Country Girl: A Memoir (Back Bay Readers' Pick) - Softcover

O'Brien, Edna

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0316122718 ISBN 13: 9780316122719

Publisher: Back Bay Books, 2014

Synopsis

"Country Girl is Edna O'Brien's exquisite account of her dashing, barrier-busting, up-and-down life."--National Public Radio

When Edna O'Brien's first novel, The Country Girls, was published in 1960, it so scandalized the O'Briens' local parish that the book was burned by its priest. O'Brien was undeterred and has since created a body of work that bears comparison with the best writing of the twentieth century. Country Girl brings us face-to-face with a life of high drama and contemplation.

Starting with O'Brien's birth in a grand but deteriorating house in Ireland, her story moves through convent school to elopement, divorce, single-motherhood, the wild parties of the '60s in London, and encounters with Hollywood giants, pop stars, and literary titans. There is love and unrequited love, and the glamour of trips to America as a celebrated writer and the guest of Jackie Onassis and Hillary Clinton. Country Girl is a rich and heady accounting of the events, people, emotions, and landscape that have imprinted upon and enhanced one lifetime.

About this title

Review:

"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."--Philip Roth

"You must suffer to become yourself, and it doesn't get easier. I took heart from Country Girl, both as the self-portrait of a great prose stylist, and an exemplary female survivor."--Judith Thurman, "Best Books of 2012," The New Yorker

"The doyenne of contemporary Irish letters did not enjoy a straight-line rise to international fame and critical regard. . .Now, of course, O'Brien's fiction (brilliant short stories as well as novels) is seen for what it always was, richly illuminating and, yes, candid depictions of women's needs and desires, rendered with no sentimentality or salaciousness. . . .Her book is a beautifully expressed testament to a writer's tenacity."-Brad Hooper, Booklist (starred review)

"Country Girl is a book of magics, truths, stories, and quiet immensity. No one else could have written it, and no one else could have lived it."-Andrew O'Hagan, author of Be Near Me

"Edna O'Brien's Country Girl shimmers with heart, soul and literary brilliance."-Nancy R. Ives, Library Journal

"After dazzling readers and reviewers around the world for decades, O'Brien, now 82, finally turns her attention to her own life. Country Girl is as dramatic as any novel."-O, the Oprah Magazine

"Edna O'Brien had to exile herself, like Joyce and Beckett, to become herself. Mad Ireland hurt her into prose the way Auden said it had hurt Yeats into poetry....Literature-O'Brien's most faithful companion, her deepest faith-brings what consolation it can. She returns the favor by adding her extravagant lyricism to its trove."-Charles McNulty, Los Angeles Times

"Edna O'Brien, for whom the word 'redoubtable' may well have been coined, has lived a long and quite remarkable life...Anyone who knows and loves her work, as I do, will want to read Country Girl from start to finish."-Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post

"O'Brien's account of her life is completely irresistible."--Kate Tuttle, Boston Globe

"O'Brien's religion has been literature; to it she has remained devout, with a fervor that is contagious...She is no saint. She is an icon."--Stacy Schiff, New York Times Book Review

Book Description:

Edna O'Brien's Country Girl is an astonishingly honest and compelling memoir from one the greatest names in twentieth century literature.

About this edition

• Publisher: Back Bay Books
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0316122718
• ISBN 13: 9780316122719
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 384