Tender and gripping portrait of Edna O’Brien

You could say it’s impossible to make a poor documentary about the writer Edna O’Brien as she’s never said or done anything uninteresting in her life. Point a camera and we’re away. But Sinead O’Shea’s Blue Road: The Edna O’Brien Story is especially rewarding as it is not only beautifully constructed but also includes diary entries that have never been made public before, plus an interview conducted with O’Brien in July last year just before her death. She was 93 and frail but as extraordinarily vivid as ever. She was born, she says, ‘ravenous for life’ and, blimey, what a life it was.

When I was growing up, there was no teenage fiction to speak of so we went straight from Ballet Shoes to whatever was on the bedside table of our mother. Luckily, my mother had O’Brien, and The Country Girls. I still have that paperback, which I’ve returned to many times, and I’ve read all her other novels (there are 20). She fearlessly and thrillingly told the truth about the female experience, which is not something I ever took away from the books at my father’s bedside (cricket, military, Wilbur Smith). She also carved her own path despite many attempts to bring her into line. The Country Girls (1960) was banned in her native Ireland, while her father said she deserved to be ‘kicked naked down the street’. When she ran off with the writer Ernest Gebler, they bolted to the Isle of Man, thinking they’d be safe there, but woke up to find her father, her brother, a neighbour, her sister’s boss and an abbot at the gate. The abbot ‘held up the gold crucifix and made the sign of the cross over me’.