Molly Furey: ‘Edna O’Brien was never really convinced that Ireland had changed. Neither am I’

Reading The Country Girls is a rite of passage for any Irish woman. I first encountered the trilogy as a record of a vanishing past. It was clear to my teenage self that my experience of growing up in Ireland in the 2000s was dramatically different to that of O’Brien’s protagonists Cait and Baba. I read the book as a story of another Ireland, one that my grandmother had endured, my mother had experienced the remnants of, and that I had luckily escaped. Times had changed – and the books were a warning to be grateful for the extent to which they had.