Country Girl: A Memoir by Edna O’Brien (2012)

[jserraglio]

A memoir by a great Irish writer I had never heard of before reading Fintan O’Toole.

https://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/12/book ... brien.html
Literature was something to be forgiven in O’Brien’s family, and she delivers with the 1960 publication of “The Country Girls.” It is all sex and sensibility — and getting kicked out of convent school. (Her mother never acknowledges the book’s receipt. O’Brien discovers the copy she sent home years later, when she also finds that her mother has blacked out the offensive phrases.) The novel is banned and burned. Essentially O’Brien does for Ireland what her great friend (without privileges, she insists) Philip Roth did for Newark: she scandalized it, then put it on the map. She is notorious before she is famous.