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Biography
Biography O'Brien was born in Tuamgraney, County Clare, in the west of Ireland, and as a young woman, she worked as a pharmacist and spent time in both London and Dublin. But after the publication of The Country Girls Trilogy, she left Ireland for good and settled in London. When asked why so many writers leave Ireland, she responded, "I left Ireland because my first books were banned, I was frightened; and the climate of censorship was strangulating. But although you physically leave the country, mentally you bring it with you." Much of
O'Brien's work is autobiographical: "A writer's journey is a graph,"
O'Brien told the Atlantic Monthly, "I started with things
I knew—convent girls, family, etc.—but as I became a little
more confident I applied myself to venturing into the outer world and,
I hope, integrating it with a corresponding inner world." O'Brien's
later work deals with a wider range of social and political issues. In
Wild Decembers (2000), O'Brien wrote about a conflict over land
ownership and its ramifications on a family and a community. This book
followed House of Splendid Isolation (1994), set amidst IRA struggles,
and Down by the River (1997), concerning Ireland's famous “X”
trial and the issue of abortion. Although O’Brien writes about difficult
aspects of an often repressive society, the beauty, humor, and melancholy
of her native country still resound in her writing. Excerpted
from Wild Decembers (2000) The
salon is half a terraced cottage with a concrete back yard for a coal
shed and in the front window a placard of a brunette and a sample folder
of nylon hairs, little switches, ranging in colour from ash blond to jet
black. In that small linoleumed room with its smell of ammonia and hairspray
everything gets told. Josephine is the first to know who is pregnant or
who has miscarried, the first to ferret out secrets too terrible to tell.
Lovers are her speciality, clandestine lovers meeting in their cars. Of
Josephine, people say, “She would go down in your stomach for news.”
Yet they confide in her because they cannot help it. Something in her
invites it, her motherly way, her soft stout arms with the healthy growth
of black under the arm pits, and her thin lips permanently open, as if
she is drinking her listeners in. Her particular forte is that she always
agrees, never contradicts, always says, “That’s right . . .
That’s right,” regardless of what she is thinking inside. “I
love when it’s just us,” Lady Harkness says. She says it faithfully
each week as she rubs her hands to show off her bracelets, the envy of
all, even Josephine, who jokes and says, “You’ll leave me them
in your will.” Sometimes she even gives them a little kiss. Lady
Harkness comes only on Thursdays to avoid the Bolshies, and usually there
is that nice girl Fiona, who has just got engaged and has wedding jitters.
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