"What happened to me?''
-Nuala O'Faolain,
Are
You Somebody ? : The Accidental Memoir of a Dublin Woman
This was, without a doubt, the most depressing, anti-human book I've
ever read (well, actually, listened to). Kathleen de Burca, a travel
writer, has fled an unhappy childhood in her native Ireland, only to find
an unhappy adulthood in England. She has almost no friends and seems
never to have loved or been loved. Instead she engages in innumerable
casual couplings, fueled by nothing but physical desire :
I believed in passion the way other people believed
in God: everything fell in place around it.
But now, as she approaches fifty, she faces the possibility that even
this sexual consolation will dry up :
But then I thought, Isn't it some kind
of good, that a person can be shocked into truthfulness, even if it's only
for a
few hours and only with herself? I sat in the thick night air of the plane
and I
thought, If anyone had said to you, all these years, are you interested
in sex?
you'd have said, haughtily, No. I'm interested in passion. Passion. I murmured
the word half out loud. What passion? It was never real excitement that
got you
into bed; it was hope, like some stubborn underground weed. Look at the
way
you've believed every time, at the first brush of a hand across a breast,
that the
roof over your life was sliding back and a dazzling, starry firmament was
just
coming into view. When it never happened. When a one-night stand has never,
in all the years, done what you wanted it to do. What's more, the whole
thing is
getting more and more pathetic. The truth is, I said to myself, that the
older you
get, the more grateful you are for being wanted on any terms, by anybody.
But if I stopped all that, how would I ever meet anyone? If I didn't have
this
kind of sex life, I'd have none! Then I thought, But should it even be
called sex?
Look at the businessman in Harare. You're not even giving them any pleasure
anymore, never mind getting any for yourself.
Pathetic ? Pathetic doesn't even begin to cover it, sweetie.
Finally becoming dissatisfied with her utterly meaningless existence,
and shocked out of her torpor by the death of a gay male coworker, Kathleen
returns to Ireland. But things go no better there as she squabbles
with sisters, gets involved with a married man, and rages against the country's
anti-abortion laws. Apparently, the lot of Ireland's universally
unhappy women would be infinitely better if only they could terminate their
unwanted pregnancies. In fact, it's not merely the children who are
wrecking their lives, I lost track of how many women in the book have some
kind of disease of the womb; their very womanhood is killing them.
A whole lot of other nonsense goes on, but by then I plunged deep into
a suicidal fugue state...
Lest you think I'm overstating the case here, allow me to submit in
my defense this quote from a profile
of O'Faolain in The Guardian :
'I can't wait to be an old lady,' she says. 'I'm
dying to wither up so I can stop hurting.'
For God's sake, someone put the old girl out of her misery, or at the
very least out of ours. This one has Oprah
Book Club written all over it.
(Reviewed:11-Jul-01)
Grade: (D)
Websites:
Book-related and General Links:
-BOOK
SITE : Are You Somebody (Henry Holt)
-EXCERPT
: Chapter 1 of My Dream of You
-EXCERPT
: from Are You Somebody
-ESSAY
: Memories of Saint Patrick's Day (Nuala O'Faolain, Emigrant Online)
-ESSAY
: Moved to write on gender relations (Nuala O'Faolain, July 28, 1997,
Irish Times)
-ESSAY
: An Irishman's Diary (Kevin Myers, December 16, 2000, Irish Times)
-ESSAY
: O'Faolain exposes the dishonesty of feminisma (John Waters, December
18, 2000, Irish Times)
-ESSAY
: Defending fatherhood not attacking feminism (John Waters, August
05, 1997, Irish Times)
-DISCUSSION
: The following is a transcript of a conversation by phone between Nuala
O'Faolain and Pulitzer prize-winning author Frank McCourt, author of Angela's
Ashes, celebrating the US publication of O'Faolain's bestselling memoir
Are You Somebody. Their conversation took place on February 12, 1998 (Henry
Holt)
-AUDIO
INTERVIEW : Nuala O'Faolain (Fresh Air, NPR)
-AUDIO
INTERVIEW : (Victoria Lautman, Eight Forty-Eight, WBEZ)
-AUDIO
INTERVIEW : Living Alone. : Original Airdate: 2/3/99. The Irish journalist
Nuala O'Faolain grew up in a culture that assumed she would have a better
half. But she's alone. In her fifties. As are so many other men and
women, who didn't expect to be. She's not unhappy, but she can't help asking,
'What happened to me?' Nuala O'Faolain is the author of "Are You Somebody.
(The Connection)
-INTERVIEW
: Nuala O'Faolain: The Girl of Her Dreams (Yvonne Nolan -- 3/12/01,
Publishers' weekly)
-INTERVIEW
: Irish writer explores love and longing among the 'overlooked'
(Ellen Kanner , Feb. 2001, Book Page)
-CHAT
: Transcript: Visions of Europe Roundtable : Oxford University historian
Timothy Garton Ash, Irish Times columnist and author Nuala O'Faolain and
TIME International Editor James Geary discuss the issues facing Europe
at the eve of the 21st century. Transcript from Jan. 20, 1999 (TIME International)
-PROFILE
: A Thorny Irish Rose : Nuala O'Faolain's memoir became a surprise
best seller. Now there's a new novel from the woman whose blunt talk about
sex, religion and the hypocrisies of her homeland made her a star (DAPHNE
MERKIN, The New York Times Magazine, Feb. 18, 2001)
-PROFILE
: Accidental heroine : When her extraordinarily intimate memoir caught
the public's imagination, Nuala O'Faolain became an overnight sensation.
On the eve of the publication of her first novel, the outspoken Irish columnist
talks to Daphne Merkin about illicit love, alcohol and the advantages of
being a late starter (April 8, 2001, Guardian Unlimited)
-PROFILE
: When Prince Charming never comes (Marilyn Gardner, The Christian
Science Monitor)
-PROFILE
: (Judith Rosen, Publishers' Weekly)
-PROFILE
: Nuala O'Faolain finds passion in words (Kerry Taylor, The Age)
-ARCHIVES
: "Nuala O'Faolain" (Salon)
-ARCHIVES
: Nuala O'Faolain (Find Articles)
-ARCHIVES
: Nuala O'Faolain (Mag Portal)
-REVIEW
: of MY DREAM OF YOU By Nuala O'Faolain (Catherine Lockerbie, NY Times
Book Review)
-REVIEW
: of My Dream of You by Nuala O'Faolain (Helen Falconer, The
Guardian)
-REVIEW
: of My Dream of You (Margaret A. McGurk, Cincinnati Enquirer)
-REVIEW
: of My Dream of You by Nuala O'Faolain (Renata Golden, Houston
Chronicle)
-REVIEW
: of My Dream of You by Nuala O'Faolain (Charles Taylor, Salon)
-REVIEW
: of My Dream of You by Nuala O'Faolain (DANIEL MENDELSOHN, New
York Magazine)
-REVIEW
: of My Dream of You by Nuala O'Faolain (KATHLEEN OCHSHORN, St.
Petersburg Times)
-REVIEW
: of My Dream of You by Nuala O'Faolain (Catherine Keenan, Sydney
Morning Herald)
-REVIEW
: of My Dream of You by Nuala O'Faolain (LYNN FREED, The
Washington Post)
-REVIEW
: of My Dream of You by Nuala O'Faolain (Pauline Ferrie, Bookview
Ireland)
-REVIEW
: of My Dream of You (Sofrina Hinton, Book Reporter)
-REVIEW
: of ARE YOU SOMEBODY The Accidental Memoir of a Dublin Woman. By Nuala
O'Faolain (Zoe Heller, NY Times Book Review)
-REVIEW
: of Are You Somebody ? (Bob Minzesheimer, USA TODAY)
-REVIEW
: of Are You Somebody ? (G. K. Nelson, Savoy Magazine)
-REVIEW
: of Are You Somebody (Colleen Dougher-Telcik, City Link)
-REVIEW
: of Are You Somebody ? (Suzanne Barrett, About.com)
GENERAL :
-ESSAY
: The Suffering Irish : What will Erin's literary artists write about
now that their motherland has found its pot of gold? (Daniel Reitz
, Salon)
Comments:
Orrin welcomes reader comments on his reviews.
Add yours here.
I go back to Are You Somebody? whenever there has been one too many crisis. Nuala is a gifted writer and as a person, a gift to humanity in general and women in particular. Life is messy. Nuala courageously shared her story w/ great honesty. I have personally derived great comfort from Nuala's story.
- Elizabeth Jean Jones
- Nov-20-2004, 10:58
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