Editor’s Picks: The Defiance of Novelist Edna O’Brien

Frieze Editor’s Picks is a fortnightly column in which a frieze editor shares their recommendations for what to watch, read and listen to.

Sinéad O’Shea, Blue Road: The Edna O'Brien Story (2025) 

In the opening minutes of Sinéad O’Shea’s Blue Road (2025), a new documentary about Edna O’Brien, the celebrated writer’s gentle west-of-Ireland voice murmurs over footage of her younger self: ‘I was born with this ability and demon to write. I was punished for it constantly.’ These harrowing words commence a film about an artist whose life encapsulated the very definition of defiance. O’Brien risked everything by daring to vocalise women’s experience in Ireland in the 1950s in her breakthrough novel, The Country Girls (1960). Her talent threatened everyone, from the macho literary establishment to her bitter husband, Ernest Gébler. 

In the film, we hear tales of the glamorous parties she held in London in the 1960s after she escaped Gébler and the suburban home where he attempted to break her spirit. ‘My work has been my life. Not everyone has thought that. Many people have thought I was a flibberty-gibbet, or I met this person, or I met that person. That isn’t really what I am; I am something else’, O’Brien says, skewering her media image as a socialite. That ‘something else’ is precisely what O’Shea portrays in Blue Road – insightfully, in O’Brien’s own words. 

Bella Freud, Fashion Neurosis (2024–ongoing) 

Bella Freud’s knowing podcast, Fashion Neurosis, invites prominent industry operators to lie down on her very loaded ancestral couch and discuss their clothes in the abstract and literal. The show toys with our relationship with clothes and examines how garments can simultaneously be very psychological – linked to how we want to reveal and conceal aspects of ourselves in the world – whimsical, flamboyant and bashful. Freud is the perfect host because she plays the stately role of distant psychoanalyst while embracing her guest’s more frivolous and fun tendencies. John Cooper Clarke, the bard of Salford, is an absolute joy, discussing his early Italian suits in the way only he could. Kate Moss is playful in detailing her early adolescent style. Julianne Moore is apparently challenged by colour. Fashion Neurosis hits the right note between camp, comforting and intelligent. 

Good Sad Happy Bad, All Kinds of Days (2024) 

All Kinds of Days (2024), the second album from London-based outfit Good Sad Happy Bad, feels rooted in a history of alternative music but also uniquely its own. Sometimes, it’s giving Psychic TV; other times, it’s Guided by Voices. Its simplicity is joyful, with a lightly sparkling saxophone, driving bass, sing-speaking vocals and themes of isolation (‘Lonely Well’), domesticity (‘DIY’) and repetition (‘Twist the Handle’). Though seemingly drifty, the record is tight in execution, with 11 songs totalling 35 minutes. It’s refreshingly airy and diffident at a time when it can seem everyone in London is feverishly on the make. Even the title, All Kinds of Days, suggests an openness to going whichever way the day dictates. 

Sinéad O’Shea’s Blue Road: The Edna O'Brien Story is released in UK cinemas on 18 April. Bella Freud’s Fashion Neurosis is available to listen (and view) on Spotify. Good Sad Happy Bad are currently on a UK tour that continues in Birmingham on 25 April. 

^{Main image: Sinéad O’Shea, Blue Road: The Edna O'Brien Story, 2025, production still. Courtesy: Modern Films}