Are You Somebody?: The Accidental Memoir of a Dublin Woman [Paperback]

Nuala O'Faolain (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 15, 1999

Nuala O'Faolain attracted a huge amount of critical praise and a wide audience with the literary debut of Are You Somebody? Her midlife exploration of life's love, pain, loneliness, and self- discovery won her fans worldwide who write and tell her how her story has changed their lives. There are thousands who have yet to discover this extraordinary memoir of an Irish woman who has stepped away from the traditional roles to define herself and find contentment. They will make this paperback a long-selling classic.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Self-preservation did not come instinctually to Irish journalist Nuala O'Faolain. One of 9 children--her mother had 13 pregnancies in all--she grew up in the 1940s and '50s in a defeated Dublin household. Her reporter father seems to have spent his time and money, and even love, elsewhere--and as the family grew more isolated and unable to cope, alcohol became her mother's only way out. "One of the stories of my life has been the working out in it of her powerful and damaging example in everything," the author admits, "Nothing mattered to her except passion." Some of O'Faolain's siblings emphatically didn't make it, but she was lucky to find refuge in books. They have been a defense, a comfort, and a delight.

Does her memoir then follow the standard rags-to-self-acceptance trajectory? Are you wondering if perhaps you can give it a miss, and in fact send the entire genre on a well-deserved vacation? Don't. Are You Somebody (the title unaccountably lost a question mark somewhere between the Irish and American editions) offers a wrenching account of childhood and a highly provocative take on the sexual and professional situation of Irish women. Though literature made O'Faolain, the male-dominated literary life and industry certainly didn't, and she now gives it more than a few body blows. It was a world in which writing and drink mattered far more than women: "The 'literary Dublin' I saw lied to women as a matter of course and conspired against the demands of wives and mistresses.... Women either had to make no demands, and be liked, or be much larger than life, and feared."

Irish women didn't seem to know to look for, let alone demand, equality. O'Faolain miraculously avoided pregnancy; but others were not so blessed. "Lives were ruined at that time, thousands and thousands of them, quite casually.... They were hotly pursued, and half longed to yield, but they were not able to defend themselves against pregnancy, and they were destroyed if they got pregnant." For all her energy and ambition and good fortune (and she needed this trio to jump her family's "sinking ship" and avoid getting pregnant), O'Faolain fell for the cant that she must marry, have children, and serve. Some will be initially shocked by her assertion that she was lucky never to have had a child. "Childbearing, along with bad education, relationships that managed to be simultaneously all-absorbing and rewarding, and financial dependence--these were the enemies of promise. But that's not why I'm glad; I didn't think of myself as having promise. I'm glad because under the old system it was so easy to rear children badly. The child wouldn't have properly survived." Yet the '70s enabled her to break out of the assumptions and realities of Irish women's lives, not to mention her yearning to be like "the troubled, rich, English upper-class people in books."

At the end of her memoir, O'Faolain knows she finally is, in fact, somebody. Still, those who don't recognize her see her only as a single, middle-aged woman. Like children, such individuals "aren't supposed to kick up." Thanks to this bracing book, the author gets to permanently do so. The writing exercise has answered some of her questions and some of her fears, but O'Faolain is too honest not to admit that for others there is no response or cure. She leaves us wanting to know more about her life but grateful that she has allowed us in. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

"I'm not anybody in terms of the world, but then, who decides what a somebody is? How is a somebody made?" asks Irish Times columnist O'Faolain. The answer can be found in her moving and painfully honest memoir, a best seller in her native Ireland that deserves as much attention here.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Holt Paperbacks; 1st edition (January 15, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0805056645
• ISBN-13: 978-0805056648
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.5 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (97 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #665,523 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

52 of 53 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Excellent read November 16, 2000

By kbwong

Format:Paperback

If you like your tales to have an ending, a point, and a moral-of-the-story all nicely and neatly printed out, avoid this book. If you are intelligent enough to draw your own conclusions and examine both your own and other people's lives in the clear light of day, you will be delighted and mesmerized by this book.

Nuala O'Faolain is a work in progress, and she knows it. She's a product of her generation who has spent her life trying to become something other than what she was raised to be. She shares what her life has been with clarity and humor; she whines and then prods at herself for whining; she presents her own confusion and negatives in a stark and uncompromising manner. She is fully human right out in front of God and everybody, and I can only admire her bravery and hope that someday I'll grow up to be of her character.

The women who were born the two generations before mine (I was born in 1960) are the ones who were the advance soldiers in the dirty, muddy war of women's rise to full citizenship of humanity. I admire them, I thank them for their sacrifices, I hope that their struggles were not in vain. O'Faolain's book gives a human dimension to what will someday be three or four lines in a history book. I gulped it down in two sittings, finishing up at 2 am.

It's not a book for everyone (and thus only four stars). Wait until you're mature enough to really understand that no one is really as mature as you thought you were when you were 21. Wait 'til you're old enough to have compassion for the humanity in yourself and others. And then you'll be able to "get" this book.

29 of 29 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A particularly Irish life, but not just for the Irish July 4, 1998

By A Customer

Format:Hardcover

I found this book intensely moving -- but not for the reasons I thought I would. It's everything the reviews say: a brutally honest picture of the author's chaotic and emotionally starved childhood, a memoir of literary Dublin in the 60's, a melancholy tale of her search for a lasting love, and a chronicle of her journalism career, and on that level it's a fascinating (and beautifully written) story for anyone.
But I'm only about 5 years younger than Ms. O'Faolain. I was raised in a (partly Irish) Catholic family, went to Catholic schools all the way from kindergarten through college, then went to graduate school at Berkeley in the late '60's. Time after time, her observations chimed with my own: the cruelty masquerading as love (or maybe it's the other way round) in Catholic schools; how living in an intensely Catholic environment blinds you to any other viewpoint; how matter-of-factly women were consigned to invisibility in our era, even (and especially) the well-educated; and how the assumption of male superiority lingered on throughout the supposedly "liberal" sixties and seventies.
As the author points out in "Afterwords," her book became a best-seller in Ireland because she articulated what many of her fellow-countrymen felt but couldn't say about their lives. But I think her experiences have a far wider relevance for any woman who grew up in the same time period -- and who's now struggling to make sense of her life.

45 of 48 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars middle-aged conventional man finds Nuala valuable February 23, 2000

By Bill Compton

Format:Hardcover

You either love this book or find it a tedious whine. Why would a conventional, middle-aged English teacher like myself find it worthwhile, even riveting? It helps that I have visited Ireland several times in recent years, and have gradually seen beyond the Irish Tourist Board conception of the emerald isle. And I have enjoyed Dublin, despite its scruffy character. I also have spent most of my professional life working with single women, and though none of them have faced life situations as tough as Nuala's, I still found connections with her life and their's. I also teach English, and I love her affection for poetry and books. But most of all, I love her truth-seeking, and despite some of the personal complaints on this list of reviews, this is a crafted book that never left me confused. We all have parents, and conflict between us seems to be just a part of living we can't altogether avoid. I thank Nuala for bravely writing her memoir. I read it straight through in two chunks of time over two days.