My new biography, FEARLESS, which will be published later this year, is a comprehensive life of the great Irish novelist Edna O'Brien. Researching this book involved a rather daunting number of roadblocks.
In early 2020, after requesting a draft of my biography of Elizabeth Hardwick, Edna declined, in an email exchange via her London agent, to make herself available for an interview. She did not give a reason, but I imagine that her decision was due at least in part to concerns about my approach. It was clear from remarks made during her last years that she sought validation for the seriousness of her body of work and had grown impatient with rehashes of her eventful personal life. She had recently received a brutally negative profile in The New Yorker, and she saw that my Hardwick biography delves into that author's fraught private life with her husband, the poet Robert Lowell.
According to Edna's agent, there was to be an official biography; Edna would choose the author from among several candidates. I was also informed that I was not to contact anyone who knew Edna (when I tried to do that anyway, most potential interviewees either failed to respond or declined to speak to me), and that my book could not be published until after Edna's death. As I pursued my research, I learned that I was also forbidden to consult her archive at University College Dublin.
Fortunately, there is a voluminous archive of Edna's papers at Emory University, and it is open to all researchers. A few items within this massive resource—including Edna's journals and correspondence with certain individuals—are closed to researchers until August 1, 2034. But she had spent some sixty years speaking to members of the press; appearing on talk shows and in documentaries (often available online); corresponding with family, friends, and people in publishing and the theatre; and writing published and unpublished essays on a variety of topics. Of course, I also read her many novels, nonfiction books, and short stories, as well as her film scripts, playscripts, and poetry.
As luck would have it, I benefited by not being allowed to publish while Edna was living. Additional information I obtained from various sources helped me better explain aspects of Irish history and politics, and I was able to conclude the biography with a description of Edna's funeral. I also read many books by the excellent young contemporary Irish women novelists who owe their writerly freedom to Edna's example, which I briefly discuss in my final chapter.
Meanwhile, Sinéad O'Shea, a Dublin-based documentary filmmaker who had interviewed Edna in 2016 for a Publishers Weekly article, decided to put Edna's life on film. After her attempts to interest Edna's agent failed, serendipity came to the rescue. At a party, O'Shea chatted with an American film producer, Barbara Broccoli, who turned out to be a good friend of Edna's. Broccoli coaxed Edna, who was initially hostile to the idea, to agree to the documentary.
O'Shea interviewed Edna at her home in the spring of 2023—an exchange that had to be cut short after forty minutes when she was too ill to continue. (Edna was being treated for pancreatic cancer.) In succeeding months, she recorded voice messages about her life from her hospital bed and suggested that O'Shea read her journals. (There was one final videotaped session in the hospital three months before Edna's death in July 2024.) Apparently, the fact of Edna's agreement to the documentary superseded the archive's embargo of her journals.
The documentary, Blue Road: The Edna O'Brien Story (not yet in release in the US; I was able to stream it last autumn) is very well done, providing an entertaining and sympathetic narrative of Edna's life. Both her sons are interviewed as well as a number of other people for whom she was a friend and inspiration. Passages from the journals, read by the actress Jessie Buckley, form the backbone of the film.
I must say that I wish I had known someone who could have interceded for me with Edna, so that I could have spoken to her and her sons, read the journals, and assured other people in her life that she was happy to have them tell me what it was like to know her. But it seems that the authorized biography will not appear after all, whether because Edna had trouble choosing the right author, or for some other reason. So I am pleased that my biography will not have a rival and that it will provide a much fuller account of Edna's writing life than is possible on film.
© Cathy Curtis 2025