I had just settled into my seat in the Shafler Auditorium in Bloomberg when we were asked to all move forward. A man in a navy blue suit explained, "Mrs. O'Brien prefers reading in a more intimate setting."
With its physics equations all over the blackboard behind the podium and its three hundred-person capacity, the auditorium was anything but intimate. But the room was quite full of students, many of them there no doubt due to diligent IFP TAs and professors alike.
But intimate was what Edna O'Brien managed to make her reading. She began by telling a charming story about seeing her publisher and forgetting to ask if it would be OK if she read from her yet-to-be-released novel. At 74, with bright red hair and a wining smile, it felt like the audience was more than willing to forgive her forgetfulness.
Phillip Roth has called her, "the most gifted woman writing in English." Hopkins Professor Steve Dixon said that, "She is the foremost Irish fiction writer."
O'Brien has received many literary awards, including the Kingsley Amis Award for Fiction, the Yorkshire Post Novel Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Writers' Guild Prize for Fiction, a lifetime achievement award from Irish PEN, honors from the American Academy of Achievement, the National Arts Gold Medal and many others. She is an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and is author of more than 20 books, including a very well respected profile of the author James Joyce. In addition to these larger projects, she has also created numerous short stories and plays.
Professor Alice McDermott introduced O'Brien by saying, "[I] cannot do justice [to O'Brien's talent because her] language makes itself heard, the images endure and the story triumphs."
She read from her most recent book, Twilight, which will be out in what she called the "proverbial nine months." Twilight is about a relationship between a mother and a daughter and is a novel in five parts. She read for only 25 minutes, but it was mesmerizing for the duration.
Read aloud, her language was truly incredible -- soft echoing sounds played in the huge auditorium: "c9 such a lonely evening sound to it, like the lonely evening sound of the mothers saying, `It is not our fault, it is nature's fault, nature who makes us so full and then so empty.'"
O'Brien said that her new novel is about "attachment and suffocation" and "what happens in family." This is a bit of a departure from her early books, which dealt with relationships between men and women and often with religion and sex -- causing six of her first novels to be banned in her native Ireland.
In the question and answer session after the reading, what she called "her time to just talk" with her audience, she was remarkably candid. When asked how she prepares herself for writing, she answered with a laugh, "Suffering." But, she added, "The thing that helps to write is to read something amazingc9 [and] we mustn't rule out experience."
Her thoughts about writing were remarkably astute. For O'Brien, writing is "like manna in the desert, even when scatological, [writing is] holy." Towards the end of the reading she said, "writing is something, I suppose that's in the blood, but I'm certain it's in the obsession."
O'Brien was unbelievably versed in classic and current literature; when asked about her relationship to the New Yorker , where she was often pubished, she said, "I like it, but times change. Their choices of fiction are different now, as indeed the world is very different. A lot of writing, in my humble and not so humble, opinion isn't up to scratch."
She described good writing as having an intensity about it, "a great poem encapsulates a whole life or a whole emotion." Although O'Brien sometimes had trouble hearing questions, she had no trouble relating complex answers in extremely approachable ways.
In response to audience questions, she quoted from Sartre ("To read a book is to write it."), Kafka ("Writing is an act of criminality.") and many other luminaries. Throughout the reading, O'Brien showed herself to be a truly great mind and wit, even at her advanced age.
When asked to reflect on her career, she kept her response simple: "I love writers, and I love writing, and without it I'd be much poorer."
