SOURCE: "Tough Luck: The Unfortunate Birth of Edna O'Brien," in Colby Library Quarterly, Vol. XXIII, No. 4, December, 1987, pp. 216-23.

In the following essay, Haule examines O'Brien's treatment of birth, infancy, childhood, and motherhood in her works.

Edna O'Brien's Mother Ireland is a book filled with memories that move starkly between terror and pity as it explains, with the help of the haunting photographs of Fergus Bourke, why Ireland must be left and why Ireland can never be escaped. Her last statement is a remarkable admission of an entrapment at once willing and unwilling, a confession of both victory and defeat:

I live out of Ireland because something in me warns me that I might stop there, that I might cease to feel what it has meant to have such a heritage, might grow placid when in fact I want yet again and for indefinable reasons to trace the...