The Irish writer faced a bitter court fight for her sons after she quit her troubled marriage. Before her death, she told Lara Feigel that it haunted her still
Edna O’Brien with her husband Ernest and children Carlo and Sasha in 1961
“What is a child between injured parents,” Edna O’Brien wrote in Girls in Their Married Bliss, “only a weapon.” O’Brien knew to her cost what it meant to weaponise your children. She’d fought for her sons, Carlo and Sasha, in a long and brutal custody battle in 1965, when they were 11 and nine.
As we process her death, it’s clear that O’Brien is one of the major cultural figures of the past century. When I realised I wanted to write about her in my book Custody it was because I saw that her custody battle was the rupture that defined her life and that her writing went on to explore.