{"id":616247,"date":"2026-09-06T12:10:12","date_gmt":"2026-09-06T12:10:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/616247\/"},"modified":"2026-09-06T12:10:12","modified_gmt":"2026-09-06T12:10:12","slug":"the-twilight-of-edna-obrien-son-chronicles-novelists-dedication-to-her-craft-and-the-dread-of-loss-edna-obrien","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/616247\/","title":{"rendered":"The twilight of Edna O\u2019Brien: son chronicles novelist\u2019s dedication to her craft and the dread of loss | Edna O’Brien"},"content":{"rendered":"

After visiting his dying mother in London, Carlo G\u00e9bler returned to his rural home in Northern Ireland<\/a> one night and encountered a hedgehog sitting on the doormat. A thought bubbled up: his mother had died and returned as this woodland creature.<\/p>\n

In fact his mother, the novelist Edna O\u2019Brien<\/a>, was still alive, and not reincarnated, but his mind insisted otherwise. \u201cAt that moment that\u2019s what I believed. And then of course I stopped believing it because I knew it wasn\u2019t true.\u201d<\/p>\n

When O\u2019Brien died days later in July 2024, at the age of 93, the literary world mourned the passing<\/a> of a singular voice who had scandalised her native Ireland <\/a>with depictions of female sexuality and blazed a trail for generations of Irish writers.<\/p>\n

Now her son has produced a chronicle of O\u2019Brien\u2019s final years, a twilight marked by her struggle to keep working despite illness and frailty, and of the impact of her death on his own life.<\/p>\n

Published on 11 September, No One Tells You: The Last Years of Edna O\u2019Brien<\/a> documents the writer\u2019s doomed battle to complete a final book about TS Eliot as age and infirmity sapped her powers.<\/p>\n

It was a painful fate for a woman so dedicated to her craft. \u201cMy mother\u2019s strategy was basically to be a Stakhanovite, to keep on working. That was the elixir of life,\u201d G\u00e9bler, a novelist, critic and biographer, said in an interview.<\/p>\n

\u2018The elixir of life\u2019: Carlo G\u00e9bler chronicled his mother\u2019s determination to keep writing in her dying years. Photograph: David Barker\/Carlo G\u00e9bler<\/p>\n

O\u2019Brien escaped a stifling and conservative upbringing in County Clare <\/a>by moving to Dublin and eloping with an Irish-Czech writer, Ernest G\u00e9bler<\/a>, to England, where they raised two sons, Carlo and Sasha, before divorcing.<\/p>\n

The Country Girls, published in 1960, established O\u2019Brien\u2019s reputation, launching her image as a glamorous public persona in London: a convent-educated rebel who befriended Hollywood stars while penning novels, biographies, plays and poetry.<\/p>\n

Female desire and subversion populated O\u2019Brien\u2019s fiction decades before Ireland liberalised and legalised divorce, same-sex marriage and abortion, but that did not entitle Irish people to \u201cco-opt\u201d her memory for political ends, said G\u00e9bler.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn Ireland people want a narrative which emphasises the progressive journey, as if she planned all the political progress on the back of an envelope. She wasn\u2019t antagonistic to progress but she was a writer. Writing is about the transcription of feeling into a narrative. That is not a political programme and you shouldn\u2019t get the two mixed up,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

O\u2019Brien, pictured in 1977, wrote about female desire and subversion decades before Ireland legalised divorce, same-sex marriage and abortion. Photograph: Jane Bown\/The Observer<\/p>\n

G\u00e9bler said his mother endured many hostile reviews, initially by critics who deemed her work \u201cunseemly\u201d and later by critics who disliked her forays into the lives of historical figures, such as James Joyce\u2019s muse Nora Barnacle<\/a>, or the kidnapping of girls in Nigeria<\/a>. \u201cHer fiction changed its register, but the world isn\u2019t very sympathetic to that. It\u2019s kind of: \u2018It\u2019s not your gig, madam\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n

He called a 2019 New Yorker profile a \u201chatchet job\u201d and lamented that his mother was accused of cultural appropriation. \u201cThe dialogue on the left about what is and is not appropriate for writers to write about is chilling. It\u2019s morally cramping and inhibiting.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Posthumous acclaim for his mother validated the morbid joke about death being a great career move, said G\u00e9bler. \u201cA living writer is sometimes overlooked because there\u2019s so much other noise, but death is an even bigger noise, so you can get people\u2019s distracted attention.\u201d<\/p>\n

For G\u00e9bler, however, her passing brought loss, confusion and dread. \u201cThe awful thing about a parent\u2019s death is that you move up to the cliff edge. Once they\u2019re gone, you know you\u2019re next. And then you start to have all sorts of terrible thoughts. Why did I do this to my children? They didn\u2019t ask to be born and then they too are going to die.\u201d<\/p>\n

The cover of Carlo Gebler\u2019s memoir, No One Tells You: The Last Years of Edna O\u2019Brien. Photograph: New Island<\/p>\n

The impulse for the memoir came in her final weeks as he shuttled from his home in County Fermanagh to tend to her in London, said G\u00e9bler. \u201cThe unconscious is very patient and very clever, and it always waits until the right moment. And then comes this very strong sense, right, this is what I must write.\u201d<\/p>\n

Asked if his mother would have approved of the book, G\u00e9bler replied: \u201cI think she would have thought that that\u2019s what writers do. She might have preferred a fictional iteration.\u201d<\/p>\n

He opted for nonfiction. \u201cWhy not just tell it as it was? It is about my experience of the death of somebody to whom I was very close \u2013 it\u2019s about what the effect someone\u2019s slow annihilation has on the psyche of someone that continues living.\u201d<\/p>\n

His response to the hedgehog on the doormat showed the \u201cstrange things\u201d that the mind is capable of. \u201cAlthough you are reasonably rational, there are deep wells of irrational belief.\u201d<\/p>\n

The finality of death is unconscionable, said G\u00e9bler. \u201cThere\u2019s no way around the fact: one\u2019s own extinction is disgusting to contemplate, as is the extinction of other people.\u201d<\/p>\n

Those who are close to a dying person have an obligation to let them feel seen and heard, he said. \u201cHuman being to human being, you listen. That\u2019s your most important duty.\u201d<\/p>\n

His other advice is to impose order on the chaos of loss by writing about it, no matter whether in scribbled notes or a published book. \u201cIf you just let things fester in the basement of the psyche, they just get bigger and darker and huger and more and more terrible. You have to get it up into the light. And then you can come to some sort of accommodation with it, or a truce.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"After visiting his dying mother in London, Carlo G\u00e9bler returned to his rural home in Northern Ireland one…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":616248,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[93,61,60],"class_list":["post-616247","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/616247","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=616247"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/616247\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/616248"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=616247"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=616247"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=616247"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}