Edna O'Brien's family encouraged her to attend pharmacy school, but she left before finishing to marry an older writer, give birth to two sons, and publish, in 1960, her first novel. The Country Girlsso scandalized the O'Briens' local parish that the book was burned by the priest, her family disgraced. COUNTRY GIRL comes twenty-one books later, a rich and heady accounting of the events, people, emotions, and landscape that imprint upon and enliven one lifetime. Starting with O'Brien's birth in a grand but quickly deteriorating family house in western Ireland and the physicality of family life in the country, her story moves on to the crushes and challenges of convent school; elopement, divorce, single-motherhood, and the wild parties of the '60s in London that included people from all walks of life, including such stars as Marlon Brando, Richard Burton, and Paul McCartney. There is love and unrequited love, and the glamour of trips to America as an acclaimed writer who was sought and hosted by Jackie Onassis and invited to the White House by Hillary Clinton. The "broken piano" state of old age is heightened by the intensity of reading, and the drive to write. A brilliant, sensuous rendition of the memoir form, COUNTRY GIRL is a book that Edna O'Brien was always meant to write.