Edna O'Brien

Why did you work in a pharmacy when you left home?

Oh yes, I always say that it was there I learned how to cook. And it's true for a very simple reason. That the medicines, a lot of the medicines, there were some patent medicines, but a lot of the medicines were still made up by hand. So I learned how to make emulsions, and I learned how to make suppositories, and I learned all those things which teaches one how to make a good source and so on.

Does getting fame and accolades change the perspective of the novelist?

Well, I I I'm being genuine when I say this to you. I feel very hard worked and sometimes over oppressed with cares and calls, and I hate the telephone. But I don't feel a star. I feel, thank God, that I've managed to continue the talent that was given me and to be very serious and obsessive about it. But for the most part I lead a fairly hidden and secluded life. … Uh the bulk of my life is lived alone. Trying to write or writing … and perhaps, perhaps, I I I I would like to make a bit more sure, who wouldn't, but perhaps that having to, you know, lead ordinary, if you like, a housewifely life has um kept me my feet are on the ground

Have you found the life of a writer totally satisfying?

Um no, no, I haven't. I uh often wished that I had um a job that brought me into contact with people. … So I am glad that I am a writer and wouldn't in any other incarnation want it altered. But to counteract it, I would love um a a much more physical life uh and and contact.

Does religion still play an important part in your life? Do you still go to Mass?

Yes, I go to Mass. I light candles in the two churches near me. My belief, however, is not as clear-cut as maybe the Pope or clergy would wish. So I have this inner and rather private need, but much about the Catholic Church. And their, if you like, their tyranny of the Catholic Church religion, the stranglehold which I grew up with. I do not like. But spirituality and religion are two different things, because one is God and the other is politics.

Were books ever present [in your childhood]?

No, books were not present at all. There was prayer books and there was a Mrs. Beaton's cookery book, much stained, you know, egg yolk and all that. And then my father was a man for the horses. There was bloodstock manuals. But there was one copy of Rebecca that had circulated into Scariff and Tombgrany. And it was loaned. And it was loaned by the page, not consecutive. So you might get page two hundred and four and then get page one.

Did living in that way as a little girl leave you with a sort of fear generally of men and a fear of the power that men have?

I think I have a fear of women and men, to tell you the truth. Yes, you live on the edge. But living on the edge doesn't dispose one very easily for ongoing life. As for going out into the world, my inner experience of men was all got from the odd bit of reading that I picked up here and there along the way. You know, Heathcliff, Mr Rochester, all that. So they were demon men that they were savable. So I went into the world With really the most daft kind of inner mythology. To this day, I regret the fact I don't think I know or have ever learned the game of men and women. It's like a dance that I cannot learn.

What mark did [being educated at a convent] make on you at the time?

Well, I wanted to be a nun, of course. I fell in love with nuns. It was a very stern place. There was a high stone wall around it. Gates were locked. So, what the convent did was to um give me a a a bit of a hotchpotch education.

Is it true that after your mother died you found a copy of The Country Girls buried in a field near your house?

Yes, she thought The Country Girls was disgraceful, and she had erased as a character Baba in The Country Girls who has the oddswear word every other minute, actually. My mother had erased them with good, deep. Black ink.

Is it fair to say that your marriage then simply collapsed under the weight of your success?

Yes. I mean, when it's encapsulated like that, it seems very um as if that's not the whole story, which of course it's not. I think that that was very central to it. … But secondly, and this I take the responsibility and some of the blame for. Between the age of nineteen or twenty and twenty-nine or thirty. I was a di a very different person, and it was very easy to bring up my children and write. A husband is harder to manage than children …

In the end, do you think that you have had to choose between writing and love?

I do. The choice has to be made because both. are very hard taskmasters. But also I if I were to fall in love again before I die. Alice is boastful, but why not be a little boastful? I would Hope for. An extraordinary man. who was a great poet as well as a great uh journeyman on the earth.