O'Hehir, Diana 1929–

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O'Hehir, Diana 1929–

(Diana F. O'hehir)

PERSONAL: Born 1929; married Brendan O'Hehir (an educator; deceased); partner of Mel Fiske (a writer).

ADDRESSES: Agent—c/o Author Mail, Berkeley Prime Crime Publicity, Penguin Group, 375 Hudson St., New York, NY 10014.

CAREER: Novelist, poet, and educator. Mills College, Oakland, CA, taught creative writing for more than thirty-four years.

AWARDS, HONORS: Pulitzer Prize finalist, for novel I Wish This War Were Over; honorary Ph.D., Johns Hopkins University.

WRITINGS:

Summoned: Poems, University of Missouri Press (Columbia, MO), 1976.

The Power to Change Geography (poems), Princeton University Press (Princeton, NJ), 1979.

I Wish This War Were Over (novel), Atheneum (New York, NY), 1984.

The Bride Who Ran Away (novel), Atheneum (New York, NY), 1988.

Home Free (poems), Atheneum (New York, NY), 1988.

(Editor, with Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar) Mothersongs: Poems for, by, and about Mothers, Norton (New York, NY), 1995.

Spells for Not Dying Again: Poems, Eastern Washington University Press (Cheney, WA), 1996.

Murder Never Forgets (novel), Berkley Prime Crime (New York, NY), 2005.

Sound recordings include Diana O'Hehir Reads "The Old Lady under the Freeway, Period Piece, Bedside, The Prayer Meeting at the Nursing Home" (poems), and "I Wish This War Were Over" (excerpts), American Audio Prose Library (Columbia, MO), 1990.

SIDELIGHTS: Diana O'Hehir was already established as a poet when she wrote her debut novel, I Wish This War Were Over, which was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. Anne Tyler, who reviewed the book in the New Republic, wrote that O'Hehir "has managed in her first novel to produce a group of characters so complex and particular, so appealing and so heartbreaking, that what happens to them matters far less than who they are. Like real-life people, they draw us into the layers of their personalities, and these form the book's real plot."

The story is set in 1944, and World War II is not yet over. O'Hehir reveals wartime life through the eyes of nineteen-year-old Helen, who is on a cross-country quest to save her forty-three-year-old alcoholic mother from herself. In spite of her grandmother's warnings that Helen is but a child and her mother a grown woman who cannot be helped, Helen travels by train to Washington, DC, and along the way meets O'Connell, one of her mother's former boyfriends. O'Connell, a union activist twice Helen's age, calls her "Butchie," and invites her to stop with him in Reno. As they approach that city, he entertains her as they play poker by inventing other players, including a stripper, and playing their hands. As Tyler wrote: "Wartime Washington, a Virginia mill town, the bizarre, bleak waiting room of an Army doctor, the crumbling little apartment in which, after Helen's mother goes on a doughnut-frying spree, droplets of grease hang from all the shade pulls—each scene is palpable, meticulously described. And all are deepened by a faultless sense of time. The year 1944 lies over them like a translucent wash of color."

O'Hehir is editor with Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar of Mothersongs: Poems for, by, and about Mothers, an anthology of 200 poems called "razoredged" by a Publishers Weekly contributor. The reviewer wrote that the collection "illuminates so many angles of its subject that the overall effect is dazzling."

In Spells for Not Dying Again: Poems O'Hehir's focus is her relationship with her now-deceased first husband, Brendan O'Hehir, a James Joyce scholar who taught at the University of California at Berkeley. In spite of the volatility of that relationship, the poet grieves for Brendan, as reflected in the poems she considers "spells." Brendan is the central figure, much as Ani is the central figure of the Egyptian Book of the Dead. Upon his death, Ani's body was mummified, to be preserved so that his ba (soul), xu (intelligence), and ka (genius) might revisit it and live on in unison in Osiris. Brendan's body was cremated and returned to Ireland, where his son scattered his ashes from a cliff. He lives on in the poems of O'Hehir, whose book is a tribute, an offering of forgiveness, and a reaffirmation of life after death.