Irish journalist Nuala O’Faolain didn’t set out to write a memoir.
But as she penned the introduction to a collection of her newspaper columns, the piece took an unlooked-for autobiographical turn.
That introduction became the New York Times best seller, “Are You Somebody? The Accidental Memoir of a Dublin Woman,” from which O’Faolain reads Monday to launch this year’s “Kitsap Reads” series.
“People don’t generally go up to middle-aged women and say, ‘Could you favor us with excerpts from your life?’” O’Faolain said.
“But for me, it was a question of ‘write it or die.’”
The story that so demanded her attention opens with O’Faolain’s experiences as the child of a journalist father known throughout Ireland – a dominating family presence, although absent in fact – and a mother left isolated in the bleak countryside to raise the children
Struggling to survive on slender means, her mother sank deeper into alcoholic gloom with each successive child (there were nine).
The O’Faolain clan slept on stair landings and in closets, with coats for bed linen. Siblings jostled for waning parental attention. A brilliant brother’s potential went untapped. A sister ill with tuberculosis slid toward death, unnoticed.
O’Faolain escaped into books.
“Novels were what I cared about,” she writes in her memoir.
“They asked the questions I wanted answered: How do lives get lived? How is love found?”
As a young teen, O’Faolain discovered eroticism in “lower-class” dance halls. Exiled to a convent boarding school, she diverted her energy to her studies and attended college to become, like her father, a journalist.
Through the 1960s and 70s, O’Faolain excelled in media and communications, then “men’s fields.”
But she paid the price in singularity and loneliness. Drinking further fractured a problematic personal life.
When “Accidental Memoir” reached American bookstores, O’Faolain’s story of an independent woman in a patriarchal system spoke to the generations of women here who came of age in the 50s and 60s.
The success of her memoir in the United States took even the author by surprise, and prompted an extended stateside visit.
“So I came to New York two years ago,” O’Faolain said. “I took a leave of absence from the Times, got a room and a cat from a shelter.”
O’Faolain settled in and wrote her well-received first novel, “My Dream of You,” (Riverhead Books, 2001).
With the success of her books and with new-found friendships with her female peers in New York, life is better, O’Faolain says.
“In general, I’m so much happier,” O’Faolain said. “I hardly drink at all. I’m learning about friendship. I have found that here in far more abundance. Irish society is riddled with doubt that makes friendship hard.
“One wonders, there: how much is it worth giving, and how much is it worth taking?”
O’Faolain both loves and hates her homeland. She is quick to point out that she owns a house there and only sublets in New York – but she notes, too, that Ireland is still a hard place for women.
“I don’t think that men have changed at all,” O’Faolain said, “but young women are bouncier and tougher.”
Though O’Faolain herself seems both exuberant and resilient, when she speaks of her life she does not blunt the edges of what has been, at times, an ordeal.
“I think it’s a miracle that any of us survived it,” O’Faolain said, “And our mothers were half-mad.
“The cruelty done to women just beggars the imagination.”
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Nuala O’Faolain, author of the acclaimed New York Times bestselling memoir, “Are You Somebody? The Accidental Memoir of a Dublin Woman,” appears 7:30 p.m. Feb. 11 at the LGI room at Bainbridge High School. The event kicks off O’Faolain’s national tour and inaugurates the 2002 “Kitsap Reads “series.
Nancy Pearl from the Center for the Book at the Seattle Public Library will conduct a conversation/question-answer session. Call 842-4162 for more information.
