![]() It was banned in Ireland (and South Africa, of course) and denounced by the culture minister and the archbishop. When it was published, all hell broke loose. It was a portrait of a dreary rural Ireland where the men drank themselves senseless and the women grimly endured, and also an exploration of the stirring of sexuality in the girls and their refusal to accept the life of their parents. The book, published in 1960, follows two young women who are expelled from their convent and who gad off to Dublin in search of the high life. When she meekly gave him the manuscript of her first book, The Country Girls, he read it and told her, coldly, “You can write and I will never forgive you.” She hid her writing from her vain husband Ernest Gébler, an older author who wasn’t producing much of anything. She was a young, miserable wife and mother transplanted from the Irish countryside to suburban London in the late ’50s. They marked an annual initiative called One City, One Book, in which residents of Dublin are invited to read the same book and various events are held around it.ĭame Edna O’Brien deserves a tea towel all of her own, not to mention the Nobel Prize. But also hanging from the streetlamps were posters of Edna O’Brien and her book The Country Girls Trilogy. ![]() Boyne was absolutely jubilant.īoyne came to mind when we arrived in the middle of Dublin Pride and the city was festooned with rainbow banners and balloons. A week later he was at the Kingsmead Book Fair and his country had just voted in favour of an amendment to the constitution, “to permit marriage to be contracted by two persons without distinction as to their sex”. The popular writer, a gay activist, spoke about it a lot at the Franschhoek Literary Festival and could be heard in the Green Room on calls home asking for updates. When he was in South Africa in 2015, Ireland was holding a referendum on the question of gay marriage. He has written, often and eloquently, about the oppression of the Catholic church - in particular its merciless attitude to homosexuality. I thought of Boyne when I visited Dublin last month. Granted, there are four Nobel laureates among them, but the absence of women writers is ludicrous. Although they do let us use it to dry the dishes.”īoyne was slyly commenting on the tea towel (and t-shirt, and coaster) found in every souvenir shop in Ireland featuring “Twelve Great Irish Authors” - all of them men. ![]() In John Boyne’s recent novel The Heart’s Invisible Furies, a character says teasingly to a female writer, “You’ll be on the tea towel one of these days.” “That will never happen,” she replies.
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