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COUNTRY GIRL A MEMOIR (2000)

by Edna O'Brien(Favorite Author)

3.44 of 5 Votes: 1

languge

English

genre

review 1: Her memoir is a pastiche of remembered moments strung together like a rosary, delivering the same stunned wonder as her fiction. "We strolled over to where the horses stood, near-motionless, like circus apparitions. They started then to come toward me...Her flanks glistened, her teeth were bared and she exuded a warm, jerky breath, her eyes slithering in every direction. He said to stroke her, to make friends with her, but I balked. "Go on," he said, and he took my hand and laid it on the nape of her neck,and I could feel her nerviness as I ran my fingers over the knob of bone and down along the face that was almost fleshless, down to the wide crater of the nostrils and the wet pink blubber of her mouth. "You're doing great," he said, but my heart was going pitter-pat... moreter as I remembered horses of long ago, in the stables at night, crashing against their wooden partitions and whinnying to be let free, their pent-up energy so great, so wild, it was as if they would break the door down. The fear they installed in my mother and me, inseparable from the fear of my father." (p. 347) The book is divided into four parts, corresponding to childhood and youth, first steps as a writer, fortune and fame, and retirement. Weakest by far is the third section, which nevertheless has intriguing celebrity gossip -- Rita Tushingham's allergy to lobster and Gore Vidal calling to her, as she dragged her enormous trunk up the steps of his Italian villa, "Do I hear Sisyphus again?"
review 2: At age 78, O'Brien decided to write her autobiography, and though I had never read any of her novels, I selected this book based on the rave review in the NYT and because I felt I should find out what the fuss was about. I found her personality to be enchanting and her writing to be tantalizing. She not only wrote novels but screenplays and adaptations of novels for screenplays. As such, she met everyone who was anyone in New York and Hollywood in the 60s,70s, and 80s. Though she talks about a lot of famous people it never feels like gossip or name-dropping. Don't ask me how she manages to pull that off, but I guess that's part of what makes her such a good author. She hails from Ireland and her first book was publicly banned by the parish priest in her hometown. In later years she was of course welcomed home with great acclaim. She talks about her friendship with Jackie Kennedy and Marlon Brando and the fight for custody of her children when her ex-husband tried to take them away on the grounds of her loose moral character. . . . of being kissed by Jude Law (of all people)! It's a treasure chest of interesting vignettes and I cannot do justice to it in this review. The only boring parts were at the beginning when she is talking about her parents and grandparents. I almost always find it boring when people talk about their relatives but it seems necessary in an autobiography so I forgive her that bit. But WHAT in the wide world of sports is an "orgone box"?? On page 238 she writes of an experience she had with a guru saying: "All that was needed was an orgone box. I had years before sat in one under the supervision of a Norwegian doctor." Yes, I checked the internet but can't figure it out. less

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