On July 27th, 2024, Edna O’Brien died in London at the age of 93. Over subsequent days, her funeral Mass in Tuamgraney, Co Clare, and burial afterwards on Holy Island, Lough Derg, received widespread media coverage; this newspaper published a four-page special literary supplement on Monday, July 29th. “She was a speaker of truth,” said her funeral celebrant, Fr O’Meara, a “remarkable woman” who “held up a mirror for us in a very narrow time in Ireland”.

This memoir, by her older son Carlo Gébler, covers the final years of Edna’s life, beginning in May 2020. It is, for a number of reasons, a surprising book; any expectations that this will be a “tell it all” account of what it was like to have a famous author mother are quickly dispersed, and the chronological coverage is somewhat jagged and uneven.

Interested readers will find some of the wider familial story in Sinéad O’Shea’s recent documentary Blue Road: The Edna O’Brien Story, featuring memorable interviews with O’Brien filmed not long before she died, as well as contributions by her two sons.

Instead, what is offered here is a quiet, unflinching and moving reflection on watching a loved one age; a book that tells, in close-up focus, what it feels like to watch a parent weaken and to learn what “no one tells you” before.

In his preface, Gébler recounts how the knowledge of his mother’s impending death began to feel “like a sore tooth to which the tongue keeps darting: it wouldn’t let me alone” and so “I decided I should stick with the sore tooth. I would write about my experience of my mother’s death. It was what I needed to do. Solipsistic of course, but it had to be done.”

Carlo Gébler on his mother Edna O’Brien: Coming to the end

That solipsism is also an act of narrative generosity. The emotions he describes are familiar to very many, and his acknowledgment of them a source of solace. They range from helplessness to anger, through anxiety and worry, back to rage. And even more powerfully, the memoir evokes O’Brien’s rage against dying: “She would testify to the brutal truth and she did and terrible as it was to hear, it was also bracing. She wouldn’t baulk; she would resist; she would cavil. Wasn’t that the better way to face extinction, to say loudly over and over and over, ‘No, no, no, it’s hideous.’”

The hideousness of dying notwithstanding, Gébler’s account of his mother’s final years also brings some welcome humour. Reading lines like these – in which Edna O’Brien’s voice is still powerfully sharp, and thankfully so – one feels like cheering out loud: “I hate emails, I fucking hate emails. I want them out of my fucking life. I want them abolished. I never want to see another fucking email for as long as I live, which won’t be long. God grant me this wish – no more fucking emails for the time remaining.”

Not only a narrative about a son and mother, this is definitely also a book about two writers and about the vital power of writing as a life force for them both. The early chapters feature some fascinating depictions of Edna O’Brien’s writing process. This is one example: “When she worked with someone, she either read from handwritten sheets, changing what she had written as she read, or made it up on the spot without the aid of notes. She could dictate off the cuff and when she did, her voice had a strange, tranced, otherworldly quality.”

Other details convey the continuing impact of practical reality, including financial worries and the precarity of being a 90-year-old tenant, as well as O’Brien’s remarkable work ethic. Even in her last months she struggled to complete a book on TS Eliot.

For the writing son, the last years have been times of watching – his mother and himself – and of painful learning: “Death, in this case (or do I mean her case?) I was coming to understand, was less an event than a series of incremental reductions, with one capacity after another being taken away until at last, you came to the end – extinction. And like some wretched formula I needed for an examination but could not keep hold of in my mind, I had to keep relearning this, again and bloody again.”

In February 2023 O’Brien had a terrible fall, one consequence of which was that she could no longer live at home. Recounting the story of her fall to her son, she vigorously protested that “No one warns you about old age” and “No one tells you that your body falls apart”. In retrospect, he realises that the world’s seeming failure to warn her adequately also left her free to rage against it. Now, his own decision to speak the truth, to warn and tell, makes for very compelling, if unsettling, reading.

Margaret Kelleher is Chair of Anglo-Irish Literature and Drama at UCD. Her biography of Mary and Padraic Colum is published this month by UCD Press