Why do you only like us when we're already dead?

The Messy Dead Women's Writing Industrial Complex

I was on an aeroplane just over two weeks ago when the news broke that Edna O’Brien had died. On that little shuttle bus that takes you from the plane to the airport, my boyfriend turned to me in obvious dismay and said: Edna O’Brien has died!

It is probably a surprise to no one that I loved Edna O’Brien. She was that rare and ever rarer thing: a serious, smart, perceptive and brilliant writer who is also impossibly chic,¹ fun, full of spark and in possession of a slightly loose canon-esque unpredictability.² So many writers are – respectfully – just so dull now. I feel like almost every contemporary novel by a young woman I read is like a contest to see who can be the most somnambulant and disaffected, sleepwalking through an interior monologue that is completely devoid of fun or feeling.³