Thirty years after Nuala O’Faolain’s memoir Are You Somebody? was published, other writers reflect on the impact of the book and share personal memories and anecdotes of the author.
Emilie Pine
Like many people, I vividly remember the feelings I had on reading Are You Somebody? for the first time – a mixture of shock, fear and joy. Shock that someone could be that real on the page, fear at the level of vulnerability revealed, and joy – oh the joy! – at finding a woman whose life story was not my life, but whose emotions matched mine. Who gave me the sense of being seen, through the generosity of seeing herself.
Later on, when I found my own writing voice, I tried to honour O’Faolain’s bravery on the page. But I found myself struggling with a new fear – the fear that writing about my self was self-indulgent. In those moments, I found strength in Are You Somebody? once more.
In her prologue, O’Faolain writes: “I didn’t value myself enough – take myself seriously enough – to reflect even privately on whether my existence had any pattern, any meaning.” But in the next breath O’Faolain refuses that kind of erasure: “Yet my life burned inside me. Even such as it was, it was the only record of me, and it was my only creation and something in me would not accept that it was insignificant.”
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Through this insistence on the burning power of her life, O’Faolain did not just refuse to accept insignificance. She gave permission to herself and all of us who come after her to take ourselves seriously. Permission to see our lives as meaningful. And, even, to see our lives as art.
Emilie Pine is the author of Notes to Self and, forthcoming, On Being Seen (Jan 2027)
Rosita Boland
It was November 1996, and I was living in Galway. I was cleaning toilets and sweeping floors at a local theatre during the day, and working the box office there in the evening. I was also trying to write a book about my recent lengthy solo travels in Iran, Pakistan, India and Nepal. The London agent who had looked at a few of my terrible chapters had just returned them with a damning note that said: “Fascinating, but alas not for us.”
On this particular November day, I was sitting in Cafe de Journal on Quay Street, reading a book. The book was Are You Somebody? by Nuala O’Faolain, which had been published a couple of weeks previously. There was a huge buzz around it. There had been a Galway launch the previous evening, and I had gone along, and bought the book at the end.
The atmosphere in the room that evening was unlike any other book launch I’d been to. It was mostly women, for a start, as I recall. There was a kind of febrile energy in the room; a giddy sensation of possibility. It all emanated from Nuala O’Faolain, who radiated both a joyful and a steely presence from the centre of the room.
[ Your first eight novels disappear into the ether. Then you strike goldOpens in new window ]
I knew her as a formidable journalist, and now she had written this book, and broken more barriers about what women were not supposed to say out loud. It was this same book I was avidly devouring when a woman came into the cafe and sat down.
It was Nuala O’Faolain herself. My feet propelled me to her table, book in hand. Might she be kind enough to sign it? She was Somebody, and I was Nobody, but she asked me my first name and signed my book, with grace and warmth.
She wrote: “From Nuala, a sister, in many ways. With heartfelt wishes.” On a day when I had many doubts about my future, I read that inscription and felt inspired; scattered with some unexpected stardust. She is gone now, but I still keep the signed book on my shelves, and always will.
Patrick Freyne
When I was writing my book of essays OK, Let’s Do Your Stupid Idea, I was initially trying to channel the comic writing of Clive James and Nora Ephron but I was increasingly influenced by Irish essayists like Emilie Pine and Sinéad Gleeson. I was so moved by their honest and beautiful writing about difficult life experiences and the wider realities of being women in Ireland. It felt like something was being unearthed, that all the stories I saw sublimated into fiction in the works of Edna O’Brien and Mary Lavin were finally freed into the world as something more like liberating fact. It felt like something was being released.
And then I read Nuala O’Faolain and realised that it had happened before. I was aware of O’Faolain as a journalist and broadcaster, but I had never read Are You Somebody? her accidental memoir (she had started out simply writing an introduction to a collection of her journalism). It’s stunning. It’s exquisitely written but it was also almost unwisely excoriating about the circumstances in which she grew up. It was a dark picture of Ireland. I felt like I was witnessing someone who had experienced psychic damage and was now releasing that damage on to the world in gorgeous prose.
Usually, I prefer memoirs about sad subjects to feel like they’re being written from a position of safety. I feel like in the past decade a lot of young writers were encouraged to write about terrible things that happened to them before they had fully processed them. In contrast, I felt when reading Pine and Gleeson that even when they were describing something painful they were now safe and recounting it for the benefit of the reader. That’s why I loved their books. I did not feel this safety with Are You Somebody? It felt like O’Faolain was writing it entirely for herself and that it was, in places, vibrating with hurt. And that’s, counter-intuitively, why I love it. It leaves a mark. I’m still not sure I’ve ever read anything like it.
Patrick Freyne’s first novel Experts in a Dying Field is published by Penguin Sandycove on June 11th
Dermot Bolger
International best-sellers can start with small things. In 1994 I cried with laughter one morning reading an article by Joseph O’Connor. I phoned him to insist there was a book there and six months later a collection of his articles became the bestselling The Secret World of the Irish Male. A year later I was moved, this time to tears, by an Irish Times column from Nuala O’Faolain where she described the dignity with which a Ranelagh butcher treated an old lady purchasing a single rasher for her dinner.
Again, I felt her journalism would make an amazing book and got Edwin Higel, who cofounded New Island Books with me, to approach her, suggesting the writer Tony Glavin as a perfect, sensitive chaperoning editor. I took time out from being New Island’s consigliere that year but kept in touch with Tony as the editing evolved.
The project began as a collection of newspaper articles but Tony kept telling me how Nuala’s introduction was taking on a life of its own, becoming a full memoir. However, Nuala was so lacking in self-confidence and convinced that nobody would be interested in her life that she kept insisting the real book was the newspaper articles and her memoir was merely an intro to them.
I think that, in her soul, Nuala increasingly knew that this wasn’t true but writers need coded layers of self-protection. When I first read the then memoir in progress, one night in Tony’s attic, I knew it was a unique and remarkable human document. The journalism was now superfluous but – in those early editions of Are You Somebody? – Nuala refused to drop it, still insisting that nobody would be interested in what she’d written about herself.
As ever in publishing, there was debate about an initial print run. We hesitated between 2,000 and 2,500, then threw caution to the wind and printed 3,000. I still remember watching The Late Late Show that week, which had such a boring line-up, with Nuala appearing last, that I was kicking the furniture, convinced that viewers would switch off. Then she came in and was magnificent and open and honest and brave, while Gay Byrne was at his most supercilious. Occasionally you just know something special is happening. Byrne was only asking his third question when I phoned Edwin, saying just four words: “Reprint another three thousand.”
He did but it still wasn’t enough. I wasn’t just a consigliere to New Island but occasionally to others in the book trade, notably my old Finglas mucker, John Harold, an important figure as the founder of Colour Books, Ireland’s first specialist book printers. “I need to check if Edwin has lost his reason,” John asked in a discreet phone call. “He wants a reprint of 41,000 copies.” “Trust Edwin’s instincts,” I said, “Nuala’s book will sell and sell.” Thirty years on I’m thrilled this is still the case.
Dermot Bolger’s latest book is Imperfect Beings (New Island)
Doreen Finn
For people over a certain age, Nuala O’Faolain’s weekly column in The Irish Times was, in the best sense of the expression, part of the furniture. Her accurate portrayals of Irish life were a regular reminder of who we were, how we did things, what we hid. Her precision allowed people to see themselves in her writing; though she excavated her own soul in print, it seemed that she did so on behalf of all who read her, and, in so doing, she helped us look more closely at ourselves.
In 2005, Nuala did a reading in Duttons, a celebrated bookshop in Beverly Hills. The audience loved her; I think her directness, her honesty, appealed to American sensibilities, their preference for openness. Afterwards, I told Nuala how her columns had punctuated my weeks, how much I had loved her books. She couldn’t have been nicer, tolerating my blatant fangirling without a single sigh. When her dog Molly died, I wrote to her, and so began a correspondence that lasted until Nuala died.
One night in May 2008, my mother rang me in the LA predawn to ask if I was listening to Marian Finucane. I wasn’t, having been asleep until that moment. Later, listening to that singular interview on playback, like everyone who knew and loved Nuala’s writing, I was stunned. I emailed her to tell her how sorry I was. Nuala replied with her usual pithy style, and said that having had Molly go before her, it somehow made things easier.
Her bravery in that interview, and in her subsequent writings, have stayed with me, a shining example of the pared-back humanity Nuala brought to her life, and by extension, to ours.
Doreen Finn is the author of My Buried Life
A 30th anniversary edition of Are You Somebody? by Nuala O’Faolain is published on May 29th by New Island
