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Don Swaim Interviews

Audio Interview with Edna O'Brien

Edna O'Brien, author of The Country Girls, The Lonely Girl, and Girls in Their Married Bliss (The Country Girls trilogy), August Is a Wicked Month, A Pagan Place, Mother Ireland, and Time and Tide, talks with Don Swaim about the differences between The Country Girls and Time and Tide. She feels both novels are views about life, but one is seen through the eyes of a teenager and the other is seen through the eyes of authority figures.

Edna O'Brien says the Ireland of her youth was a narrow, religious, claustrophobic, and punitive society. Everything was redolent of sin in her home and she ran away and eloped when she was eighteen years old.

Her first novel, The Country Girls, was savagely attacked in Ireland and her early novels were banned by the Irish censorship board. In her home village, the parish priest burned three copies of her book. She blames the narrow-mindedness on the lack of books in a village that had no library. She wants her books to glisten with truth and feels each of her books is a rung on a ladder to her next book.

Listen to the Edna O'Brien interview with Don Swaim, May 22, 1992
(46 min. 46 sec.)

MP3 File

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