Nuala ofaolain wikipedia

Parents and upbringing
The increasingly chaotic marriage of her parents, marked by sometimes violent relations between a famous, hard-drinking, increasingly remote and unfaithful husband who mocked his wife’s dependence, and a wife overwhelmed by housework and childcare, worn down by thirteen pregnancies, and consoling herself with alcohol and the memory of a passionate first decade of marriage, was central to O’Faolain’s sense of identity.

In her memoir, she describes unsatisfactory and intermittent relationships with the art critic Clement Greenberg and the writer and producer Harry Craig as evidence of her unreconstructed consciousness; when interviewed for a 2006 RTÉ documentary series, Flesh and blood, she apologised to the wives of all the married men with whom she had had affairs.

Rediscovering Ireland; broadcasting, journalism, Nell McCafferty
O’Faolain occasionally covered Northern Ireland, and experienced anti-Irish hostility during the IRA bombing campaign in Britain, but was not particularly interested in Ireland.

It was awarded the 2006 Prix Femina Étranger.

Illness and death
By February 2008 O’Faolain had reached a semi-detached modus vivendi with Low-Beer, had completed her second novel and was exploring further literary possibilities, while reporting on the 2008 US presidential election for Irish media.

In Are You Somebody?, she speaks candidly about her fifteen-year relationship with the journalist Nell McCafferty, who published her own memoir, Nell.^[5] From 2002 until her death, O'Faolain lived much of the time with Brooklyn-based attorney John Low-Beer and his daughter Anna. (O Faolain’s posthumous second novel, Best love, Rosie (2009), depicts a much-travelled, professional Irishwoman coming to terms with her murky Irish roots and settling down with the assistance of money earned by composing self-help reflections for American tea towels, while her frustrated elderly aunt is rejuvenated by escape to America.)

A second memoir, Almost there: the onward journey of a Dublin woman (2003), describes the composition, publication and reception of Are you somebody?, before developing into an account of the newly-affluent O’Faolain’s attempt to reinvent herself in Manhattan in the late 1990s, including an account of her developing relationship with the New York lawyer John Low-Beer, the principal companion of her later years, whom she met in January 2002 after registering on the dating website Match.com as research for her novel.

Editorial Review (Amazon). Having expected an impoverished retirement of music, reading and alcohol, ending in an old people’s home for the destitute, O’Faolain found herself affluent. Some students responded to this passionate concern and would ‘literally touch the hem of her academic gown’ (McCafferty, 336).

During the 1960s O’Faolain inhabited bohemian Dublin, where intellectuals, writers, certain students and certain academics mingled in pubs and bedsitters.

May 2008
Country most active: Ireland
Also known as: Nuala O’Sullivan

This biography is republished from The Dictionary of Irish Biography and was written by Patrick Maume. She regarded her parents as representative of a generation of bohemians reacting against the grim provincial catholic patriarchy of their upbringings but incapable of developing coherent alternative values.