Word: faolain
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DIED Six weeks after a diagnosis of terminal cancer, Irish journalist and author Nuala O'Faolain confessed that life, for her, had lost its beauty. "There is an absolute difference between knowing that you are likely to die--let's say, within the next year--and not knowing when you are going to die," she said during a tearful radio interview. Ever unflinching in her writing, O'Faolain explored the struggle of growing up poor in mid-20th century Ireland in her first memoir, Are You Somebody?, before penning the novel My Dream of You, also set in her homeland...
Rather than with Bridget, curl up with Nuala O'Faolain (Are You Somebody: The Accidental Memoir of a Dublin Woman) and Julia Scully (Outside Passages), who elicit a hundred now-isn't-that-the-truth moments. O'Faolain, a celebrated columnist at the Irish Times, is more than a female Frank McCourt. While she's no slouch at depicting old-sod poverty--sleeping with a scrap of sheet to keep her father's overcoat from scratching her chin and dreaming of a place to hang her ragged clothes--her real strength is in her close-to-the-bone rendering...
While Bridget spends the holidays trashing the Smug Marrieds who are giving a party, O'Faolain spends her Christmas walking and reading alone and envying the married friends she visits, "laughing and talking in bed...and when the clock goes off in the morning, they start again, talking to each other. What happened to me?" she asks, and answers...
...Like O'Faolain, Julia Scully uses the memoir to reveal yourself to you. The primer begins in the emotional void of a San Francisco orphanage where Scully ends up after her father's suicide. By the time she rejoins her hapless mother for a make-do life in a makeshift roadhouse in godforsaken Alaska, "the smell of stale beer and cigarette smoke" is perfume to her, the rough miners princes. She works like a dog and builds an inner structure that gets her to Stanford and then to New York City, where she becomes a successful editor...
...Connor, too, was largely self-taught. In 1923 he filled the gaps in his education while imprisoned for republican activities during the Irish civil war. Nationalism brought him in contact with other young Irish writers like Sean O'Faolain and Liam O'Flaherty. In 1931 O'Connor made his name with a book of stories entitled Guests of the Nation...