Edna O’brien: Life, Stories RTE One, 10.15pm

She has had one of the most remarkable and enduring careers in Irish literature, and now, aged 82, and with her memoirs due in the coming months, Edna O’brien gets the documentary treatment worthy of her stature.

‘ Life, Stories’ gains unprecedented access to the writer as she opens her home and her heart to film- makers Charlie Mccarthy and Cliona Ni Bhuachalla.

The programme gets its structure from a series of frank and entertaining interviews with O’brien, as well as her two sons, Carlo and Sasha Gebler.

O’brien’s journey from Tuamgraney, Co Clare, to the centre of literary life in London has involved rebellion, censorship, elopement, motherhood, divorce, custody battles and the rearing of two sons as a single mother, as well as a glittering social life and a growing profile as a public personality and commentator.

But throughout most of these dramatic developments, O’brien wrote consistently, and in this film viewers get a privileged glimpse of her more private life, her writing process and rituals.

O’brien was a key figure in the social and literary whirl of 1960s and ‘ 70s London. Indeed, she’s probably the only Irish novelist who credits the taking of LSD with influencing her prose style during that era.

This documentary touches on her reputation- making books such as ‘ The Country Girls’, ‘ A Pagan Place’, and ‘ In the Forest’, in addition to the tales of the writer’s social encounters with many of that period’s biggest names, including Marlon Brando, Jane Fonda, Elizabeth Taylor and Robert Mitchum.

But, all the while, in her life and in her work, O’brien was dealing with a complex emotional web, including her tangled relationship with her parents, and her ambivalence towards Ireland.