O'Faolain, Nuala 1940-

PERSONAL:

Born 1940, in Dublin, Ireland; immigrated to the United States, 1999. Education: National University of Ireland, B.A., M.A.; attended University of Hull and Oxford University.

CAREER:

Writer. University College, Dublin, Ireland, lecturer; Irish Times, Dublin, journalist, 1988-99; affiliated with Radio Telefis Eireann, Belfast, Ireland. Worked variously as a maid, actress, and television producer.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Prix Fémina, 2006, for The Story of Chicago May.

WRITINGS:

Are You Somebody? The Accidental Memoir of a Dublin Woman, New Island Books (Dublin, Ireland), 1996, Holt (New York, NY), 1998.

My Dream of You (novel), Riverhead Books (New York, NY), 2001.

Almost There: The Onward Journey of a Dublin Woman, Riverhead Books (New York, NY), 2003.

The Story of Chicago May (biography), Riverhead Books (New York, NY), 2005.

Columnist for Irish Times; book reviewer for London Times.

ADAPTATIONS:

Works adapted for audio include My Dream of You (twelve cassettes; unabridged), read by Dearbhla Molloy, BBC/ Chivers, 2002, and Almost There (six cassettes; unabridged), read by the author, Simon & Schuster Audio, 2003.

SIDELIGHTS:

Nuala O'Faolain is an Irish writer who came to the United States in 1999, first for a residency at Yaddo, the renowned artists' colony in New York state, and then to live occasionally in New York City. In Ireland she had written a column for the Irish Times, reviewed books for many publications and produced and hosted shows for Ireland's Radio Telefis Eireann. O'Faolain studied at Oxford and lectured at University College in Dublin, and her circle included such notable Irishmen as filmmaker John Huston, Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh, and English writer Kingsley Amis. But in her down times, she took all sorts of work to get by. She was independent from a young age, but found herself moving in and out of loneliness throughout her life as relationships came and went. O'Faolain's remarkable, complex life is detailed in her critically acclaimed Are You Somebody? The Accidental Memoir of a Dublin Woman.

The story of how this memoir came to be explains its "accidental" nature. O'Faolain's columns were collected to be published in a small volume for which she began to write an introduction. The introduction took on a life of its own and was published as this first memoir, and it and the collection became best sellers, with little publicity, based on O'Faolain's reputation with her readers.

O'Faolain writes that her family was poor, but she and her eight siblings always had enough to eat. Her father, a journalist, cheated on her mother, who became addicted to alcohol, and O'Faolain noticed at a young age how pregnancy had trapped her mother and so many other women in Dublin. Irish women were "hotly pursued," she wrote in Are You Somebody?, but were "not able to defend themselves against pregnancy." Childbearing became, to O'Faolain, a barrier, because in Ireland during the 1940s and 1950s, marriage and motherhood essentially made women into slaves. The literary men in Ireland "lied to women as a matter of course and conspired against the demands of wives and mistresses."

While O'Faolain managed to avoid the yoke of children, she was nagged by a sense of loss. She had experienced much of life and had a ten-year relationship during which she moved to London to be closer to her lover. It was then that she began working in television and radio and writing for the London newspapers. The affair ended, and, in her thirties, she found herself alone. The sight of "small children, hopping around" became, to O'Faolain, "too beautiful to bear," and she laments the absence of a constant companion. Coupled friends get to laugh and talk in bed "and when the clock goes off in the morning, they start again, talking to each other," she writes in her book. Then, at the age of forty, she began a relationship with a woman, which was enormously enriching and lasted almost fifteen years. Despite misgivings about the turns her life has taken, O'Faolain remains steadfast in her belief that she is, in fact, "somebody." Colm Toibin of the Times Literary Supplement remarked that O'Faolain's writing style is one of "stark, merciless tension." Zoe Heller, writing in the New York Times Book Review, declared that Are You Somebody? contains passages with "more genuine, painful candor … than all the modish, scandalous confessions of recent years put together."

When O'Faolain came to the United States in 1999, she had no intention of staying, but her time at Yaddo produced the beginnings of a novel. When she was offered a contract to complete it, she rented a room in New York City, got a cat for company, and began working on the book. Writing a novel was a new adventure for O'Faolain. The protagonist of My Dream of You, like her creator, is a journalist and comes from a similar background. Kathleen de Burca is a travel writer, approaching the age of fifty, childless and without a partner. Her best friend is Jimmy, a gay American colleague, and when he dies, she returns to Ireland to attempt to make some sense of her life. She begins to investigate and write of a scandalous divorce that occurred during the Potato Famine, after an Irish noblewoman engaged in an affair with a stablehand. In creating this novel within a novel, O'Faolain explores the history of the crisis that shaped Ireland's history, even as she makes comparisons between the lives of Irish women across the decades.

Women's Review of Books contributor Judith Grossman wrote that My Dream of You "shows a novelist balancing the claims of contemporary realism, history, and romance. To her credit, she is an unsparingly lucid observer, on the one hand, of upper-class English callousness, and on the other, of the indifference to women's suffering on the part of Irish Catholic husbands and fathers. Equally, she allows all the contradictions of historical record in the Talbot case to register. Nevertheless, she gives decisive weight and the final word here to bittersweet romance."

New York Times Book Review critic Catherine Lockerbie noted that "middle age holds few dramatic attractions for the novelist when set against the heady passions of youth or the wisdom (or bitterness) of advanced age. Here, O'Faolain has quietly made this territory her own, and a generation of readers will ruefully, yet with gratitude, recognize the small panics, the surges of semiforgotten desire, the bemused staring into the mirror."

O'Faolain remained in New York, and through the online dating service Match.com, met a twice-married Jewish lawyer from Brooklyn. She writes in her second memoir, Almost There: The Onward Journey of a Dublin Woman, of their relationship and her jealousy of his young daughter who, unlike O'Faolain herself, basked in childhood love and adoration. She recalls painful memories and shares parts of letters from readers of her first memoir, people who empathize with her suffering, as they themselves have suffered. She writes of a family reunion in Italy that she organized for her sixtieth birthday, an annual event that is now affordable for her, and other events that have occurred in the six years since her first memoir. Mary O'Donoghue wrote in the Women's Review of Books: "O'Faolain's delineation of loneliness, wrenching in Are You Somebody?, reappears here, raw as a wound, in words as starkly beautiful as stripped bone."

In The Story of Chicago May O'Faolain offers readers a biography of the famed Chicago May, born MaryAnn (May) Duignan, a poor Irish girl who ran away to America using the money she had stolen from her family. In the 1890s, she worked as a prostitute in Chicago and earned her nickname. Though she later moved on to New York, then London and Paris, the name stuck. Over the course of her career, Chicago May was involved with people of all walks of life, from criminals to celebrities. O'Faolain tells May's tale with honesty and heartfelt emotion, showing not just the hardships inherent in trying to make one's way in the world as a poor woman at the turn of the twentieth century, but a detailed look at life in general during the time period. Annie Tully, in a review for Booklist, found O'Faolain's work to be "a fresh and informative view of turn-of-the-twentieth-century America." Gena Moore, writing for Library Journal, remarked that the book "provides insights into the lives of single immigrant women of May's generation and … suggestions as to why so many were driven to lives of crime." A contributor for Kirkus Reviews dubbed O'Faolain's work as "a biography with narrative muscle and thrilling historical relevance."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

O'Faolain, Nuala, Are You Somebody? The Accidental Memoir of a Dublin Woman, Holt (New York, NY), 1998.

O'Faolain, Nuala, Almost There: The Onward Journey of a Dublin Woman, Riverhead Books (New York, NY), 2003.

PERIODICALS

Atlantic Monthly, March, 2003, Caitlin Flanagan, review of Almost There, p. 108.

Book, July, 2001, Rochelle O'Gorman, review of My Dream of You, p. 80; March, 2003, Beth Kephart, review of Almost There, p. 73.

Booklist, December 1, 2000, Danise Hoover, review of My Dream of You, p. 676; September 1, 2005, Annie Tully, review of The Story of Chicago May, p. 154.

Critical Survey, September, 2002, Eibhlin Evans, "Letters after the Fact: Responses to Nuala O'Faolain's Are You Somebody?," p. 51.

Irish Literary Supplement, spring, 2002, Audrey S. Eyler, review of My Dream of You, p. 7; spring, 2004, Audrey S. Eyler, review of Almost There, p. 25.

Kirkus Reviews, December 15, 2002, review of Almost There, p. 1827; July 15, 2005, review of The Story of Chicago May, p. 780.

Library Journal, December, 2000, Heather McCormack, review of My Dream of You, p. 190; February 1, 2003, Sue Samson, review of Almost There, p. 86; September 1, 2005, Gena Moore, review of The Story of Chicago May, p. 154.

New York Times Book Review, March 15, 1998, Zoe Heller, review of Are You Somebody?, p. 10; March 4, 2001, Catherine Lockerbie, review of My Dream of You, p. 14; February 23, 2003, Deborah Mason, review of Almost There, p. 30.

Publishers Weekly, May 26, 1997, review of Are You Somebody?, p. 77; January 8, 2001, review of My Dream of You, p. 47; December 9, 2002, review of Almost There, p. 71.

Times Literary Supplement, November 29, 1996, Colm Toibin, review of Are You Somebody?, p. 15.

Women's Review of Books, March, 2001, Judith Grossman, review of My Dream of You, p. 17; March, 2003, Mary O'Donoghue, review of Almost There, p. 9.

Writer, February, 2002, Lauren Byrne, "Accidental Author: Life's Journey Leads Nuala O'Faolain to a Writing Career," interview, p. 26; July-August, 2006, Lauren Byrne, "A Becky Sharpe Kind of Life," review of The Story of Chicago May, p. 23.

ONLINE

BookPage,http://www.bookpage.com/ (May 18, 2004), Anne Bartlett, review of Are You Somebody?, Ellen Kanner, review of My Dream of You, interview with O'Faolain.

Bookreporter.com,http://www.bookreporter.com/ (May 18, 2004), Sofrina Hinton, review of My Dream of You, Roberta O'Hara, review of Almost There, and biographical article.

Nimble Spirit,http://www.nimblespirit.com/ (May 18, 2004), Barbara O'Donnell, review of My Dream of You.