Carlo Gébler describes his new book, No One Tells You: The Last Years of Edna O’Brien, as “a study of a mind by a mind”. It is a sad, beautiful and wise meditation on ageing, grief and death, as well as a portrait of his late mother, one of Ireland’s great writers.
Gébler and O’Brien enjoyed a rare intellectual complicity rooted in their shared passion for literature and writing. I interviewed O’Brien in what she called her doll’s house in Ovington Street, London, in August 2022. Reading Gébler’s memoir is to revisit her home, to see O’Brien again in all her fading exuberance.
Talking to Gébler about his book feels like the continuation of the interview with O’Brien. Mother and son used the word pith to describe the innermost core of a writer or story. When Gébler quotes O’Brien quoting Beckett, Hemingway or Joyce, I hear her voice through him.
In phone calls and visits, they discussed their works in progress: O’Brien’s last play, Joyce’s Women; The Hermit Thrush, her unfinished book about TS Eliot; Gébler’s modern-day version of Boccaccio ... They talked about Thomas Mann and Emily Dickinson. In the aftermath of her death, Gébler could not help making mental notes of literary anecdotes to share with her, “a way of keeping a conversation going with the dead”, he writes.
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O’Brien wrote valiantly almost until she died, five months short of her 94th birthday. An extract from The Hermit Thrush will be published in a Faber anthology of her non-fiction next year. I find echoes of Eliot in Gebler’s book. Her handwritten first draft of his biography was lost to fire and water – shades of Eliot’s Waste Land. Lines from Eliot’s Figlia Che Piange, “As the soul leaves the body torn and bruised/As the mind deserts the body it has used” summarise her death on a summer afternoon in 2024. Her “Edna-ness” had already departed.
Asked why he wrote No One Tells You, Gébler quotes Beckett, who distinguished between facultatif or optional writing, and writing that is absolutely necessary. Gébler felt compelled to write the book because of “the shortness of time, the sense of my own mortality but also absolute confusion about the world”.
“By making a book and creating order you are soothing the unconscious. Here is something which is coherent and chronological and it’s finished and it’s done ... Just the actual business of doing it is of benefit. The pressure to do it is partially driven by bewilderment.”
Gébler describes in almost forensic detail the last four years of O’Brien’s life. Her house in Chelsea is burgled. An unattended candle sets fire to her diningroom, whence the loss of her Eliot manuscript. A family of foxes invade her basement, leaving a trail of blood, faeces and half-eaten books. At age 92, O’Brien is thrown to the pavement by a revolving hospital door. Her bank makes errors, counting deposits as withdrawals.
“Life should be a bit easier at 90,” O’Brien writes to her son, who lives in Enniskillen, Co Fermanagh. “Instead it’s far more difficult.” A pattern sets in: O’Brien tells Gébler of some new setback, then follows with a cheerful message attempting to quell anxiety over her problems. She is still asserting her indomitability and her determination to keep going. “Time after time into the abyss she fell, and time after time she pulled herself out again.”
Gébler comes to understand that death “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”.
Recovering from a bad fall, O’Brien rages: “No one warns you about old age. No one tells you that your body falls apart.” The quotation provided the title for Gébler’s book, and exemplifies our denial about what de Gaulle called the shipwreck of old age. Most of us prefer to believe we can defy the laws of nature.
Of course, she knew, Gébler thinks. Hadn’t she read and reread the Beckett trilogy, Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable?
In earlier decades, Gébler reflects, the world seemed to make sense. But in O’Brien’s last years, it reverted to 20th century levels of brutality and absurdity. Though O’Brien was dying, “her political ire was undimmed”, he writes. “She loathed Trump and dreaded his victory over Biden ... She was deeply exercised by the sufferings of the Ukrainians and the Palestinians. She hated Putin and the Russian army, and she hated Netanyahu and the Israeli Defense Forces.”
O’Brien was capable of infectious gaiety, but one always sensed an undertow of sadness. “No politically, socially and culturally alert human being could live through the 20th century and into the 21st century without experiencing profound unhappiness,” Gébler says. “This is what it is to be alive.”
Mother and son transformed personal sorrows and the world’s dramas into the stuff of literature. She taught him the importance of remaining in touch with one’s unconscious while also “dealing with the insanity flooding in”. The writer, Gébler says, must face in two directions, inwards and outwards, Janus-like.
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When Edna O’Brien divorced Ernest Gébler, her ex-husband was initially given custody of Carlo and his younger brother Sasha. O’Brien would take the boys to the cinema, then cry through the film at the thought of their imminent separation. She took her ex-husband to court. A judge ordered the boys to state in writing which parent they wanted to live with. Ernest punished them by breaking off contact.
One does not recover from such memories, Gébler says. “You cannot magic away experience, because experience has formed part of the geology of your psyche ... The material of hurt is an inexhaustible source of creative material and creative energy.”
O’Brien and Gébler jokingly referred to themselves as Stakhanovites, after the legendary, hard-working Soviet miner. She had an almost mystical vision of the writer’s vocation, saying she could not live without writing. Gébler credits writing with keeping her alive so long.
When Gébler’s publisher asked him for a modern-day version of Boccaccio’s tales, he says: “I did nothing but eat, sleep and breathe The Decameron; I spoke to no one, and contacted no one. I just wrote and wrote and wrote. This obsessively singular, focused manner of writing was something I had seen my mother practise.”
O’Brien always kept a spiral notebook and purple ink pens to hand. She wrote at the hairdresser’s, in taxis, while waiting in restaurants. “If she wasn’t in full creative mode or flow then she would do other kinds of work, non-fiction and journalism,” Gébler says. “She was very protean.”
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Gébler inherited not only his work ethic but his anxiety from O’Brien. “She was highly, highly anxious and spent – which goes back to childhood – every waking moment in a state of hyper-vigilance as she waited for whatever blow or catastrophe was going to descend on her head,” he says.
Gébler and his British wife Tyga visited O’Brien in January 2023. O’Brien, then 92, made certain the champagne was chilled in an ice bucket, that there were linen napkins and proper fish knives for the smoked salmon. Had their conversation been recorded, Gébler writes, “viewers would, I think, have decided that here were people gathered who weren’t talking about what they knew they ought to be talking about. And we weren’t”. It was impossible to talk about O’Brien’s impending death, he says.
O’Brien created beauty around her and took pride in her appearance, even in her 90s. “She was one of these people who believed, who was absolutely certain that at every moment, every hour through the day, your job was to make the world more beautiful ... The frock you wore, or the way you put the flowers into the vase, or the way you laid the table, it was all part of the same process: beautifying, improving, aestheticising,” Gébler says.
The last time Gébler visited O’Brien in London, he studied his unconscious mother’s hands, to imprint them in memory. “I uncurled the fingers of both and turned them palm up. In childhood I had loved her hands. They were very beautiful, small and smooth, lovely and capable.” He enumerates the marvellous things his mother could do with her hands: the fluency and quickness of her writing, the way “she muttered under her breath the lines she was writing ... as if she were giving herself dictation”. He recalled the way she set tables and cooked. “There was no end to the brilliant things she could do with her very beautiful and brilliant hands. And looking at them now I saw they were still the small and soft and very shapely hands with the same lines on the palms that I remembered from childhood.”
Grief plays tricks on the mind. On returning home from his last visit to O’Brien, Gébler discovers a hedgehog outside his study, the first he has seen in a quarter century. He feels certain that his mother has died and returned “as this beautiful little animal”.
In 1960s and 1970s London, in what O’Brien called her reckless period, she entertained lavishly. Her sons carried champagne up from the cellar and waited on rich and famous guests. After her death, Gébler imagines he will see her again, walking towards him in the street, or at “a composite of all the parties”. Two years after her death, she is still “a live and vivid presence” to him.
A thread of coincidence run poetically through the book. On July 27th, 2025, Gébler arrived outside the borrowed apartment in Belgravia where his mother had died at 4.20pm, exactly one year to the minute after she passed away. “The universe has gone to some trouble to organise this, I thought.”
Gébler believes that through coincidence, the universe invites us to pay attention to patterns of meaning we would not otherwise observe. “We spend most of our lives not being conscious, mainly dreamy, not focused, and actually what the universe is demanding is absolute presence in the moment. And when you are, you begin to notice these coincidences. You need to be attuned to the world.”
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Paradoxically for a writer who put so much autobiography into her fiction, Edna O’Brien was an intensely private person who jealously controlled her public image. Gébler did not tell her he was writing a book about her last years. How does he think she would have reacted?
“She would have wanted more jokes,” Gébler says. “She always wanted more jokes, more laughter.” He says she would not have minded him divulging the difficulties of her last years. “This is a historical record,” he says. “It’s obviously inadequate, because no record is ever sufficient. But there’s nothing in it that isn’t true. It’s not a celebrity memoir. It’s a book about what the effect of death is, which is a thing that we ought to pay a lot more attention to.”
No One Tells You - The Last Years of Edna O’Brien by Carlo Gébler is published by New Island
