By: Nuala O'Faolain ? a journalist and feminist who gained international fame with her outspoken 1996 memoir
Are You Somebody? ? died Monday of lung cancer, weeks after revealing her illness on the radio. She was 68.
At the time of her cancer diagnosis, she had been offering weekly RTE radio commentary on the U.S. presidential race from her second home in New York City. O'Faolain had worked as a television producer and reporter for the British Broadcasting Corp. and RTE, and gained a national readership as an Irish Times columnist starting in the mid-1980s.
She became a best-selling author on both sides of the Atlantic in 1996 with the publication of
Are You Somebody? The book, initially intended to be a collection of her Irish Times columns, evolved into an unusually intimate, even risque memoir that became an international bestseller.
In it, she recounted her tough family upbringing with a philandering father and alcoholic mother, descent into her own alcohol abuse, and a lifetime struggle to attain professional, social and sexual fulfillment. O'Faolain, who was a University College Dublin lecturer in literature before becoming one of Ireland's best-known journalists, went on to publish three more books: the novel
My Dream of You in 2001, a second memoir titled
Almost Therein 2003, and the biography
The Story of Chicago May in 2005.
Just a few weeks ago she gave a wrenchingly honest account of her decision to forgo chemotherapy. Instead, she traveled Europe with the help of close friends until the disease confined her to a nursing home.
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In her memoir
Almost There, she wrote: "There is an idea current in the prevailing culture that writing about something that pains you heals the pain. I am not, when I began writing my life story, am not now, healed of my mother. But you do gain a small distance from anything by keeping it in suspension in your mind while you work at finding the words to fit it. The process is so slow and incremental that you don't notice the effect, but the point is that it is a process. I learned when I was a little girl that if you're crying uncontrollably and want to stop, the thing is to do something useful with your tears--water a plant, say. They'll dry up of themselves. The same happens when you try to make sentences out of painful material: the material lightens as it is put to work."
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