It is her funeral today, and she is returned to Clare. 

Some years ago, in a London homestead with dappled light which lifted her face and framed her drooping breasts, she spoke of her death. “I call it the last banquet”, she said. “It may be sad, but it won’t be depressing.” Things are never all bad, nor all good. 

She was a woman whose life I followed distantly, yet consistently. I have only ever read one of her books. 

We lived in the Centre of Empire at the same time, for a period, Edna and I. 

It was the 1990s, and it was another London. She was a fixed presence on the literati circuit, and in literary supplements. 

O’Brien had an imperious way of communicating with the Brits which seemed, deeply, to please them. The desire of the dominator to be dominated, perhaps. Although to spell it out is to break the spell. 

Edna O’Brien’s wine of choice was Veritas, poured with emotion, to the brim. She was not one to speak in literal terms. The world was rarely moving directly from A, to B. 

Every story she told, coloured in specificity, also stood for life. It was no wonder she sometimes forgot to pay her bills. 

‘My childhood home’, she said, referencing Tuamgraney in Clare, ‘was a metaphor for the world’. Within it was the smell of baking bread, the warmth of communion, and, lest one get too comfortable, the slow waft of danger. 

Explaining what happened in those walls would become the debut novel, The Country Girls, which made her reputation from 1960, and made her skedaddle out of Ireland.

Edna did not translate her world-class imagination and work-ethic into worldly goods. She seemed often to take on projects out of economic necessity. 

Fame and fortune are not always wed. The British aristocrat, Diana (Mosley) Mitford, long in exile in France, died during that country’s disastrous heatwave of August 2003. How could it be, I wondered, that a woman of such fame did not have the means for air conditioning? Despite the media luvvies who fell on her every word, the 93-year-old Ms Mitford died in the stifling heat, on her own.

I have read several times over the years that Edna was skidding dangerously close to broke. The news created the same Mitford-like confusion in me. Truth ain’t so profitable – and that’s the goddam truth of it.

‘In The Forest’ is the fictional account of real events which happened in the wilds of Claregalway, in the west of Ireland, in 1994. A young woman, her son, and a young priest are led deep into the woods, and then murdered, by a disturbed young man. 

I read ‘In The Forest’ on my Mum’s advice. Being of Edna’s generation, she had followed her every word. Because I was living away from Ireland during the 1990s, I was not aware of the tragic and personal story which inspired O’Brien’s fiction. 

It was a harrowing, sensorial story of a long walk to death. Even now, twenty years after reading, I can recall O’Brien’s humid prose, as she set up her characters in the labyrinthine paths of Cloosh Wood, and made them march together through velvety undergrowth, to the gallows. 

Grabbing the story of others for her own telling created quite a brouhaha at the time. But this was how the author knew she was on-track. Literature should stir the pathway; leave a trace. 

I read about her and watched her, as O’Brien passed through the stages of a metamorphic life. She began as the bookish young beauty who escaped the place which ‘forgot to think’; she was a London vixen, known for Saturday night Chelsea parties, with rascal, dagger smiles; she was a stalwart of commentary for the English who daily saw the Irish on their streets, but did not yet fully know them. 

But it is O’Brien, dame of letters, that I have known best. 

Her late evening was so full of clarity. Most of the actors of her life had died off. She spoke with forthright insight, and never gave up on adventure. She had moved on from her sacred calling, that of explaining Irishness, to speaking of issues which affect women and girls around the world. She remained wisely provocative in interview, and, to the measure that age permitted, always glamorous.

Edna O’Brien was modern, until the moment she was dead. And it is surely a fine banquet, 93 years in the coming, playing out in Clare as I write.