Country Girl: A Memoir

Edna O'Brien

2012 • Faber & Faber

I have read over the years some rather cheapening and ridiculous things about myself […] As if I was a sort of hormonal Mata Hari going from one adulterous room to the next. And I felt somebody else might do it [write my memoir], when I am dead or whatever. […] It’s not that I want to be flattered but I don’t want to be remembered as this lightweight who gave parties and had love affairs. It is ridiculous. I have written more than 25 books. I have earned my living through writing. No man ever helped me. […] To actually render your own memories in prose means going back into them. Take my father shooting at my mother and I. I remembered it as the time when I thought he had killed us. But to have to describe it, render it … I had to scrape the memory the way a womb is scraped. Oh it was painful, yes. How could it not be?

— Edna O'Brien

Non-Fiction Memoir English Language

Country Girl: A Memoir

Edna O'Brien

2012 • Faber & Faber

I have read over the years some rather cheapening and ridiculous things about myself […] As if I was a sort of hormonal Mata Hari going from one adulterous room to the next. And I felt somebody else might do it [write my memoir], when I am dead or whatever. […] It’s not that I want to be flattered but I don’t want to be remembered as this lightweight who gave parties and had love affairs. It is ridiculous. I have written more than 25 books. I have earned my living through writing. No man ever helped me. […] To actually render your own memories in prose means going back into them. Take my father shooting at my mother and I. I remembered it as the time when I thought he had killed us. But to have to describe it, render it … I had to scrape the memory the way a womb is scraped. Oh it was painful, yes. How could it not be?