Are You Somebody? <\/p>\n
Author: Nuala O’Faolain<\/p>\n
ISBN-13: 9781835940488<\/p>\n
Publisher: New Island<\/p>\n
Guideline Price: \u20ac16.95, 296pp<\/p>\n
Nuala O\u2019Faolain<\/a>\u2019s Are You Somebody? remains as raw and relevant as it did when I first read it 20 years ago. As Katriona O\u2019Sullivan writes in the foreword to this 30th-anniversary edition, its excellence lies in \u201cits capacity to describe the true experience of a woman grappling with who she is, and what she is not\u201d. That struggle gives the book its force.<\/p>\n O\u2019Faolain writes with rare openness and brutal honesty. She is committed to telling the truth, even when it exposes her as angry, needy, lonely or emotionally chaotic. The memoir unfolds in a free-associative style, thoughts spilling forward as though she is encountering them for the first time herself. The effect is intimate, compelling and occasionally unsettling.<\/p>\n Her emotional openness is matched by a formidable literary intelligence. O\u2019Faolain moved through a world populated by Philip Larkin<\/a>, Kingsley Amis<\/a> and Patrick Kavanagh<\/a>, though the name-dropping never feels performative. Instead, these figures emerge as vividly human. Amis is \u201clike a big, pink, particularly likeable baby\u201d; Kavanagh \u201ca terrible flatmate\u201d, too consumed by his own struggles to notice anyone else.<\/p>\n [\u00a0Nuala O\u2019Faolain: My powerful, idiosyncratic, crude friendOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n Books themselves were both salvation and refuge for O\u2019Faolain, as they were for her mother, who read constantly \u201cas part of her utter determination to avoid reflection\u201d. \u201cI would prefer to read something I don\u2019t enjoy than do almost anything else,\u201d O\u2019Faolain writes. Yet of writing itself, she admitted in interviews that she regarded it as hard work and did not want to do it.<\/p>\n The memoir is equally striking in its treatment of female desire and the need to be seen. O\u2019Faolain writes about sex with frankness and flippancy, but beneath the irony lies a profound need to be loved and a deep fear of insignificance. \u201cMy life burned within 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