JUNE 2013 - AudioFile
For lovers of audiobook memoirs, it doesn't get better than this: a grand and memorable life, efficiently written and carefully detailed, as told by the person who lived it. We listen as O'Brien—propelled by destiny, courage, and confidence—writes her way out of the small-minded world of her Irish hometown; inserts herself into a high-society culture filled with musicians, literary titans, and film stars; experiences several highs on the "love trampoline," as well as life-threatening bouts of despair; and ultimately (and fortunately) breaks her vow never to write her memoir. In her narration, O'Brien's vocal eccentricities—including a sonorous, often bemused tone— enliven and color her carefully crafted prose. The result is a detailed self-examination that achieves the realm of literary nonfiction. R.W.S. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2013, Portland, Maine
The Washington Post - Jonathan Yardley
Edna O'Brien, for whom the word "redoubtable" may well have been coined, has lived a long and quite remarkable life…the author of more than two dozen books, she has at last turned to the story of her own life in this memoir, though of course her life has been the raw material for much of the fiction—much of which is entirely extraordinary—she has written since the publication of her first novel, The Country Girls, in 1960. The first couple of hundred pages of Country Girl are wonderful, the second 150 rather less so, but anyone who knows and loves her work, as I do, will want to read it from start to finish.
The New York Times Book Review - Stacy Schiff
Any book that is any good must be autobiographical, O'Brien has asserted. And any memoir that is any good must be better-proportioned than real life. This one is shapely in the curvaceous ways of longing and regret. It begins with a diagnosis of hearing loss and ends with a set of 3-D glasses, both of them revelatory. O'Brien does not omit the times when the words failed to come, when the heart shattered, when…she had very nearly had enough. The past surges and eddies throughout, with a logic and texture of its own. Its author remains beguiling and brave, as lucid as ever about the rapturous lows and the punishing highs. Her eye is pitiless and her prose sumptuous.
The New York Times - Dwight Garner
This memoir is the book one has long wanted from Ms. O'Brien. She has famously had an adventurous life…You might come…for the gossip, but you'll stay for this memoir's ardent portrait of a young woman struggling to find her identity both as a human being and a writer…Country Girl is, like Ms. O'Brien's best fiction, plain-spoken and poetic in equal measure.
Publishers Weekly
Demure reflections on her celebrated literary life well lived comprise this lovely memoir by Irish novelist and short story author O’Brien (Saints and Sinners). Organized thematically, O’Brien meanders from her deeply Catholic, decidedly respectable upbringing in Drewsboro, County Clare, where the budding young writer experienced the sensuous rural impressions that imbued her early work, through schooling with the Galway nuns and a four-year apprenticeship at a chemist’s shop in Dublin. But she yearned for a glittering literary world, “with all its sins and guile and blandishments.” Indeed, marrying the older, cosmopolitan novelist Ernest Gebler in her early 20s allowed O’Brien instant entrée into the literary milieu. She also gave birth to two sons. The publication of her first novel, The Country Girls, in 1960, spelled both the end of her marriage to a seething, resentful husband and her start as the novelist of the moment, reviled by the church for her depictions of liberated, sexual women while feted by literary lions of London and New York. Fetching, game, and talented, O’Brien attracted numerous famous studs, and she makes some bedroom confessions, revealing a night of “sparkle” with Robert Mitchum. The book also includes lively depictions of her Saturday-night parties in her house in Putney, England, during the Swinging Sixties. From Chelsea to New York to Donegal, O’Brien always returns to the enduring heart of her writing. Agent: Ed Victor, Ed Victor Literary Agency. (Apr.)
Philip Roth
"Edna O'Brien has made of her memories something of both precision and depth, a book that, letting us see her as she was, jumps with an all-consuming curiosity from one lucidly narrated event to another, the scenes of disenchantment and bewilderment mingling with an assortment of surprises, traps, and ventures that are often, but not always, disastrous shocks. She is an observer of tears, including her own, and is able to differentiate what she calls the good tears from the bad. Only Colette is her equal as a student of the ardors of an independent woman who is also on her own as a writer."
JUNE 2013 - AudioFile
For lovers of audiobook memoirs, it doesn't get better than this: a grand and memorable life, efficiently written and carefully detailed, as told by the person who lived it. We listen as O'Brien—propelled by destiny, courage, and confidence—writes her way out of the small-minded world of her Irish hometown; inserts herself into a high-society culture filled with musicians, literary titans, and film stars; experiences several highs on the "love trampoline," as well as life-threatening bouts of despair; and ultimately (and fortunately) breaks her vow never to write her memoir. In her narration, O'Brien's vocal eccentricities—including a sonorous, often bemused tone— enliven and color her carefully crafted prose. The result is a detailed self-examination that achieves the realm of literary nonfiction. R.W.S. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2013, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
The octogenarian Irish novelist, playwright, poet, biographer (and more) revisits her rich and sometimes rowdy life. The best sections of this episodic memoir are the first and final quarters of the text. In the first, O'Brien (Saints and Sinners, 2011, etc.) writes affectingly of her girlhood--her memories of being attacked by an ill-tempered dog, of playing with dolls in her dining room, and of discovering and nurturing her interest in literature and writing. "The words ran away with me," she writes. She worked in a pharmacy in Dublin but soon fled when the seductions of sex and literature and celebrity whispered that she could have a very different life than the one she was experiencing. Her account of her marriage to writer Ernest Gébler is grim and often depressing (understatement: he was not happy about her literary success), but she eventually left him, battled for custody of her children (she eventually won) and soared off into celebrity, a state that consumes the middle--and weakest--sections of the book. She seems determined to list every famous person she encountered, and the roster seems endless--John Osborne, Robert Mitchum, Paul McCartney, R.D. Laing (who became her therapist), Harold Pinter, Gore Vidal (she stayed at his Italian villa), Arthur Schlesinger and Norman Mailer. On and on go the names, a virtual phone book of the famous. These sections are mere molecules on the surface of some much deeper issues that she neglects. In the final quarter, O'Brien returns to some effective ruminations about finding a place that's "home" and about feeling mortal--even old (an encounter with Jude Law is poignant). Near the end, she revisits her abandoned girlhood home, drifting through it and remembering. Emotion and reflection contend for prominence with superficiality; the former win, but barely.
