When a writer becomes the voice of a generation, of an historical movement, it’s important we hear what she has to say – this documentary is precisely what Edna O’Brien has to say
Irish author Edna O’Brien vigorously defended her stance on women’s rights within the home and the bedroom, be it between the pages of one of her 34 fiction and nonfiction books, or on television talk shows where, despite what the newspapers were blasting her for, she was something of a superstar. She threw parties where princes, playwrights, actors and Beatles felt at home, and though she lapped up the effervescence of such occasions, when asked what she most regretted about her life, she answered ‘I wish it had been funnier.’
Director / writer Sinéad O’Shea (Pray for our Sinners) had plenty to work with in Blue Road: The Edna O’Brien Story, from O’Brien’s own memoires and diaries, to home movies, television archival footage and interviews with family members, those who attended her famed parties, and those who were deeply affected by her work – Anne Enright and Gabriel Byrne are two. No one, however, tells the story better than O’Brien herself. At 93 years old she is seated in front of the camera, wearing a black sequined jacket and bright red lipstick, her ever-glamourous stature matched with her always-practical and sage reflections.
In the 1950s, Ireland’s literary scene was a man’s world, and Ernest Gébler was one of those men. Two decades her senior – and a communist to boot – her family violently opposed the relationship, brutally attempting to abduct O’Brien once she’d committed to living with him. A stern man, Gébler cared little for the full life O’Brien had hoped to live and ultimately took to reading her diaries and commenting on them in red ink, correcting incorrectly, as a jealous man would. When her first book, The Country Girls, was published, her star shone brighter than his, and when the New Yorker published one of her stories, she’d crossed a line she knew was there, but one she hadn’t chosen to adhere to.
Burned and banned in her home country, her works were critically received abroad, especially in America, and when the checks started rolling in, Gébler viciously and physically demanded the money in an almost carbon-copy way as her father had from her mother when O’Brien was just a child. Though her father had used a gun, whereas Gébler choked her. The accumulated trauma at the hands of men manifested in loneliness and depression, just as it informed her writing and politics, which were one and the same.
Voicing O’Brien’s diaries and memoirs is the Irish actress Jessie Buckley (The Lost Daughter), whose inflections of defiance rings true. O’Brien’s grown children, Carlos and Sasha Gébler, speak of their mother with fondness and generosity, aware that the happy childhood they experienced was because of the kind of mother and the kind of person O’Brien was. They remind us that she wasn’t all about the parties and glamour that the media often used to attack and ridicule her, nor an example of the sexually free woman her books depicted. Having published a book a year, she worked hard.
O’Brien died shortly after the filming of the documentary wrapped, ensuring Blue Road: The Edna O’Brien Story gives the celebrated writer the final word. And she was so good with words.
Reviewed by Heather Taylor-Johnson
Blue Road: The Edna O’Brien Story screens as part of the Adelaide Film Festival.
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