Are You Somebody?

June 2, 1997
O'Faolain, a producer and on-air personality for Ireland's Radio Telefis ireann, has produced a biography that chronicles not only her life, but also the progress of her countrywomen from the 1940s to the present time. She recalls growing up in the north Dublin community of Clontarf with her mother and siblings as her father, a well-known journalist, dashed around the country, leaving his family living in near poverty. She tells of being educated by the nuns and how Eamon De Valera and the church treated the Irish "like children" by keeping them uneducated about sex. She tells of the terror of being a young woman in an Ireland without contraception and how pregnancy brought ostracism. With the financial help of writer Mary Lavin, she went to college, then on to Oxford and ended up as a lecturer at her alma mater, University College Dublin. There are many wonderful moments here: platonically sharing a boardinghouse room with the boozy poet Patrick Kavanagh; watching a televised moon landing at John Huston's Galway home; and enjoying bohemian Dublin in the '60s with the likes of Myles na Gopaleen, Kingsley Amis and Seamus Heaney. Also included here are the author's essays reprinted from the Irish Times on social issues of the day, from divorce to sexual harassment to abortion. A lovely memoir that traces the growth of a woman and her country over the last 50 years.