Poets, writers and musicians in Stateside tribute to much-loved figure

POET PAUL Muldoon, novelist Frank McCourt and Irish Times columnist Fintan O'Toole were among hundreds of friends and former …

POET PAUL Muldoon, novelist Frank McCourt and Irish Timescolumnist Fintan O'Toole were among hundreds of friends and former colleagues of Nuala O'Faolain who gathered at the New York Public Library on Tuesday evening to remember the writer who died last month.

"This is not a memorial," said Paul Holdengraeber, the library's director of public programmes. "It is a tribute."

As musicians led by Susan McKeown played traditional Irish airs, images from O'Faolain's life were projected on to a screen before more than two hours of tributes to a life dedicated to the written word.

Her sister, Deirdre Brady, said that the personality traits that marked O'Faolain as an adult were already apparent when she was a child. "She was terribly clever, bossy, a born leader, impatient," Ms Brady said.

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O'Faolain moved to New York after the success of her memoir Are You Somebody?and Ms Brady said the move opened up new possibilities for her sister at a time when she felt personally bogged down. "She had come to a standstill and America welcomed her," she said.

John Low-Beer, a New York attorney who became O'Faolain's domestic partner in 2002, recalled how they met through an internet dating agency and spoke of her awkwardness about intimacy and her constant anxiety about their relationship.

During O'Faolain's interview with Marian Finucane on RTÉ a few weeks before her death, she referred to Mr Low-Beer only as the source of her US health insurance. She asked, however, that her headstone should be inscribed with the words "Beloved of John Low-Beer of Brooklyn".

Mr Low-Beer said O'Faolain hoped that, years from now, the inscription would make visitors to her grave wonder about the story behind it. The message apparently caused some confusion among the stonemasons too, he said, because it appeared as: "Beloved of John Low Beer of Brooklyn".

Although "intimacy was harder for her than for most people", Mr Low-Beer rejected the characterisation of O'Faolain in some obituaries as a woman tragically unable to find love.

"I know Nuala did love and was loved in return," he said.

McCourt and Muldoon both noted O'Faolain's liberating effect on those she knew. Another friend remarked that, although she guarded her own privacy, she cheerfully invaded that of everyone she met.

"When you were in her presence, you had to be honest," said McCourt.

The evening was interspersed with recordings of O'Faolain herself, reading from her work or telling American visitors to Ireland that they should visit a pub every day, whether they liked it or not.

Then, as the sound of her breathless, improbably young, perennially lively voice faded, waiters in white coats appeared with trays of champagne for a final toast to Nuala O'Faolain.