I find it interesting that to me the most fascinating character in Ken Burns’ new documentary “Hemingway” is not Papa H himself (though I realize I’ve not read many of his short stories and most of his nonfiction), but Edna O’Brien, an Irish novelist who shines as one of the talking heads Burns uses so beautifully.

O’Brien is calm but intense, and her comments cut to the quick of Hemingway’s novels. In one of her earlier appearances, she takes on detractors who say that Hemingway hated women and wrote adversely about them. 

To answer these criticisms, she reads a passage from Hemingway’s short story “Up in Michigan,” considered scandalous when it was published. The passage occurs near the end of the story, after a sexual encounter that the female character did not want, and O’Brien reads it slowly, the camera panning down to her hands, which gesture slightly as she reads the words with that Irish lilt in her voice. 

I don’t see O’Brien then but my mother, who was roughly O’Brien’s age when she died. I see the same set of the jaw, the same hair, full and of a color not found in nature. The same unbridled truthfulness. 

Mom was a writer, too — though most of her stories were never told. 

(In honor of O’Brien and Mom, a photo of the green fields of County Clare.)