After visiting his dying mother in London, Carlo Gébler returned to his rural home in Northern Ireland one night and encountered a hedgehog sitting on the doormat. A thought bubbled up: his mother had died and returned as this woodland creature.
In fact his mother, the novelist Edna O’Brien, was still alive, and not reincarnated, but his mind insisted otherwise. “At that moment that’s what I believed. And then of course I stopped believing it because I knew it wasn’t true.”
When O’Brien died days later in July 2024, at the age of 93, the literary world mourned the passing of a singular voice who had scandalised her native Ireland with depictions of female sexuality and blazed a trail for generations of Irish writers.
Now her son has produced a chronicle of O’Brien’s final years, a twilight marked by her struggle to keep working despite illness and frailty, and of the impact of her death on his own life.
Published on 11 September, No One Tells You: The Last Years of Edna O’Brien documents the writer’s doomed battle to complete a final book about TS Eliot as age and infirmity sapped her powers.
It was a painful fate for a woman so dedicated to her craft. “My mother’s strategy was basically to be a Stakhanovite, to keep on working. That was the elixir of life,” Gébler, a novelist, critic and biographer, said in an interview.
O’Brien escaped a stifling and conservative upbringing in County Clare by moving to Dublin and eloping with an Irish-Czech writer, Ernest Gébler, to England, where they raised two sons, Carlo and Sasha, before divorcing.
The Country Girls, published in 1960, established O’Brien’s reputation, launching her image as a glamorous public persona in London: a convent-educated rebel who befriended Hollywood stars while penning novels, biographies, plays and poetry.
Female desire and subversion populated O’Brien’s fiction decades before Ireland liberalised and legalised divorce, same-sex marriage and abortion, but that did not entitle Irish people to “co-opt” her memory for political ends, said Gébler.
“In Ireland people want a narrative which emphasises the progressive journey, as if she planned all the political progress on the back of an envelope. She wasn’t antagonistic to progress but she was a writer. Writing is about the transcription of feeling into a narrative. That is not a political programme and you shouldn’t get the two mixed up,” he said.
Gébler said his mother endured many hostile reviews, initially by critics who deemed her work “unseemly” and later by critics who disliked her forays into the lives of historical figures, such as James Joyce’s muse Nora Barnacle, or the kidnapping of girls in Nigeria. “Her fiction changed its register, but the world isn’t very sympathetic to that. It’s kind of: ‘It’s not your gig, madam’.”
He called a 2019 New Yorker profile a “hatchet job” and lamented that his mother was accused of cultural appropriation. “The dialogue on the left about what is and is not appropriate for writers to write about is chilling. It’s morally cramping and inhibiting.”
Posthumous acclaim for his mother validated the morbid joke about death being a great career move, said Gébler. “A living writer is sometimes overlooked because there’s so much other noise, but death is an even bigger noise, so you can get people’s distracted attention.”
For Gébler, however, her passing brought loss, confusion and dread. “The awful thing about a parent’s death is that you move up to the cliff edge. Once they’re gone, you know you’re next. And then you start to have all sorts of terrible thoughts. Why did I do this to my children? They didn’t ask to be born and then they too are going to die.”
The impulse for the memoir came in her final weeks as he shuttled from his home in County Fermanagh to tend to her in London, said Gébler. “The unconscious is very patient and very clever, and it always waits until the right moment. And then comes this very strong sense, right, this is what I must write.”
Asked if his mother would have approved of the book, Gébler replied: “I think she would have thought that that’s what writers do. She might have preferred a fictional iteration.”
He opted for nonfiction. “Why not just tell it as it was? It is about my experience of the death of somebody to whom I was very close – it’s about what the effect someone’s slow annihilation has on the psyche of someone that continues living.”
His response to the hedgehog on the doormat showed the “strange things” that the mind is capable of. “Although you are reasonably rational, there are deep wells of irrational belief.”
The finality of death is unconscionable, said Gébler. “There’s no way around the fact: one’s own extinction is disgusting to contemplate, as is the extinction of other people.”
Those who are close to a dying person have an obligation to let them feel seen and heard, he said. “Human being to human being, you listen. That’s your most important duty.”
His other advice is to impose order on the chaos of loss by writing about it, no matter whether in scribbled notes or a published book. “If you just let things fester in the basement of the psyche, they just get bigger and darker and huger and more and more terrible. You have to get it up into the light. And then you can come to some sort of accommodation with it, or a truce.”
