Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(29)
4 star:		(15)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(19)
1 star:		(21)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

"It wasn't marriage that did her in. She wanted him. It was motherhood. It was us. But we didn't make her suffer. It was love and passion that made her suffer. It was that that undermined them all: my mother, and my father, and Carmel. There was a degree of pain in their dealings with love and passion that, all unexpectedly, I realized I was coming to terms with, through my book. Not through writing it but through publishing it. It was the warmth the book met that had made me strong."

-Nuala O'Faolain

Memoirs are not on the top of the list of favorite reads, usually because they are full of blame, spite, negativity, and they beg for pity. This one doesn't. It's a gutsy recount of life of the eldest of nine offspring sired by a well-known Irish writer and his bookworm of a wife. It's a view of Dublin, England, Academia, and the Irish country, but it is also a journey inside the heart of an energetic and spirited woman and inside the childhood and adolescence that produced this intelligent, articulate, and compelling person.

Somewhat in the genre of Angela's Ashes, this work helps to understand a culture, and makes no excuses for some past behaviors that are both dark and disturbing. It also puts forth a heart, and a culture that is sensitive, long-suffering, articulate, and compelling. There is a dark side to this book, as there is a dark side to being Irish in some cases. But there is also a courage, and a sense of survival and endurance, and a sensitivity, and it is all served up with a very articulate and well-written account of a memorable life in a memorable country.

For someone who just returned from Ireland, it was a sumptious re-exploration of Dublin, and a memorable experience to see it from these eyes and a different perspective. This is a well-written, thoughtful, and courageous book about a compelling woman and her very interesting life and experiences. Highly recommended. 4 l/2 stars.

I have once again made the mistake of reading the other customer reviews before writing my own review. Generally when I happen onto a one or two star review that really comes down on a book that I like, I will go to the "See All Reviews" page and order the reviews from "Lowest First". I will then read through review after review by readers who simply wanted this to be another book rather than the one it is.

I suppose that my repeated exercise of this masochistic procedure is part of my own Catholic background, which was far less complete, administered twenty years after O'Faolain's and in the New World rather than isolated, entrenched Ireland. Perhaps it helps to be Catholic when it comes to understanding Nuala O'Faolain's nearly continual struggle to lead a full and worldly life and not feel badly about it.

A lot of readers still seem to expect a 'Whig history' from a memoir with triumph leading to triumph, interspersed with set-pieces of 'struggle' to make it interesting. Are You Somebody? is something much braver, truer and scarier: an honest recollection.

O'Faolain very clearly describes the historically maintained cultural institutions that caused her to have certain beliefs and take certain actions that led her repeatedly into disaster. Forty years before her, Virginia Woolf had described the need for women to make lives that were expressions of their own desires rather than fulfillments of the needs of men. O'Faolain is acutely conscious, looking back in middle age, that she had not internalized Woolf's wisdom and that her dysfunctional relationships with men were a direct result.

She is also at pains to describe the slow awakening of her consciousness of her Irishness and she is quite frank about how her failure to think of herself as Irish, even though the BBC thought of her as an Irish woman, caused to make mediocre documentaries about contemporary events in Ireland.

In chapter after chapter O'Faolain shows us how hidebound patriarchy made it difficult for a woman to enjoy or trust worldly success, how the medieval nature of Irish Catholicism made for complete confusion about sex and female independence, and how a deep-seated disinterest in Irish culture among the educated classes of Dublin made one's identity peculiarly rootless. As if that weren't enough, there is much more in this book.

If you find this book pretentious and depressing, then I suggest that you stop going to Starbucks and paying $3 for a cup of coffee. Life has not always been the way it is now. A lot of things were harder for women, particularly Irish women, not so long ago. If you don't want to hear it, then you're part of the problem.

Nuala O'Faolain's father was a genial gossip columnist and man-about-town, and her brilliant mother was a voracious reader--but Nuala's youngest sister often went to school without food or underwear. O'Faolain's autobiography, first conceived of as a brief (!) introduction to her essays, manages to take on the changing face of Ireland AND women's roles in this century...while telling wonderful tales at the same time. Nuala's lifelong search for a home, a husband, a vocation, found her, in her fifties, childless, living in a tiny cottage with a woman, writing feisty opinions for the Irish Times. O'Faolain's rambling, episodic style is slowly revealed as a way of understanding the tragic contradictions of her past, and the hopeful possibilities of her future. Heartbreaking, funny, self-revealing...and a living example of what Adrienne Rich once wrote: "What does not change is the will to change."

Nuala O'Faolain is a columnist with the Irish Times. To a certain extent she followed her journalist father's footsteps, but her climb was a bit more difficult. In addition to her struggles to become a writer, O'Faolain grew up a woman in the impoverished Ireland of the 40's and 50's. Although her childhood in some ways was similar to those of Frank McCourt and Christie Brown, she had the added burden of being female.

Like Brown and McCourt, the family struggled with too many mouths to feed and an alcoholic parent. In her adult years, Nuala struggled with her own affliction with the disease of alcoholism. She managed to find recovery from alcoholism and pull her self up from an extremely low place. Her story of the rebuilding of her life is an inspiration to those suffering from alcoholism -- their own or that of a loved one.

O'Faolain's writing is not as lyrical as McCourt's nor as colorful as Brown's, but she tells a good tale. Her relating of the day-to-day interaction of her parents, as well as her own relationships with her parents, lovers, friends, and others is honest, compelling and somewhat sad. Her description of Ireland is a million miles from the Hollywood version of the 1940s. I recommend this book to anyone who can't get enough of the "old country."

Reading this book at twenty-five made me feel as if an older woman finally told me the truth about life. Why then, I wonder, does nobody seem to like this book, when I consider it among the best I have ever read? Because both these books share that extreme amount of sadness that seems to belong only to the Irish, some might lump them together, but while in McCourt's work his eventual emmigration proves a happy ending to his trials, the sadness in O'Faolain's work doesn't seem to end. This is precisely what makes it a beautiful book. Readers who love the maddeningly innocent perspective of the young McCourt in his biographic Angela's Ashes may find O'Faolain's adult account of her young life cold in comparison. Hers, though, is not simply the story of a difficult upbringing, but of a life made up of difficult decisions made or avoided, and their consequences.

Nuala O'Faolain daughter of Katherine and Terry O'Soullivan (as her father's name, being a journalist, was changed) was one of the nine children of this downhearted couple who, like her siblings, had to grow up by herself without ever feeling her parents' affection or assistance. O'Faolain courageously faced life with the same eagerness her mother drank and read in their grubby house and worked with the same determination her father continued to lie about his affairs and mistresses. What else but admiration can you feel for a single woman surviving in the harsh reality of Ireland as well as succeeding in being `somebody' in her life. For many Irish women O'Faolain must have been the personification of the tough woman, never giving up and struggling the harsh Irish realities for becoming independent. Nonetheless, O'Faolain is very frank and modest about the way she really felt concerning independence, "I had tried to be independent. But I couldn't stand the loneliness"(65). Her independence wasn't easy to achieve, as it wasn't easy to find what she valued most in life- a vocation, a home and a partner. She failed to achieve some of the goals she most equalized with her independence-her own family and a husband. This autobiography is significant not only because it helps us get acquainted with the life and spirit of a grand woman, but also because we get acquainted with the social and cultural Ireland of O'Faolain's days. We get to know an Ireland, which was a `living tomb' for women, and we get a bizarre picture of different uncommitted social classes as well. O'Faolain gives the features of a conspiring male Dublin, " The `literary Dublin' I saw lied to women as a matter of course and conspired against the demand of wives and mistresses...like or be much larger than life, and feared." Although at the very beginning of the book O'Faolain fears that she lacks a strong affirmative public voice, her tone in her autobiography is everything but unconfident. I assume that the innermost reason many reviewers haven't found this autobiography to their likings is the complete involvement it needs in order to understand this woman. Going deep down under the surface of her narrative is necessary to understand O'Faolain's feelings and personality. I would recommend this autobiography to all those people who like spending time in understanding people better and who look at books as a virtual way to change somehow their attitude toward life. Are You Somebody makes you reflect on where you stand in the tides of your own consciousness and life.

Nuala O'Faolain's memoir is not particulary easy to read. It starts slowly with the history of her young years and family. It's difficult to read about her parent's relationship and the neglect and desperation felt by the family, especially the nine children. O'Faolain is so honest about her own shortcomings and dysfunctions at first it's hard to like her but how we admire her. She chronicles the historical context of Ireland from the 1950's through the 1990's with special emphasis on the role of women and the enormous societal changes in just the few short years between those decades. It is interesting to read her commentary on the social structure and roles of men and women as it emerged through this time period. The books strength though is not in O'Faolain's ability to chronicle history, that at times is vague with alot of names and places that may not be familiar to those outside of Europe. It is within this historical context that she continually points out her lack of grounding or purpose as a young adult. She floats from job to job--relationship to relationship without much thought to the consequences of her actions. It is not until she reaches a personal crisis at her parents death that she acknowledges the destructive role alcohol plays in her life, the repeating of familial patterns and the aimless way she has existed. It is then that she begins to emerge as a different and more intorspective person. The book begins to take on a different tone and we come to love the person that is Nuala O'Faolain. We have read about her struggles and see her becoming more than the wounds she has suffered in life. It is beautiful. At the end of the story she shares the letters from so many people who were moved and related to her life story. She continues to assert that she did nothing remarkable in writing what for her simply had to come out. But we the reader know that something special has passed here and can only stand back and admire a woman as brave as Nuala O'Faolain who has put down on paper the whole truth that is her life.