{"id":464342,"date":"2026-05-24T04:34:12","date_gmt":"2026-05-24T04:34:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/464342\/"},"modified":"2026-05-24T04:34:12","modified_gmt":"2026-05-24T04:34:12","slug":"30-years-since-nuala-ofaolains-are-you-somebody-vibrating-with-hurt-it-leaves-a-mark-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/464342\/","title":{"rendered":"30 years since Nuala O\u2019Faolain\u2019s Are You Somebody? \u2018Vibrating with hurt. It leaves a mark\u2019 \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

Thirty years after Nuala O\u2019Faolain\u2019s memoir Are You Somebody? was published, other writers reflect on the impact of the book and share personal memories and anecdotes of the author.<\/p>\n

Emilie Pine\"EmilieEmilie Pine: Nuala O\u2019Faolain gave me the sense of being seen. Photograph: Antonio Zazueta Olmos <\/p>\n

Like many people, I vividly remember the feelings I had on reading Are You Somebody? for the first time \u2013 a mixture of shock, fear and joy. Shock that someone could be that real on the page, fear at the level of vulnerability revealed, and joy \u2013 oh the joy! \u2013 at finding a woman whose life story was not my life, but whose emotions matched mine. Who gave me the sense of being seen, through the generosity of seeing herself. <\/p>\n

Later on, when I found my own writing voice, I tried to honour O\u2019Faolain\u2019s bravery on the page. But I found myself struggling with a new fear \u2013 the fear that writing about my self was self-indulgent. In those moments, I found strength in Are You Somebody? once more. <\/p>\n

In her prologue, O\u2019Faolain writes: \u201cI didn\u2019t value myself enough \u2013 take myself seriously enough \u2013 to reflect even privately on whether my existence had any pattern, any meaning.\u201d But in the next breath O\u2019Faolain refuses that kind of erasure: \u201cYet my life burned inside me. Even such as it was, it was the only record of me, and it was my only creation and something in me would not accept that it was insignificant.\u201d <\/p>\n

Through this insistence on the burning power of her life, O\u2019Faolain did not just refuse to accept insignificance. She gave permission to herself and all of us who come after her to take ourselves seriously. Permission to see our lives as meaningful. And, even, to see our lives as art. <\/p>\n

Emilie Pine is the author of Notes to Self and, forthcoming, On Being Seen (Jan 2027)<\/p>\n

Rosita Boland\"RositaRosita Boland, ‘a sister, in many ways’. Photograph: Dara Mac D\u00f3naill <\/p>\n

It was November 1996, and I was living in Galway. I was cleaning toilets and sweeping floors at a local theatre during the day, and working the box office there in the evening. I was also trying to write a book about my recent lengthy solo travels in Iran, Pakistan, India and Nepal. The London agent who had looked at a few of my terrible chapters had just returned them with a damning note that said: \u201cFascinating, but alas not for us.\u201d <\/p>\n

On this particular November day, I was sitting in Cafe de Journal on Quay Street, reading a book. The book was Are You Somebody? by Nuala O\u2019Faolain, which had been published a couple of weeks previously. There was a huge buzz around it. There had been a Galway launch the previous evening, and I had gone along, and bought the book at the end.<\/p>\n

The atmosphere in the room that evening was unlike any other book launch I\u2019d been to. It was mostly women, for a start, as I recall. There was a kind of febrile energy in the room; a giddy sensation of possibility. It all emanated from Nuala O\u2019Faolain, who radiated both a joyful and a steely presence from the centre of the room.<\/p>\n

[\u00a0Your first eight novels disappear into the ether. Then you strike goldOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

I knew her as a formidable journalist, and now she had written this book, and broken more barriers about what women were not supposed to say out loud. It was this same book I was avidly devouring when a woman came into the cafe and sat down. <\/p>\n

It was Nuala O\u2019Faolain herself. My feet propelled me to her table, book in hand. Might she be kind enough to sign it? She was Somebody, and I was Nobody, but she asked me my first name and signed my book, with grace and warmth.<\/p>\n

She wrote: \u201cFrom Nuala, a sister, in many ways. With heartfelt wishes.\u201d On a day when I had many doubts about my future, I read that inscription and felt inspired; scattered with some unexpected stardust. She is gone now, but I still keep the signed book on my shelves, and always will. <\/p>\n

Patrick Freyne\"PatrickPatrick Freyne: ‘I\u2019m still not sure I\u2019ve ever read anything like it.’ Photograph: Dara Mac D\u00f3naill <\/p>\n

When I was writing my book of essays OK, Let\u2019s Do Your Stupid Idea<\/a>, I was initially trying to channel the comic writing of Clive James and Nora Ephron but I was increasingly influenced by Irish essayists like Emilie Pine and Sin\u00e9ad Gleeson. I was so moved by their honest and beautiful writing about difficult life experiences and the wider realities of being women in Ireland. It felt like something was being unearthed, that all the stories I saw sublimated into fiction in the works of Edna O\u2019Brien and Mary Lavin were finally freed into the world as something more like liberating fact. It felt like something was being released. <\/p>\n

And then I read Nuala O\u2019Faolain and realised that it had happened before. I was aware of O\u2019Faolain as a journalist and broadcaster, but I had never read Are You Somebody? her accidental memoir (she had started out simply writing an introduction to a collection of her journalism). It\u2019s stunning. It\u2019s exquisitely written but it was also almost unwisely excoriating about the circumstances in which she grew up. It was a dark picture of Ireland. I felt like I was witnessing someone who had experienced psychic damage and was now releasing that damage on to the world in gorgeous prose. <\/p>\n

Usually, I prefer memoirs about sad subjects to feel like they\u2019re being written from a position of safety. I feel like in the past decade a lot of young writers were encouraged to write about terrible things that happened to them before they had fully processed them. In contrast, I felt when reading Pine and Gleeson that even when they were describing something painful they were now safe and recounting it for the benefit of the reader. That\u2019s why I loved their books. I did not feel this safety with Are You Somebody? It felt like O\u2019Faolain was writing it entirely for herself and that it was, in places, vibrating with hurt. And that\u2019s, counter-intuitively, why I love it. It leaves a mark. I\u2019m still not sure I\u2019ve ever read anything like it. <\/p>\n

Patrick Freyne\u2019s first novel Experts in a Dying Field is published by Penguin Sandycove on June 11th<\/p>\n

Dermot Bolger\"DermotDermot Bolger: ‘A a unique and remarkable human document.’ Photograph: Bryan Meade <\/p>\n

International best-sellers can start with small things. In 1994 I cried with laughter one morning reading an article by Joseph O\u2019Connor<\/a>. I phoned him to insist there was a book there and six months later a collection of his articles became the bestselling The Secret World of the Irish Male. A year later I was moved, this time to tears, by an Irish Times column from Nuala O\u2019Faolain where she described the dignity with which a Ranelagh butcher treated an old lady purchasing a single rasher for her dinner.<\/p>\n

Again, I felt her journalism would make an amazing book and got Edwin Higel, who cofounded New Island Books with me, to approach her, suggesting the writer Tony Glavin as a perfect, sensitive chaperoning editor. I took time out from being New Island\u2019s consigliere that year but kept in touch with Tony as the editing evolved. <\/p>\n

The project began as a collection of newspaper articles but Tony kept telling me how Nuala\u2019s introduction was taking on a life of its own, becoming a full memoir. However, Nuala was so lacking in self-confidence and convinced that nobody would be interested in her life that she kept insisting the real book was the newspaper articles and her memoir was merely an intro to them.<\/p>\n

I think that, in her soul, Nuala increasingly knew that this wasn\u2019t true but writers need coded layers of self-protection. When I first read the then memoir in progress, one night in Tony\u2019s attic, I knew it was a unique and remarkable human document. The journalism was now superfluous but \u2013 in those early editions of Are You Somebody? \u2013 Nuala refused to drop it, still insisting that nobody would be interested in what she\u2019d written about herself.<\/p>\n

[\u00a0Author Se\u00e1n Farrell: \u2018Dermot Bolger said there was a whiff of silage off my novel. I think that was a compliment\u2019Opens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

As ever in publishing, there was debate about an initial print run. We hesitated between 2,000 and 2,500, then threw caution to the wind and printed 3,000. I still remember watching The Late Late Show that week, which had such a boring line-up, with Nuala appearing last, that I was kicking the furniture, convinced that viewers would switch off. Then she came in and was magnificent and open and honest and brave, while Gay Byrne was at his most supercilious. Occasionally you just know something special is happening. Byrne was only asking his third question when I phoned Edwin, saying just four words: \u201cReprint another three thousand.\u201d<\/p>\n

He did but it still wasn\u2019t enough. I wasn\u2019t just a consigliere to New Island but occasionally to others in the book trade, notably my old Finglas mucker, John Harold, an important figure as the founder of Colour Books, Ireland\u2019s first specialist book printers. \u201cI need to check if Edwin has lost his reason,\u201d John asked in a discreet phone call. \u201cHe wants a reprint of 41,000 copies.\u201d \u201cTrust Edwin\u2019s instincts,\u201d I said, \u201cNuala\u2019s book will sell and sell.\u201d Thirty years on I\u2019m thrilled this is still the case. <\/p>\n

Dermot Bolger\u2019s latest book is Imperfect Beings (New Island)<\/p>\n

Doreen Finn\"DoreenDoreen Finn: ‘Her precision allowed people to see themselves in her writing’ <\/p>\n

For people over a certain age, Nuala O\u2019Faolain\u2019s weekly column in The Irish Times was, in the best sense of the expression, part of the furniture. Her accurate portrayals of Irish life were a regular reminder of who we were, how we did things, what we hid. Her precision allowed people to see themselves in her writing; though she excavated her own soul in print, it seemed that she did so on behalf of all who read her, and, in so doing, she helped us look more closely at ourselves.<\/p>\n

In 2005, Nuala did a reading in Duttons, a celebrated bookshop in Beverly Hills. The audience loved her; I think her directness, her honesty, appealed to American sensibilities, their preference for openness. Afterwards, I told Nuala how her columns had punctuated my weeks, how much I had loved her books. She couldn\u2019t have been nicer, tolerating my blatant fangirling without a single sigh. When her dog Molly died, I wrote to her, and so began a correspondence that lasted until Nuala died.<\/p>\n

One night in May 2008, my mother rang me in the LA predawn to ask if I was listening to Marian Finucane. I wasn\u2019t, having been asleep until that moment. Later, listening to that singular interview on playback, like everyone who knew and loved Nuala\u2019s writing, I was stunned. I emailed her to tell her how sorry I was. Nuala replied with her usual pithy style, and said that having had Molly go before her, it somehow made things easier. <\/p>\n

Her bravery in that interview, and in her subsequent writings, have stayed with me, a shining example of the pared-back humanity Nuala brought to her life, and by extension, to ours. <\/p>\n

Doreen Finn is the author of My Buried Life<\/p>\n

A 30th anniversary edition of Are You Somebody? by Nuala O\u2019Faolain is published on May 29th by New Island<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Thirty years after Nuala O\u2019Faolain\u2019s memoir Are You Somebody? was published, other writers reflect on the impact of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":464343,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[49208,200829,61,60,101137,200828,13393,200830,80,84498],"class_list":["post-464342","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-technology","tag-dermot-bolger","tag-emilie-pine","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-joseph-o-connor","tag-nuala-o-faolain","tag-patrick-freyne","tag-sinead-gleeson","tag-technology","tag-the-irish-times"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/464342","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=464342"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/464342\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/464343"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=464342"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=464342"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=464342"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}