Edna O’Brien

I was in the office today for a morning meeting but decided mid afternoon not to just sit around doing emails but to go and watch this film at the Curzon Bloomsbury.

  I met Edna once, about five years ago at a party and sat next to her on a sofa, in awe.  She was spry and sharp and charming and wanted to know why I’d not dramatised any of her books.  The meeting made an impression as did this beautifully crafted, raw documentary.  As she lived such a public life there was footage from every era but the director also did recreations. It was a terrific film, close enough to her living existence  not to be sanitised or generalised.  She came across as real and human and undefinable.  Why her? Why then?  So tough to be a gifted, searching woman at that period of the Irish theocracy.  

I absolutely loved it and love her. I have read a lot of her books but not all of them so have vowed to go back and mop up the rest. 

As my friend SP says on the death of one so admired: vale Edna, vale.  

Home by 8.30 and V did a lovely supper of mussels and we watched another episode of The Studio.