Nuala Brigid Anne O'Faolain (1 March 1940 – 9 May 2008) was an Irish journalist and writer. Her debut memoir, Are You Somebody?, published when she was in her mid-fifties, became a sensation in Ireland and a worldwide bestseller.
Born to a Dublin family with a journalist father who led a bohemian lifestyle, O'Faolain grew up poor and isolated. After studying English literature and spending time as an academic, she worked as a TV producer for the BBC and RTÉ, before becoming a newspaper columnist at The Irish Times in 1986. Her writing frequently touched on the role of women in Irish society.
Originally written as an introduction to a book of her columns, Are You Somebody? was first published in 1996 and was the number-one bestseller in Ireland for five months. In 1998, it topped the New York Times bestseller list. O'Faolain wrote two further non-fiction works: a second memoir, Almost There; and a biography, The Story of Chicago May, which won the Prix Femina étranger. She also published two novels, My Dream of You and Best Love, Rosie, the latter of which was released posthumously.
While being interviewed by her friend Marian Finucane on radio in April 2008, O'Faolain announced that she had been diagnosed with terminal cancer; she died four weeks later. She is regarded as one of the finest Irish writers of her generation, and has influenced the memoir form in Ireland.
Nuala O'Faolain was born in Dublin on 1 March 1940, the second of nine children to Tomás O'Faolain (1911–1980) and Kathleen O'Sullivan (1915–1985). Originally a schoolteacher and Army lieutenant, under the pen name Terry O'Sullivan, her father became a prominent social diarist for the Evening Press in Dublin; he was distant from his children and engaged in extra-marital affairs which produced at least two half-siblings. Despite earning as much money as the newspaper's editor, Douglas Gageby, he did not share his income with his family. "He was a dapper, clever, reticent man and he treated the family as if he had met them at a cocktail party," O'Faolain wrote of him in her memoir. The family lived in poor conditions, frequently going hungry; her mother became an alcoholic. O'Faolain's sister Noreen recalled their mother going to the pub every day at 4 p.m. and not returning home until midnight.
O'Faolain attended convent school in Dublin but was expelled aged fourteen after going home from dances with a married man. She then went to St. Louis', a boarding school in County Monaghan, whose austere environment and strict educational standards benefitted her. From there, she studied English literature at University College Dublin (UCD), where she ran in a social circle including Mary Lavin, John McGahern, Patrick Kavanagh, and Louis MacNeice. Although she dropped out of her studies temporarily and spent time working menial jobs in England, with financial assistance from Lavin and others, she graduated in 1961. On scholarships, she studied medieval English at the University of Hull before completing a postgraduate degree in 19th-century English literature at the University of Oxford. She then returned to Dublin to work at UCD as an academic in the English literature department, which brought her into contact with the bohemian Dublin literary scene of the late 1960s and early 1970s.
In 1970, O'Faolain moved to London to work for the BBC. She was a producer at the Community Programme Unit, which sought to allow members of the public to create programmes for national broadcast on human interest topics like transgender people, anti-pornography protests, and community organising in the Bogside. She also made programmes with the arts faculty of the Open University, and taught evening classes at Morley College. During this period, O'Faolain showed little interest in Ireland, regarding the country as backward and unsophisticated, but a visit to the Merriman Summer School in County Clare in 1974 sparked new enthusiasm. In 1977, she moved back to Dublin to work for the public broadcaster, RTÉ, where she became a colleague of female journalists like Doireann Ní Bhriain, Marian Finucane, and Nell McCafferty – later her partner – who were making programmes about Irish society with a feminist bent. O'Faolain was the producer of Women Today, a pioneering radio programme, from 1983 to 1986. One series she worked on, Plain Tales, a televised interview programme in which women spoke directly to camera about their life experiences, won a Jacob's Award in 1985.
O'Faolain had been interested in books from an early age, and credited voracious reading for helping her through a difficult childhood. At Oxford, she encountered the British Marxist historian Raphael Samuel, whose work on material historical development in rural England contributed to her analysis of Irish society. Her introspective and retrospective work was also influenced by the French author Marcel Proust, who was a particular favourite of hers as she got older. O'Faolain worked as a book reviewer for The Times. Between 1990 and 1993, she co-presented Booklines, a television programme about books for RTÉ, a programme she said "nobody ever watched because it was on terribly late at night".
In 1986, Conor Brady, the editor of The Irish Times, offered O'Faolain a newspaper column after hearing her being interviewed by Gay Byrne on the radio. Brady was struck by her ability to "infuse ordinary people's everyday activities with value and interest". The column became a major success; O'Faolain was awarded journalist of the year in 1986. O'Faolain wrote about domestic violence, homophobia, the role of the Catholic Church, class, sexual mores, the Travelling community and Ireland's high birth rate. Her writing was outspoken and carried notes of humour. The emotive and uncompromising tone of her columns was praised as fearless and authentic, but others, like her colleague Mary Holland, found her writing self-indulgent. The columns made O'Faolain a figure of some note in Ireland, though she was not a celebrity; in her memoir, she wrote:
I'm fairly well known in Ireland. I've been on television a lot, and there's a photo of me in the paper, at the top of my column. But I'm no star. People have to look at me twice or three times to put a name on me. Sometimes when I'm drinking in a lounge bar, a group of women, say, across the room, may look at me and send one of their number over to me, or when I'm in the grocery store someone who has just passed me by turns back and comes right up to me and scrutinises my face. 'Are you somebody?' they ask. Well – am I somebody? I'm not anybody in terms of the world, but then who decides what a somebody is? How is a somebody made?
O'Faolain acted as a roving commentator for The Irish Times, covering the 1994 Cregg Wood murders in County Clare, and visiting Northern Ireland at the time of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. Following periods of leave while she worked on her books, she left the paper in 2002, and wrote a column in the Sunday Tribune from 2005 until her death.
In December 1995, the Irish publisher New Island Books asked O'Faolain to write an autobiographical introduction to a book of her newspaper columns. O'Faolain said "I was ashamed of reprinting columns with ancient arguments in them. It's the most pitiful form of bookmaking ... I had to answer the question nobody had asked: where do my opinions come from? The answer was simple: ideology had nothing to do with it. My opinions come from my life." The commissioning editor at New Island, Anthony Glavin, later said: "She had always wanted to write her story, but had never got round to it. And yes, we did talk about her vulnerability a lot. I asked was she sure and she said she was." O'Faolain initially struggled to write in the first-person singular, remarking later "you don't crawl to the edge of 55 in Ireland by thinking you're somebody. You get there sideways." After psychological counselling and a creative writing course, she wrote a 200-page memoir, called Are You Somebody?.