Are You Somebody

Rating:
Summary: Moving, though at times tedious, this book is worth a look.
Review: I began Are You Somebody with high expectations, and ended up somewhat disappointed. While it has some moving, heartbreaking passages that keep your interest, Nuala has the very annoying habit of namedropping every other page or so. The narrative kind of grinds to a halt as you file away yet another famous or semi-famous person the author has drank and or slept with. Ok, so she's honest, but the book would have been so much better if she spent more time on her childhood and family (lots of brothers and sisters get barely a mention) and less on meeting a roaring drunk minor celebrity at a pub. But the more intimate memories make the book worthwhile. She paints a vivid picture of what it is like to grow up in an alcoholic, dysfunctional family, go to an all girls Catholic school, and find your way in life despite many setbacks. This is no Angela's Ashes, and similar memoirs such as The Liar's Club and A Drinking Life did it better. Still, it has its moments and wil! l strike a familiar chord in many readers.

Rating:
Summary: middle-aged conventional man finds Nuala valuable
Review: You either love this book or find it a tedious whine. Why would a conventional, middle-aged English teacher like myself find it worthwhile, even riveting? It helps that I have visited Ireland several times in recent years, and have gradually seen beyond the Irish Tourist Board conception of the emerald isle. And I have enjoyed Dublin, despite its scruffy character. I also have spent most of my professional life working with single women, and though none of them have faced life situations as tough as Nuala's, I still found connections with her life and their's. I also teach English, and I love her affection for poetry and books. But most of all, I love her truth-seeking, and despite some of the personal complaints on this list of reviews, this is a crafted book that never left me confused. We all have parents, and conflict between us seems to be just a part of living we can't altogether avoid. I thank Nuala for bravely writing her memoir. I read it straight through in two chunks of time over two days.

Rating:
Summary: sad and so very true
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Gutsy, Articulate, Pensive & Poignant!
Review: "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.

Rating:
Summary: This Writing is Something!
Review: Nuala O'Faolain writes candidly about her passage through opportunities, challenges,successes, and mistakes, ending up with a wise assessment of the life of a woman who is Irish, a writer, and middle aged.She explores the societal conditions that affect us all and does so with brutal honesty. Her self-revelations are amazing.

Some reviewers here have suggested that O'Faolain drops too many names and offers too little explanation or introspection. Names are certainly dropped continually, and I do believe that is the book's one weakness, but if these reviewers had read to the end of the book, they would have found plenty of explanation and introspection. Rarely, if ever, have I experienced such a wise and perceptive view of the life of a middle-aged woman.

O'Faolain is a marvelously descriptive writer. I'm so glad I visited Ireland and spent time in County Mayo before I read this book. I could see the places she went and understand better some of her stranger encounters with people.

The book, admittedly, is not for everyone. For the "older" woman, though, it's a must read.

Rating:
Summary: Not a winner
Review: I read this book as part of a book group. I found it boring and pretenious. The author would have done a much better job if she spent more time on a specific event, rather than racing through general situations. She skipped around a lot so it was very difficult to remember who was whom, or to even care.

Rating:
Summary: Resonates with all women who came of age in that era
Review: One of 9 children in your typically urban Dublin Catholic household, Nuala O'Faolain made it out. A physically absent father and emotionally absent and defeated mother didn't prevent O'Faolain from somehow finding her path through the medium of books. It was actually her near disastrous mistakes with 'boys' that, oddly, fostered her escape. To save Nuala's immortal soul, she was sent to a convent - and then with a scholarship, on to Oxford and a career.
Career. Not a word usually found in the same sentence with 'woman' in Ireland in the 50s and 60s. The fact that O'Faolin chooses not to bear children, finding solace in books, literature, and writing, does not always settle well with her compatriots - and indeed, she herself admits that it wasn't always the best situation as she struggled with alcoholism and depression.
Ultimately, however, Are You Somebody emerges as a sociological expose of Irish women and the choices they are too often forced to make.
Not just 'another Irish memoir.' It's more than the sum of its parts and well worth a careful read.

Rating:
Summary: Yes, You Are Somebody
Review: Nuala O'Faolain's book, "Are You Somebody?" answers the question for itself. Just listing her educational credits, would leave out the struggle that she had accumulating the credentials she felt that she needed. She sought a position in her life that would reflect her value. She did have some phenominal luck, it seemed at times, and at other times, she seemed to be constantly clawing her way through a life that offered little to Irish women. The book is a valuable guide to those who are trying to better themselves. Unfortunately, we can't have it all, and I am sorry that it took many years to get her where she wanted to be--only to leave her with no time to have children of her own to whom she could pass on her wisdom. So that just leaves us, the readers.

Rating:
Summary: I gave on this book...
Review: after only 58 pages. Pointless, ponderous, self-indulgent, meandering...yawn.

I deliberately stayed away from the reviews before picking this book up, but I could have co-written most of the "disappointed" ones.

There are too many good books available to waste my time on this one.

Rating:
Summary: A Brutal Self Examination
Review: Based upon the subtitle "The Accidental Memoir of a Dublin Woman" and that fact that she is a writer for the "Irish Times", in addition to favorable critical reviews, I was very interested in reading this book. However, nothing prepared me for the raw, depressing, and somewhat pathetic autobiography O'Faolain has written.

What is redeeming about this memoir is it's reflection of the plight of women, and particularly Irish women, in decades from from the 1940s through the 1970s. And despite how unrelentingly depressing most of the recollections contained are, it does reflect a gradual emergence of hope for the condition of women as the 20th century drew to a close.

For anyone Irish, or of Irish extraction, O'Faolain's depiction of Irish society and culture is bitter, distasteful, and quite ugly. Essentially she paints an alcohol soaked people where male callousness towards women resulted in the neglect as well as overt abuse of children. While evidently there is some truth in what she depicted, I question it being a thorough portrait of the Irish as a whole. She admittedly depicts her parents as "bohemian", and her experiences seem to largely describe the conditions of the economically marginal. However, later in the work her pleasure in discovering rural Irish society and culture in her middle age are uplifting. Additionally, her observations on the Balkanization of Northern and Southern Ireland, to the point that a Dublin woman knows little of the state of Catholics in the North, is insightful. She seems to take umbrage at the distaste reflected in the remarks about Ireland and the Irish by some Americans and English. However, based upon her own depictions one is left with the sense that she feels that the Irish deserve the world's pity rather than distain.

O'Faolain seems to savor wallowing in self contempt, rather than acknowledging her abilities or achievements. Clearly she would not have attained her educational credentials and professional experiences without being bright, some hard work, and occasional sober, positive life experiences. This work comes across as more of a confession; a "mea culpa" rather than a memoir. While brutally honest, and probably accurate, I didn't find it a particularly rewarding read.