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

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.

Product Description

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.


Gutsy, Articulate, Pensive & Poignant!   November 16, 2001
Chicago Dreamer (Chicago, IL United States)
27 out of 30 found this review helpful

"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.


sad and so very true   August 11, 2003
23 out of 27 found this review helpful

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.


A particularly Irish life, but not just for the Irish   July 5, 1998
16 out of 16 found this review helpful

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.