"I have read over the years some rather cheapening and ridiculous things about myself [...] As if I was a sort of hormonal Mata Hari going from one adulterous room to the next. And I felt somebody else might do it [write my memoir], when I am dead or whatever. [...] It’s not that I want to be flattered but I don’t want to be remembered as this lightweight who gave parties and had love affairs. It is ridiculous. I have written more than 25 books. I have earned my living through writing. No man ever helped me. [...] To actually render your own memories in prose means going back into them. Take my father shooting at my mother and I. I remembered it as the time when I thought he had killed us. But to have to describe it, render it … I had to scrape the memory the way a womb is scraped. Oh it was painful, yes. How could it not be?”
This is the memoir of thenovelist, playwright, poet and short story writer Edna O'Brien. Its title refers to her first publication, the novel The Country Girls (1960).
