Daily Inspiration Quote by Edna O'Brien

Memory, in Edna O'Brien's telling, isn't a tool. It's a boss. The line flips the usual writerly myth of disciplined recall: instead of an artist mining the past on command, O'Brien casts recollection as an autonomous force that arrives when it wants, dragging the self behind it. "Summon up" suggests ritual and control, like calling spirits; her refusal of that verb is the point. Recollection isn't obedient, it's invasive. The kicker, "I am the servant of it", isn't self-pity so much as a fierce admission of how art and experience actually work: the past doesn't stay in the past, especially when it's been charged with shame, desire, religion, family, or exile.

The subtext is about authority. For an Irish woman writer who spent decades circling the psychic weather of rural Catholic Ireland and the costs of leaving it, memory is not nostalgic. It's coercive, often erotic, often punishing, frequently precise in the way trauma and longing can be. Servitude here has a double edge: it signals compulsion, but also vocation. The writer serves what returns because what returns is material; craft begins after the arrival, not before it.

Contextually, O'Brien is pushing back against tidy autobiographical readings. She doesn't "choose" which episodes define her; the mind chooses for her. That stance protects the work's mystery while confessing its source: the imagination is less invention than transcription under pressure.