Are You Somebody?: The Accidental Memoir of a Dublin Woman
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- Synopsis
- Irish Times columnist Nuala O’Faolain opens her past and looks at it in this searingly honest midlife exploration of the love, pain, loneliness, loss, and self-discovery she has experienced. The result is a classic memoir. Born one of nine children in a penniless North Dublin family headed by an overwhelmed mother and a charming but absent father, Nuala not only survived but pushed at the boundaries of the confining Catholic Ireland she grew up in. The author spends much of her life seeking the sense of self that hostile environment denied to girls and women. But Nuala sees this past with new eyes when she takes the opportunity, in her fifties, to examine the meaning of her life and to review her accomplishments as well as her deep yearning for a sense of fulfillment. We are introduced to Nuala as a little girl who loves to read and gets lost in every book she can lay her hands on. But when puberty hits, her rebellious use of precocious vocabulary is replaced by a more dangerous passion--boys. Then, at the age of fourteen, young Nuala is not only taken from the smoky, sexually charged dance halls she gravitates to, but taken from the fiction she loves, when she is sent away to a convent school. While the Irish-speaking boarding school is an alien world, Nuala is aware of the quality of the education it provides. She builds on that gift by earning scholarships to University College, Dublin; the University of Hull; and then Oxford. From there, she makes a career for herself in journalism, first in radio and television and then in print. But while Nuala’s talent has made her one of Ireland’s best-known columnists, her deep longing for a gratifying connection to the world around her endures. In putting her life on paper in this memoir--published to best-selling success in Ireland--she seeks to ease that ache. Gifted commentator that she is, Nuala shows us her private thoughts and public actions as they play against the backdrop of the rural Ireland she knew as a child, the blossoming intellectual scene of Dublin in the fifties, and the unspoiled Oxford of the sixties. We see the richness of her native land’s culture and its natural beauty as she herself rediscovers them after years in England. With their help she makes her way back to health from a black period of alcoholism and debilitating depression. Nuala has distilled these experiences into a wisdom that could come only from a woman who refused to shrink from life. She escapes the example of her passionate but defeated mother and comes to her own terms with the love she yearns to share with men and women. Even the solitary life, she realizes, that includes neither lover nor child, has its deep contentments. In an age in which self-serving confessions are the fashion, Are You Somebody? reacquaints us with the gifts that a truly open, well-crafted memoir can provide. Every page holds proof of the courage that voicing the truth requires and the rewards it brings.
- Copyright:
- 1996
Book Details
- Book Quality:
- Excellent
- Book Size:
- 217 Pages
- ISBN-13:
- 9780805056631
- Publisher:
- Henry Holt & Company
- Date of Addition:
- 08/29/20
- Copyrighted By:
- Nuala O'Faolain
- Adult content:
- No
- Language:
- English
- Has Image Descriptions:
- No
- Categories:
- Nonfiction, Biographies and Memoirs
- Submitted By:
- Sandra Ryan
- Proofread By:
- Beverly Cory
- Usage Restrictions:
- This is a copyrighted book.