Carlo Gébler describes his new book, No One Tells You: The Last Years of Edna O’Brien, as “a study of a mind by a mind”. It is a sad, beautiful and wise meditation on ageing, grief and death, as well as a portrait of his late mother, one of Ireland’s great writers.Gébler and O’Brien enjoyed a rare intellectual complicity rooted in their shared passion for literature and writing. I interviewed O’Brien in what she called her doll’s house in Ovington Street, London, in August 2022. Reading Gébler’s memoir is to revisit her home, to see O’Brien again in all her fading exuberance.Talking to Gébler about his book feels like the continuation of the interview with O’Brien. Mother and son used the word pith to describe the innermost core of a writer or story. When Gébler quotes O’Brien quoting Beckett, Hemingway or Joyce, I hear her voice through him.In phone calls and visits, they discussed their works in progress: O’Brien’s last play, Joyce’s Women; The Hermit Thrush, her unfinished book about TS Eliot; Gébler’s modern-day version of Boccaccio ... They talked about Thomas Mann and Emily Dickinson. In the aftermath of her death, Gébler could not help making mental notes of literary anecdotes to share with her, “a way of keeping a conversation going with the dead”, he writes.O’Brien wrote valiantly almost until she died, five months short of her 94th birthday. An extract from The Hermit Thrush will be published in a Faber anthology of her non-fiction next year. I find echoes of Eliot in Gebler’s book. Her handwritten first draft of his biography was lost to fire and water – shades of Eliot’s Waste Land. Lines from Eliot’s Figlia Che Piange, “As the soul leaves the body torn and bruised/As the mind deserts the body it has used” summarise her death on a summer afternoon in 2024. Her “Edna-ness” had already departed.Asked why he wrote No One Tells You, Gébler quotes Beckett, who distinguished between facultatif or optional writing, and writing that is absolutely necessary. Gébler felt compelled to write the book because of “the shortness of time, the sense of my own mortality but also absolute confusion about the world”. “By making a book and creating order you are soothing the unconscious. Here is something which is coherent and chronological and it’s finished and it’s done ... Just the actual business of doing it is of benefit. The pressure to do it is partially driven by bewilderment.”Gébler describes in almost forensic detail the last four years of O’Brien’s life. Her house in Chelsea is burgled. An unattended candle sets fire to her diningroom, whence the loss of her Eliot manuscript. A family of foxes invade her basement, leaving a trail of blood, faeces and half-eaten books. At age 92, O’Brien is thrown to the pavement by a revolving hospital door. Her bank makes errors, counting deposits as withdrawals.[ Edna O’Brien: ‘She could be so queenly and dominating, but then totally wounded by criticism’Opens in new window ]“Life should be a bit easier at 90,” O’Brien writes to her son, who lives in Enniskillen, Co Fermanagh. “Instead it’s far more difficult.” A pattern sets in: O’Brien tells Gébler of some new setback, then follows with a cheerful message attempting to quell anxiety over her problems. She is still asserting her indomitability and her determination to keep going. “Time after time into the abyss she fell, and time after time she pulled herself out again.”Gébler comes to understand that death “was less an event than a series of incremental reductions, with one capacity after another being taken away until at last, you came to the end – extinction”.Recovering from a bad fall, O’Brien rages: “No one warns you about old age. No one tells you that your body falls apart.” The quotation provided the title for Gébler’s book, and exemplifies our denial about what de Gaulle called the shipwreck of old age. Most of us prefer to believe we can defy the laws of nature.Of course, she knew, Gébler thinks. Hadn’t she read and reread the Beckett trilogy, Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable?In earlier decades, Gébler reflects, the world seemed to make sense. But in O’Brien’s last years, it reverted to 20th century levels of brutality and absurdity. Though O’Brien was dying, “her political ire was undimmed”, he writes. “She loathed Trump and dreaded his victory over Biden ... She was deeply exercised by the sufferings of the Ukrainians and the Palestinians. She hated Putin and the Russian army, and she hated Netanyahu and the Israeli Defense Forces.”Carlo Gebler has written a memoir about his mother Enda O’Brien. Photograph: Alan Betson