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Irish times columnist Nuala O'Faolain opens her past and looks at it in this searingly honest midlife exploration of the love, pain, loneliness, loss, and self-discovery she has experienced. The result is a classic memoir. Born one of nine children in a penniless North Dublin family headed by an overwhelmed mother and a charming but absent father, Nuala not only survived but pushed at the boundaries of the confining Catholic Ireland she grew up in.
The author spends much of her life seeking the sense of self that hostile environment denied to girls and women. But Nuala sees this past with new eyes when she takes the opportunity, in her fifties, to examine the meaning of her life and to review her accomplishments as well as her deep yearning for a sense of fulfillment.
Gifted commentator that she is, Nuala shows us her private thoughts and public actions as they play against the backdrop of the rural Ireland she knew as a child, the blossoming intellectual scene of Dublin in the fifties, and the unspoiled Oxford of the sixties. We see the richness of her native land's culture and its natural beauty as she herself rediscovers them after years in England. With their help she makes her way back to health from a black period of alcoholism and debilitating depression.
Nuala has distilled these experiences into a wisdom that could come only from a woman who refused to shrink from life. She escapes the example of her passionate but defeated mother and comes to her own terms with the love she yearns to share with men and women. Even the solitary life, she realizes, that includes neither lover nor child, has its deep contentments.
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Previews available in: English
Subjects
Biography, Irish authors, Journalists, Women jouralists, Women journalists, Ireland, biography, Journalists, biography, Middle-aged women, Large type books, Women, irelandPeople
Nuala O'FaolainPlaces
IrelandTimes
20th centuryShowing 5 featured editions. View all 11 editions?
Edition | Availability |
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1
Are You Somebody?: The Accidental Memoir of a Dublin Woman
January 15, 1999, Owl Books
Paperback
in English
- 1st Owl Books Ed edition
0805056645 9780805056648
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2
Are you somebody: the accidental memoir of a Dublin woman
1998, Thorndike Press
in English
0786215062 9780786215065
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3
Are you somebody: the accidental memoir of a Dublin woman
1998, H. Holt, Henry Holt
in English
- 1st American ed.
0805056637 9780805056631
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4
Are you somebody?: the life and times of Nuala O'Faolain
1997, Sceptre
in English
034069663X 9780340696637
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5
Are you somebody?: the life and times of Nuala O'Faolain.
1996, New Island Books
in English
1874597464 9781874597469
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Book Details
Edition Notes
Memoir followed by a selection of Nuala O'Faolain's columns on people, issues, and places from the Irish times over the past decade.
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