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Sinéad O’Shea: ‘Edna O’Brien is one of the great lives of the 20th century’

Sinéad O’Shea: ‘Edna O’Brien is one of the great lives of the 20th century’


by Meg Walker
02nd Feb 2025

Acclaimed filmmaker and writer Sinéad O’Shea talks to Meg Walker about her latest documentary, Blue Road – The Edna O’Brien Story, which charts the fascinating life of one of Ireland’s greatest writers, who died in July at the age of 93.

I first interviewed Edna O’Brien nine years ago for Publishers Weekly and ahead of meeting her, I read The Country Girls and the book she’d just published, The Little Red Chairs. I’d never read her work before, even though I’d studied English literature at college, so I had this false impression of her writing and when I finally read those books and met her, it was a huge revelation. From then on, I began to look at her as the literary great she really was. Then in 2022, my film, Pray for Our Sinners premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) and I bumped into a friend of O’Brien’s – the film producer Barbara Broccoli, who suggested I make a film about Edna. I spent the next year reading all of her books and researching the archives, digging deeper and getting to know her while trying to get Edna on board. Thankfully, she said yes and I finally met her in August 2023 to interview her on camera. It’s unusual for a film to move so quickly, but there was this big deadline looming, which was that her health was deteriorating. I wanted her to see the film because one of her beliefs was that no one would remember her and that she would fade into obscurity, which is obviously not the case. Sadly, she didn’t get to see it but I do feel quite proud to have helped to share her story with the world.

After that first interview with Edna, she directed me to her personal diaries which were held in the archives at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. There were thousands of pages, many with notes scribbled underneath her own writing by her former husband, Ernest Gébler. I spent a long time reading and making sense of these pages while also reading her work, trying to figure out which passages to extract alongside the archive images that would all help tell the full story of her life. It was an overwhelming amount of work, but then we had such wonderful luck come our way, too, when it came to all the amazing contributors. Gabriel Byrne had seen Pray for Our Sinners and wrote me an email to say he’d liked it; a week later, I learned he and Edna were close friends, so I wrote back, telling him about the film and asking if he’d like to contribute. He was so keen to help. Then someone suggested I get a narrator to read the diary entries and passages. My friend, the poet Eva HD, had worked on a film that starred Jessie Buckley, so I thought of her and it turned out Jessie was a fan of Edna’s. Being from Kerry, Jessie also really understood Edna’s background, growing up in Clare in the rural west of Ireland. Then there were the stories shared by the American novelist Walter Mosley, who studied under Edna in New York, which showed this whole other side of her – how she taught creative writing and made something triumphant out of it.

Edna’s eldest son, Carlo Gébler, not only shared important stories of his childhood but also provided some of the most incredible footage used in the film, which came from a documentary he made when he was still a teenager. That was such a gift and we had no idea it existed. We had a wonderful archive producer, Paul Bell, who dug deep into some old television archives and discovered it. As far as I’m concerned, Carlo’s film, which was about O’Brien’s novel, Night, is a masterpiece. Edna wrote Night while doing a lot of psychoanalysis with RD Laing, so she’s really excavating her past and it’s portraying a lot of trauma, and it’s saying something very deep and profound about her life. So Carlo’s film was the most perfect documentary you could hope to create about her world.

Edna led such an unusual life and was so charismatic. I think it’s one of the great lives of the 20th century. She touches into so many different cultural areas and represents so many evolutions in creativity and in how people approach literature. She also really understood the camera.

Edna’s funeral, which we featured in the film, was so her. She had been planning it since her childhood and knew where she was going to be buried, on Holy Island off the western shore of Lough Derg in Co Clare. So I knew we had to pay homage to that in the film.

I think documentary is such an amazing artform, the way it allows the subject to tell their story. It allows us to see the passage of time as no other form can. Having said that, I think there is a form for every story and I am someone who grew up reading fiction rather than watching films. There are certain truths that sometimes only fiction, whether it’s a film or novel, can express.

For anyone who’s yet to embrace O’Brien’s writing, I would suggest starting with her first novel, The Country Girls, which is a delightful read and more startling than you might think. It’s saying, very casually at times, something very shocking about how Ireland treated women and people who were vulnerable. It’s one of the great Irish books. O’Brien was an amazing short story writer, and The Love Object is a wonderful collection that showcases her storytelling prowess. After reading those, you might be ready for A Pagan Place, which is a lot more experimental and says something very profound about Ireland, expressing the darkness and the trauma.

Blue Road is a study of a female creative in the making. It’s just such an amazing achievement to come from rural Clare in that era, and develop a literary career, and to achieve such acclaim all over the world in the way that Edna O’Brien did. And to overcome her abusive family background, her abusive marriage – her husband … it was unrelenting; he planted stories about her in the press for decades. And then the endless waves of very misogynistic criticism. She has set an amazing example for women who would like to do something creative.

Blue Road – The Edna O’Brien Story is in Irish cinemas from January 31.