding, a refusal to understand the question I asked, maybe I asked it wrong, they certainly answered it arseways. And then, walking home in the cold and into the kitchen, where I devoured food I know my body hates, so it’s all my fault. A maladaptive coping strategy is what you could call it.
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Last night, I went to see the new documentary about Irish writer Edna O’Brien, Blue Road. It’s very, very good. Funny and dark and emotional. Her ex-husband and his cruelty and smallness will make you gasp. The famous men visiting her apartment will make you cheer. When I saw the trailer a few weeks ago, I’d made a vague note to catch it. I’d read many interviews with O’Brien over the years and she always gave compelling answers. That detail about her mother burying her novel in the earth always spooked me. The director Sinéad O’Shea spoke with Miriam O’Callaghan last weekend and the story of how her film got made is captivating, its own small thriller involving James Bond. I went away to book a ticket.
In that interview, O’Shea talked about how O’Brien had one of the great lives, and that’s a thought I brought into the screening and left agreeing with. Because I saw it recently, I kept entwining Blue Road with another Irish documentary, last year’s Housewife of the Year, a compact film about a, what we would now call retrograde, annual competition which ran in Ireland for a number of years. The winner would get an oven. Housewife delves into the lives of some of the contestants and draws out the story of Ireland at that time. Considering the two films is, to me, like knitting two strands of different wools in the same colour together. You get a brilliant texture, something warmer than when alone. In these films we see the trap of marriage with no way out, for a while, and the bind of Catholicism and the State, the written and unwritten rules. The Housewife competition reaches the end of the road, we are now all baffled by our collective madness, but understand why it happened. Meanwhile, O’Brien outlives and outshines all the bastards who crossed her. Watching how she is treated in the archive footage is shocking, but it’s amazing to see how she wouldn’t give in. She answered questions boldly, with confidence and a smirk. Glamour as armour, a weapon.
I’m also thinking of Julia O’Faolain’s life, another Irish woman writer. There’s a symmetry and divergence in hers and O’Brien’s lives that’s ticking away at me. Born two years after O’Brien, in bustling Dublin to Seán and Eileen, two respected writers, her beginnings contrast with O’Brien’s ‘non-literary’ origins on a farm in Clare. There are some professional criss-crosses, including that infamous New Yorker essay on O’Brien from a few years ago which quotes O’Faolain. While O’Brien went to work in a pharmacy in Cabra, being practical and sticking briefly to the borders of her world, O’Faolain studied at colleges in Paris and Rome. Both would lead glamourous lives and write acclaimed works, although it is O’Brien who ascends higher and produces more. Both conducted the bulk of their careers away from Ireland. Both inherited difficult parents and the emotions that come with that. You can inherit emotions, I think, not in an epigenetic way. More of a black mould way. You can live with it, badly, or you can attack it with bleach, or you can move out of the dank house. O’Faolain made a happier marriage, to an art historian, if one wants to be simplistic about it. But maybe it really is that simple.
You don’t have to have read O’Brien to enjoy the documentary, I would say. I read The Country Girls for book club some years ago and caught the play in the Abbey. I wasn’t gone on it, especially the latter, but that’s not a sin. I now want to read something else of hers so I found a copy of her ‘troubles’ novel The House of Splendid Isolation this morning and I’ve decided to pick through it over tea today and the coming tomorrows.
Listen to Sunday with Miriam.
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If anyone waffles at you about it not making sense for Ireland to enact the Occupied Territories Bill because of MNCs, call them a coward. It’s a sharp glinting knife of a word.
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If you’re a writer or want to write, I’m helping out with a Flash Fiction competition that’s part of the Five Lamps Arts Festival. 500 words or less, and you must be based in Ireland. There are cash prizes and there will be a lovely prizegiving and reading also. More information here.
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I felt like Richard may have been someone who enjoyed full control of his professional life, but, in that moment, felt entirely out of control of his love life. So I gave him his own corporation and an officious 1960s headed notepaper design. I also took the artistic license to add a small and entirely missable detail, near the bottom of the page, that reads “REH:vb”.
“VB” stands for verbatim, and “REH” are his initials—meaning he dictated the letter out loud to his secretary. I do love a good mid-century office drama.
Heartbreak by Annie Atkins.
P.S. I made a mistake sending this out via email and called the Blue Road THE Blue Road.