Alison Stewart: You're listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. Let's continue our conversation about DOC NYC with the opening night film about a literary legend. Earlier this year, Irish literary star, Edna O'Brien, passed away. She was 93. The author of novels, short story collections, screenplays and stage plays, she defied the norms of Irish culture by writing about female sexuality in the early '60s. She wrote many acclaimed books, including The Country Girls, House of the Splendid Isolation, and The Little Red Chairs.

Edna was not just a writer, she was a public figure and a fixture in the celebrity social scene. Marlon Brando, Jane Fonda, Jackie Kennedy and Mick Jagger were all regulars at her parties. Her love of fun did not diminish the seriousness of her literary accomplishments. Edna's achievements were in the face of serious challenges, including a controlling husband and an intensely religious and patriarchal society. A new documentary tells Edna's story and features interviews with her just before she died. The film is called Blue Road: The Edna O'Brien Story. It has its US premiere at DOC NYC tomorrow night. Director Sinead O'Shea joins me now to discuss.

It is nice to meet you.

Sinead O'Shea: It is so nice to meet you.

Alison Stewart: When was the first time you read some Edna O'Brien?

Sinead O'Shea: Well, I'm ashamed to say I was a little late to this. As an Irish woman, it's really dreadful. I studied English literature in university in Dublin, and it wasn't on the curriculum. It was only 10 years ago, I was assigned an interview with Edna O'Brien by Publishers Weekly, a Us magazine, actually. I was a bit like, "Mm." Because I guess it wasn't overtly said to me, but my sense was that she was bit frothy, bit lightweight, which I now realize was no coincidence that I thought this, but more of that anon. I read her book, her first book, The Country Girls, and I couldn't believe it because not only was it so funny still and so fresh, but it actually spoke as much to my adolescence in the 1990s as it did to Edna's, which would have been the 1940s that she was depicting. It was brilliant.

Then I went to meet her, and then, oh, my goodness, she's just, as you saw in the film, just so exceptionally charismatic, so funny, so beguiling. Within minutes, you're weeping, you're holding her hands, you're telling her all your secrets, and she's giving the impression, at least, that she's telling you hers. She's just Amazing. I never really forgot that. That was the genesis of the documentary.

Alison Stewart: As you spoke to her, what did she tell you that she loved about writing?

Sinead O'Shea: I think for her it was as simple as breathing, and she just had to write. One of the great privileges of making this documentary was that she decided to share her diaries with me. You see in that how she interprets the world, she understands everything that happens, and processes everything by her writing, and it's just an absolute necessity for her.

Alison Stewart: How would you describe her style of writing?

Sinead O'Shea: It's very intimate. I think there's a little bit of a trick that she pulls in that it seems quite simple and it draws you in very, very quickly, but actually there's a huge level of craft there.

Alison Stewart: You show that in the film.

Sinead O'Shea: Yes.

Alison Stewart: You really show that in the film with pulled out paragraphs, and then everyone ends on just a simplest sentence.

Sinead O'Shea: Yes, the simplest sentence, and that makes you want to read the next paragraph. She's very propulsive.

Alison Stewart: Let's put this in context of what's going on. When she began writing, what was the literary scene like in Ireland?

Sinead O'Shea: Well, and I don't know if it's profoundly different now, it was very male. The literary scene in Ireland, though, was, I guess, one aspect of Irish life in which there was some pride. Ireland was a country where it just won its independence from England, and there was really great shame. We'd been taken over by the Catholic Church, which sort of institutionalized the shame. Our literary culture was something that had won us renown and acclaim across the world, but it was a male tradition, and there was a very particular way of being within that. People could be quite badly behaved, but it was a kind of male bad behavior, and Edna did not fit into that.

Alison Stewart: I see. Were there women writers writing womenly things?

Sinead O'Shea: No, not really. There were certain kinds of female writers, say, like Maria Edgeworth, for example, but they're coming from what's called the big house tradition. It's kind of an Anglo Irish style of writing that's really more connected to England. That's a slightly controversial statement by me, but perhaps the best way of describing it.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Sinead O'Shea, the director of the new documentary, Blue Road: The Edna O'Brien Story. The film has its US premiere tomorrow night at DOC NYC.

Edna was writing pretty explicitly about women's sexuality at a time when Ireland was still culturally conservative. Why was it important for her to write about sex?

Sinead O'Shea: I don't know if it was so much that she wanted to write about sex as she wanted to write about what was most relevant to her life. This was something that was happening. I don't know if she was the most sexual person in the world or in the country, which is certainly what everyone thought. Someone said to me, "We had to whisper her name when we were younger."

Alison Stewart: Really?

Sinead O'Shea: She just felt it was a part of her life, which in itself was such a revolutionary attitude for Ireland at the time. It was inconceivable that women had any kind of sexual drive whatsoever.

Alison Stewart: Let's actually listen to a clip from the documentary. This is Edna talking on a talk show. We'll let her describe it herself. This is from the Blue Road: The Edna O'Brien Story.

Host: Edna O'Brien is unquestionably one of the best thought of writers in the English language today. One thing that comes from these stories, Edna, is a rather depressing vision of men.

Edna O'Brien: Well, in my long life and my experience with men, I may have chosen the wrong ones, but I do think that they are shallower than women. I don't think they have nearly the same grasp on truthfulness, and they expect a woman to be a goddess, to be a whore, to be a mother, and nowadays, to be a breadwinner. The only thing I think that's nice about men is the occasional sexual pleasure they give us and nothing else.

Host: I don't know where to go from there.

Alison Stewart: How it's interesting hearing the talk show host say, "I don't know where to go with there." It seemed like there was quite a bit of I don't know what to do with you.

Sinead O'Shea: Yes, she was wonderful at discombobulating people, and she did it to me also many times.

Alison Stewart: Oh, really?

Sinead O'Shea: I derived great pleasure from that. I love when someone says something very unexpected. Yes, that was what she used to do. She had this uncanny ability, I think, in interview mode to. To a certain extent to be quite, in a way, rehearsed. Some of her lines were just so brilliant. She's just going to kill her lines and yet also to be utterly spontaneous and in the moment. It was a real magic that she had in that capacity.

Alison Stewart: Was her public persona the same as her Personally?

Sinead O'Shea: I don't think it was entirely. There's a bit in the film where she's going through this crazy phase of basically having the worst love affair that I've ever witnessed, at least. Everyone's had a bad relationship, but this one goes on. It's an obsessive, unrequited love for more than six years. During this time, she stops writing, and so she loses her house and she ends up trying to commit suicide. It's all so dreadful, and yet at the same time, she's going on to chat shows, and as she's writing her diary, she's saying, "And I prepare my sequins, and I prepare the face to meet these faces." As Elliot would say, she's performing.

There is a kind of a disconnect, and yet also public Edna is intrinsically her, if that makes sense. It's kind of paradox.

Alison Stewart: I'm speaking with Sinead O'Shea, director of the new documentary, Blue Road: The Edna O'Brien Story. The film has its US premiere tomorrow night at DOC NYC.

When she gets married, she marries Ernest, who's a fairly successful writer on his own. She slowly eclipses him in fame.

Sinead O'Shea: Ernest did not like this.

Alison Stewart: Did not like this at all. In fact, in the diaries, you got her diaries, but he'd written over them.

Sinead O'Shea: I know, he had annotated them. It's so interesting because he really obsessed over her for the rest of his life. He felt so wronged by everything that had happened. He is actually his own worst enemy because the annotations on the diaries, his scrolls, just betray such a vicious, controlling, bitter, jealous man. He hates her. He hates her family, slit out peasants, as he calls them.

Alison Stewart: A little asterisk next to it, that is her mother.

Sinead O'Shea: Yes, just to be clear.

Alison Stewart: Just to be clear.

Sinead O'Shea: He claims to have written her books. It turned out to be such a damning accusation. Even an old classmate of mine, when I said I was going to make a documentary by Edna O'Brien, he said, "I was just always told she hadn't written her books." I know that the people he knows knew Ernest's circle because Ernest was someone who had a lot of, I suppose, quite powerful peers within Ireland. She had this really quite good reputation abroad. In the US, she's championed by Philip Roth, she delivers the eulogy at his funeral, but at home, people are sniggering at her the whole time saying she just actually didn't write her books, but that's because Ernest is briefing everyone against her. He Was, I would say, the most unsupportive husband possible.

Alison Stewart: You include excerpts of her book, and it is narrated by Jessie Buckley.

Sinead O'Shea: Yes. She is amazing. She is so great. Her dad came to a screening in Ireland the other night, actually, which was lovely for him to see her good work, too.

Alison Stewart: What did it feel like to hear the diaries, to hear someone reading the diaries?

Sinead O'Shea: Well, it was funny, actually, because I had voiced them as a temp track, and my interpretation was so plaintive. Whereas Jessie [unintelligible 00:11:18] and her voice, I think it's so powerful from these huge theater shows that she's done. I was just like, "Jessie, be gentler." Jessie is really extraordinary.

Finally we had this friend who's a poet, Eva, in common. Eva H D, I think she might be somewhat known here in New York. I said, "Do you think Jessie would like to do it?" She sent an email and it turned out Jessie was also a devotee of Edna. Edna, she's very polarizing. There's an awful lot of people who really dislike her and dismiss her, but the ones who like her, adore her and are smitten with her and quite obsessed.

Alison Stewart: The people who dislike her, what do they dislike about her and her writing?

Sinead O'Shea: Well, there's the camp who thinks she didn't write her own books, and then there's other camps. The whole extravagance piece, which, I must say, it's somewhat basis for at least maybe laughing. I don't think it's a good reason to dislike her. She's just quite an extravagant person who spent an awful lot of money on champagne, and invested an awful lot of, I guess, faith in champagne as well. She really did love it and talks about it a lot in her diaries, for example.

I think then there's the people who simply feel she was a bit of a harlot in Irish life, and who think that she disgraced Irish womanhood, and was taken far too seriously by foreigners who didn't really understand what a lamentable person she was. As I say, there are many camps who have all their different reasons for disliking her.

Alison Stewart: She has two children. You've interviewed both of them for the film. What was their reaction to you asking fairly personal questions about their mom?

Sinead O'Shea: I know. I found that uncomfortable because I don't really like that kind of got ya' style of journalism, ambushing them with facts and insights of my own. Carlo, who's her older son, had actually written about his father before. He didn't know the content of the diaries, but he was able to articulate what his father was like. His father isn't a singular tyrant, I have to say, and a very abusive man. He was wonderfully eloquent about that. Sasha, I find very touching in the film. You can still see his face shaking as he talks about those final days of the parents' marriage, the awful custody battle, and then the letter Ernest sends to them, no need for them to send Christmas presents, "Your ex-father."

Alison Stewart: How he signed the letter to them.

Sinead O'Shea: Yes. It's just extraordinary what they've experienced and endured. I do feel such huge respect for them to have survived with their sanity intact.

Alison Stewart: New York City makes an appearance in the film. She spent some time teaching here in New York at City College. You interviewed Walter Mosley, who was one of her students. How does he describe her as a teacher?

Sinead O'Shea: Well, he would say she was very uninterested, perhaps unsurprisingly in, say, the admin side of teaching, which I don't think one or so many friends in the department. He didn't care because what he wanted was an actual writing teacher and a mentor. She, as he says in the film, changed his life. It was because of her that he became a writer. It was her faith in him. It was her sense that he could be a writer, he should be a writer. She says, "Walter, write a book." Just her sense that he could write a book completely facilitated him doing that. She also said, "You're Black, you're Jewish, you have stories to tell." He did it.

I love her whole New York time, I have to say, and I feel like she would have been much happier if she'd lived here. I'm not really sure why she didn't. I guess maybe it was a little to do with the children having to be based in London as well. The Walter stuff is terrific. I said to him at the end of the interview, I said, "Do you think that maybe you were a little enamored of Edna?" He said, "A little? I'm obsessed with Edna."

Alison Stewart: You spoke to Edna O'Brien shortly before she passed away. She's very frail. She does get dressed up, she does have her makeup on,

Sinead O'Shea: I know, the sequins still.

Alison Stewart: What seemed to be on her mind.

Sinead O'Shea: I think, and I think her motivation for the whole thing really was she wanted the final word. She felt like there were still things for her to say, there were things to be finalized, there were still things that she felt were complicated and still being discussed. She just wanted to make that final testimony.

There are two main camera interviews. I did quite a few audio interviews with her as well in between. The first one is in August 2023, and she actually fell ill towards the end of the interview, and she went into hospital the next day. Just before she falls ill, I show her that scene on my laptop, which I'd found in archive, which is her with her family, and the BBC television crew have come to film them, and her dad is singing Danny Boy, and her mother is lying away saying, "I never minded her books," which she usually did. The whole thing is just this total artifice. Poor Edna, she's much younger and she's sitting there on the windowsill just looking so uncomfortable.

It was so interesting to show that to Edna, age 92.5. She said, "Look at me, I'm so frightened." When she went into hospital, she sent a message to me and she said, "Sinead, make sure to use this in the film, that moment."

Alison Stewart: Oh wow.

Sinead O'Shea: I think that was really her way into making this film. She felt like, okay, we're going to be able to revisit these moments, and we're going to try and gain this bigger understanding of who she was.

Alison Stewart: If someone has been listening to this and thinking, "I have to go read some Edna O'Brien, where should they start?

Sinead O'Shea: I think you have to start with The Country Girls, because it's so delightful, it's so funny and so sweet, and it really is very universal. It's about a toxic friendship, and it's about devious, dangerous older men. Who can't relate to that?

Alison Stewart: The name of the film is Blue Road: The Edna O'Brien Story. You'll understand why after you watch the documentary, why it's called the Blue Road. It's having its US film premiere tomorrow night at DOC NYC. I've been speaking with its director, Sinead O'Shea. Thank you so much for being with us.

Sinead O'Shea: Thank you so much.