Rating: 
Summary: Need a Broom to Sweep up all the Names Dropped
Review: Being "one generation off the Bog", I purchased this book with some anticipation of delight. Unfortunately I found none. I found the book rambling, boring and fragmented. O'Faolain touches on her family's issues and relationship strains but fails to make them interesting enough to care about. She touches on her challenges as a female professional in modern day Ireland but fails to delve deeply enough for the reader to draw any conclusion. She bounces around the father-daughter conflict but so tepidly it made me think she was afraid to hurt his feelings. Each issue or topic she touched, she did so lightly, leaving the reader without anything to chew on.
She occassionally has writing great moments, making it clear her writing is far superior to what she presents in this book. I am disappointed she didn't treat us to more of it.
Rating: 
Summary: Where's the story?
Review: ...Blah, blah, blah...stupidly I kept reading, waiting on the edge of my seat for the story of her life to get started...I was CERTAIN there was a story there...nope!I think she lived a bit too much in a haze hopping from one bed/bar to the next...only able to remember people's names (and that's probably only because they were supposed to be famous) The part that bugs me is that there probably is a REALLY great story there...she just needs to excise all the name dropping and add a lot of why's and how's...she needs to really want to share HER life.
Rating:
Summary: what a disappointment
Review: I love biographies and memoirs, but barely made it through this one. Most annoying was the incessant name-dropping of Irish literati, most of whom were unknown to me. But more than that, I felt like, "why is this woman writing a memoir?" "What has she accomplished?" Her major accomplishment seems to have been avoiding the trap of early marriage and a suffocatingly large family that sucked the life out of so many women of her generation and culture. However, the book leaves the reader to believe that she escaped largely by chance, through a failure to get pregnant despite years of unprotected sex and binge drinking. It was disheartening to see her very immature relationships with men, even into her later years. We are left thinking "Has she learned nothing?" I will say the book's honesty is a strong point, but I was left mystified as to why it was apparently such a cause clebre in Ireland. A major disappointment.
Rating: 
Summary: Decent Account of a Woman's Life
Review: I heard Nuala O'Faolain interviewed on my local NPR station.
I was enthralled by her calm demeanor and wanted to hear more about her journey through her life. My experience reading her book didn't quite come up to my expectations. I realise that many readers were looking for a woman's version of Angela's Ashes--I was looking for an Irish Maya Angelou. Maybe if I had read the book without placing such expectations on it, I may have gotten more from it. Maybe just enjoyed it for what it is: a woman's (intensely) personal story.
Rating:
Summary: Read it for the afterword
Review: The other reviews here give a fair summary of the book, even the doubters and those obviously less than pleased. Yes, she drops names. (I didn't see this as much of a drawback - it was like sitting at a friend's family reunion and hearing people discuss long-lost cousins. The names don't mean much to you, but it means something to the family.) But did you read the afterword, I want to ask the other reviewers. The heart-breaking account of her brother's death, of realizing that time had moved on for others while she was still trapped like a ghost in the family home, reliving the abuse and neglect she and her brothers and sisters experienced. Did you read about her life after the book was published, the hunger to make a connection? This, I think, is the truest part of the book, the most open and honest. This is worth all the pages that went before.
Rating:
Summary: Disappointed
Review: I have to agree with one of the other reviewers that the work is tedious and the constant namedropping is a major distraction. I too had high hopes for this book, but can't say that I am enriched in any way by having read it. All in all, a huge disappointment.
Rating: 
Summary: The book deserves the question mark
Review: The puffs on the front and back covers are impressive, but what I read between them left me somewhat disappointed. A brave book, certainly, because her mistakes, her failures and her loneliness come starkly through. The constant name-dropping in the middle section gets boring quickly, and comes as a surprise after the title (which suggests an anonymous drudge, not nationally famous journalist, daughter of an even more famous journalist), and of the constant repetition of "poverty" (it's only much later that it becomes clear to the reader, if not the author, that the problem is neglect, abuse and alcoholism rather than impecuity). The best part of the book is an afterword, which includes comments and letters to her from people who've read her book: this part helped me understand the book's appeal - an honest expression of pain and hope - and also made clear what the theme of the book really is: the struggle to come to terms with an abused childhood and alcoholic parents. Unlike some other reviewers here, I found no wisdom in the book at all: the book proper ends with a question mark, like the original title, and that says everything. An honest account by a brave but confused and dysfunctional woman.
Rating:
Summary: is she really honest?
Review: Nuala writes on about the poverty of her life a la Frank Mccourt, yet her father had a solidly middle class profession as a news reporter. In fact, she admits that another writer "outs" her as quite middle class, and others refer to her family as "bohemian," not poor. She went to a boarding school-hardly a solution for a truly impoverished family. Her memoir would have been more poweful had she focused on what appears to be the more central problem in her family - alchoholism, and the ensuing emotional impoverishment that is the inevitable result. If I were to right a memoir as a 53 year old woman, I can't imagine that my sexual escapades would continue to be such a central part of my lifestory. I thought her continuing preoccupation with men and sex was immature, odd, or somehow disfunctional. Overall, she comes across as a very depressed woman. Very sad personal story.
Rating:
Summary: Understanding O'faolain
Review: Nuala O'Faolain daughter of Katherine and Terry O'Soullivan (as her father's name, being a journalist, was changed) was one of the nine children of this downhearted couple who, like her siblings, had to grow up by herself without ever feeling her parents' affection or assistance. O'Faolain courageously faced life with the same eagerness her mother drank and read in their grubby house and worked with the same determination her father continued to lie about his affairs and mistresses. What else but admiration can you feel for a single woman surviving in the harsh reality of Ireland as well as succeeding in being 'somebody' in her life. For many Irish women O'Faolain must have been the personification of the tough woman, never giving up and struggling the harsh Irish realities for becoming independent. Nonetheless, O'Faolain is very frank and modest about the way she really felt concerning independence, "I had tried to be independent. But I couldn't stand the loneliness"(65). Her independence wasn't easy to achieve, as it wasn't easy to find what she valued most in life- a vocation, a home and a partner. She failed to achieve some of the goals she most equalized with her independence-her own family and a husband. This autobiography is significant not only because it helps us get acquainted with the life and spirit of a grand woman, but also because we get acquainted with the social and cultural Ireland of O'Faolain's days. We get to know an Ireland, which was a 'living tomb' for women, and we get a bizarre picture of different uncommitted social classes as well. O'Faolain gives the features of a conspiring male Dublin, " The 'literary Dublin' I saw lied to women as a matter of course and conspired against the demand of wives and mistresses...like or be much larger than life, and feared." Although at the very beginning of the book O'Faolain fears that she lacks a strong affirmative public voice, her tone in her autobiography is everything but unconfident. I assume that the innermost reason many reviewers haven't found this autobiography to their likings is the complete involvement it needs in order to understand this woman. Going deep down under the surface of her narrative is necessary to understand O'Faolain's feelings and personality. I would recommend this autobiography to all those people who like spending time in understanding people better and who look at books as a virtual way to change somehow their attitude toward life. Are You Somebody makes you reflect on where you stand in the tides of your own consciousness and life.
Rating: 
Summary: Riveting, brutal, inspiring
Review: Nuala O'Faolain's father was a genial gossip columnist and man-about-town, and her brilliant mother was a voracious reader--but Nuala's youngest sister often went to school without food or underwear. O'Faolain's autobiography, first conceived of as a brief (!) introduction to her essays, manages to take on the changing face of Ireland AND women's roles in this century...while telling wonderful tales at the same time. Nuala's lifelong search for a home, a husband, a vocation, found her, in her fifties, childless, living in a tiny cottage with a woman, writing feisty opinions for the Irish Times. O'Faolain's rambling, episodic style is slowly revealed as a way of understanding the tragic contradictions of her past, and the hopeful possibilities of her future. Heartbreaking, funny, self-revealing...and a living example of what Adrienne Rich once wrote: "What does not change is the will to change."
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