Her lyrical name – Nuala O’Faolain – is quintessentially Irish. And her unflinching reminiscence, “Are You Somebody? The Accidental Memoir of a Dublin Woman,” topped The New York Times best-seller list in 1998.
Anybody who has read O’Faolain knows her success amounts to more than the luck of the Irish.
“Women of my generation in Ireland – I’m amazed that we came through,” O’Faolain said in a telephone interview. “It’s so recent that women have had jobs and money of their own that Ireland doesn’t know what to do with women.”
O’Faolain, Edna O’Brien and Polly Devlin – the holy trinity of contemporary female Irish writers – will convene June 28 for a conversation titled “Women on Words” at the 29th-annual Aspen Summer Words Literary Festival. Ireland’s literary legacy is the touchstone for this year’s June 26-30 event at Aspen’s historic Hotel Jerome. The festival also will fete Frank McCourt, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “Angela’s Ashes.”
O’Faolain, author of a novel and two memoirs, is a firebrand. In her second memoir, published last year, O’Faolain noted that in her homeland, feminism doesn’t sit well.
“There is no role model for lippy, middle-aged women,” she said. “Women of my age are supposed to be apple-cheeked grannies.”
O’Faolain is anything but, and her books are not filled with pots of gold at the end of romantic rainbows. She writes with unflinching candor, presenting less-than-flattering facets of herself and her homeland.
The longtime Irish Times columnist comes clean about her dysfunctional family, her flabby physique, disastrous love affairs, Irish famine, alcoholism, poverty.
“There’s a reason why more autobiographies aren’t written, especially in small, watchful countries. People have too many hostages to fortune,” said O’Faolain, who noted that her one-time lack of a spouse, lover, friends or close family members freed her from this particular burden.
“It was a wonderful thing that my life was so mismanaged and empty; there was nobody to stand in my way. I could afford to be reckless,” she said. “And I was under the absolutely sincere impression that nobody would read it.”
But thousands did just that. Being set among the Emerald Isle’s literary jewels still shocks her.
“I didn’t think of myself as a writer,” said O’Faolain. “I had no literary ambitions at all, though I’m very literary. I’ve taught literature, and I’m an extremely snobby reader. I love the most demanding writers, but I never saw myself as part of that world, and don’t still. It’s inconceivable to me.”
O’Faolain was the second eldest among nine siblings. Her father was a Dublin newspaper columnist; her mother fortified herself with gin, shortbread and books.
After a turbulent childhood, O’Faolain became an academic star, earning a postgraduate degree in 19th-century literature from Oxford University.
Her book career began in 1996. A publisher was set to print a collection of her opinion columns and asked her to pen an introduction. It turned into a lengthy confessional, driving sales of the book, and was eventually published separately as “Are You Somebody?” The novel “My Dream of You” and another memoir, “Almost There: The Onward Journey of a Dublin Woman,” followed.
A writer with melancholic memories and a lilting capacity for language, she recognizes she is heir to a long literary lineage.
“We had nothing else,” she said when asked why Ireland has produced so much literary brilliance. “Everything else requires something: paint or a musical instrument. The Irish were much poorer than anyone cares to remember, bitterly poor, and under political oppression.”
“The one thing they had – and nobody could control and they didn’t need any money to buy – was what they say. The Irish are good talkers. That became part of the personality of the country. Today, that’s still the case.”
O’Faolain, who splits time between Ireland and New York, contrasts her homeland with the United States – or at least the U.S. of her experience.
“In America, people don’t feel the need to tell good stories and use language vigorously and with originality,” O’Faolain said. “Americans are confident enough to be boring. The Irish are always insecure, always trying to win over people listening to them with charm.”
“All of us were oppressed. All of us denied. England conquered Ireland and discriminated against native Irish in education, religion, commerce, every possible way – all of us,” she said.
“The Irish have a different approach to truth,” she said. “They play with language. They use words differently. They ask more of the listener.
“There’s a loquaciousness and joy in language, but also a peasant caution. You can talk away, but you use the talking to hide, and you don’t let any real information out.”
O’Faolain broke ranks with her revelatory memoirs. At one point in “Almost There,” she confesses to feeling 17 years old. When pressed, she admitted to feeling more like 8.
“I’m not grown up,” she said. “I’m hopelessly immature. Scrabbling is a reflex. I don’t even want what I’m fighting for, but I’m forced to fight because I was always a child in too big a family. It’s me back with my sisters and brothers with not nearly enough resources.”
“Almost There” includes a poignant case in point. The author recalls when a neighbor gave the O’Faolain children a whole block of ice cream. Ignorant of the concept of refrigeration, the kids cached the treat in a cool culvert they called The Secret. Upon their return the next day, the ice cream, of course, had melted.
Such disappointment is grist for O’Faolain’s mill. Though adept at pastoral riffs and colorful yarns, she best translates sorrow.
“Melancholy is a conversion of anger,” she said. “I’m more angry that I used to be.”
So what bothers her?
“Right-wing Republicanism does. Sneers and insults to women, the idealization of children with all innocence attributed to children. Injustice. Waiting for dinner. Cruelty to animals.”
O’Faolain was preparing to leave New York – where she’s still involved with the man and the dog and the daughter detailed in “Almost There” – for Ireland. She happily anticipated reuniting with her beloved dog Molly and her native ways.
Despite economic upturns in the past decade, Eire, for O’Faolain, remains much the same.
“It looks modern; people have money, but deep down Ireland is the place I’ve known all my life. It’s a place all its own,” she said.
“The people are gifted in living. They risk themselves all the time. They drink like fish and dance and stay up late. They live intensely. It’s a way of life I’m very attracted to and admire.”
Aspen Summer Words Literary Festival
WRITING FESTIVAL|Hotel Jerome, Aspen; June 26-30 (“Women on Words,” 7 p.m. June 28)|$15-$200|970-925-3122 or visit aspenwriters.org
