Edna O'Brien has lived in London for a few decades, but she speaks, as she writes, in a voice inflected with the rhythms and accents of the west of Ireland, where she grew up. She calls herself "an exile(放逐者)", like her great literary forebears, Joyce and Beckett, whom she reveres, and points out that exiles "tend not to go back". "The place I grew up in is my imagery, my geography of mind and pen, " she says. "But to live there again..." Uncharacteristically(非同寻常地), she leaves the thought uncompleted, preferring to direct me to the final scene of her new memoir, Country Girl, in which she meets an Irishwoman in the street who tells her about her aunt in Dublin before adding, "But we live here now." O'Brien agrees: " 'We do, ' I said, and it was as if the two countries warred and jostled and made friends, inside me, like the two halves of my warring self. " For most of the latter half of her exile—some 25 years—O'Brien has lived in a "book-laden" house in the cosmopolitan district of Knightsbridge, a five-minute walk from Harrods, London's most famous department store. Expensive sportscars and SUVs line the pavements, and the shops are exclusive boutiques, which are the favorite of fashionable elegant ladies. Most of the houses have steps leading up to glossy front doors, but O'Brien's is reached by a dark alley that runs to a side entrance. Among the moneyed anonymity of the neighborhood, it feels set apart. There is a leather-bound edition of Shakespeare on the table in the first-floor sitting room, and a copy of Finnegan's Wake occupies a prominent position on the shelf. Despite the spring sunshine, there is a fire in the grate. Edna O'Brien has always been renowned as a great beauty, and at the age of 82, she remains good-looking. On the day we met, she had just returned from a series of literary festivals in Ireland, where she was well received—which has not always been the case. Country Girl not only revisits her childhood in County Clare, her convent(女修道院)education, and unhappy first marriage, but the scandal that ensued in Ireland when she fictionalized those episodes in her first novels. She has continued to explore her childhood memories in her fiction, but she says the memoir offers a different perspective: "Some of the material overlaps, but it's differently rendered. The mother that exists in my fiction is the same mother as in my memoir, but it's not the same aspects of her. " Besides, she does not apologize for returning again and again to her early years: "Childhood imagery, experiences, griefs, and joys—if they are there—are formative for a writer. Some people remember their childhoods in a generalized way, as rich or poor, happy or sad, but a writer's early life is embedded in them. "
单选题
According to the passage, Edna O'Brien calls herself "an exile" because______.