Are You Somebody?

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: 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: Charming Nuala.....
Review: Nuala O'Faolain is a columnist with the Irish Times. To a certain extent she followed her journalist father's footsteps, but her climb was a bit more difficult. In addition to her struggles to become a writer, O'Faolain grew up a woman in the impoverished Ireland of the 40's and 50's. Although her childhood in some ways was similar to those of Frank McCourt and Christie Brown, she had the added burden of being female.

Like Brown and McCourt, the family struggled with too many mouths to feed and an alcoholic parent. In her adult years, Nuala struggled with her own affliction with the disease of alcoholism. She managed to find recovery from alcoholism and pull her self up from an extremely low place. Her story of the rebuilding of her life is an inspiration to those suffering from alcoholism -- their own or that of a loved one.

O'Faolain's writing is not as lyrical as McCourt's nor as colorful as Brown's, but she tells a good tale. Her relating of the day-to-day interaction of her parents, as well as her own relationships with her parents, lovers, friends, and others is honest, compelling and somewhat sad. Her description of Ireland is a million miles from the Hollywood version of the 1940s. I recommend this book to anyone who can't get enough of the "old country."