The Fame Lunches

by Daphne Merkin

  Had the author not given a remarkably unzipped account of her own life and loves when she appeared on Ireland’s top-rated chat show to promote her memoir, Are You Somebody? might never have become a literary sensation. The interview began on a startling note, with the host, Gay Byrne, nosily asking, “You’ve slept with a lot of men, haven’t you?” To which O’Faolain shot back, “Only three that ever mattered, which is modest for a woman of my age.” The conversation steamed along from there, delving into the sort of damaging family history that most of Ireland’s “fretful, conscious citizenry,” as O’Faolain once described it, didn’t talk about but longed to hear discussed. She recalls that she appeared on the show in “a rictus of terror,” having prepared for it by giving up drinking and taking up exercising four weeks earlier, as well as praying to “a God I didn’t believe in.” Once on camera, she quickly charmed her way into the studio audience’s hearts—“I could feel them on my side,” she says—and within no time Are You Somebody? was being sold straight from boxes before it even reached the shelves.

  The use of the word “accidental” in the memoir’s American subtitle, The Accidental Memoir of a Dublin Woman, was not just a clever marketing ploy to catch the reader’s attention. The book was, in fact, originally conceived of as no more than a grace note, an introduction to a collection of O’Faolain’s widely read pieces from the daily paper The Irish Times. “I was ashamed,” she says, “of reprinting columns with ancient arguments in them. It’s the most pitiful form of bookmaking,” Once she decided to write an introduction, she explains, “I had to answer the question nobody had asked: Where do my opinions come from? The answer was simple: Ideology had nothing to do with it. My opinions come from my life.” Despite her fears about writing in a private voice—“you don’t get to be an Irish woman of my age and say ‘I, I, I’ with any confidence, because ‘I’ has been frightened out of you”—the introduction swelled to two hundred intensely personal pages. “I sneaked out my autobiography when no one was looking,” she says, sounding like a child caught reading by flashlight under the sheets. “My unconscious recognized a chance.”

  Prior to this, O’Faolain had made her name for more than a decade as a maverick pundit at the prestigious and traditional Irish Times, where she expressed her often discomforting views about “this damp little shambles of a democracy on the edge of the Western world.” The editor of the paper, Conor Brady, who offered O’Faolain her own column on a hunch after hearing her interviewed on the radio about her work as a producer of a magazine-style television series called Women Talking, was struck by her ability to “infuse ordinary people’s everyday activities with value and interest.” (O’Faolain prefers to shape her story—somewhat disingenuously—with a dramatic Cinderella twist, in which Brady plays the Prince Charming character; to hear her tell it, she was a middle-aged washout when he offered her the job out of the clear blue.)

  Brady’s instinct proved right within weeks of hiring her. “She just took off,” he recalls. “She’d get these amazing mailbags from people because she touched something very elemental in their lives.” Her public voice was politicized without being doctrinaire; she could be as ardently outspoken as Germaine Greer, but her perspective was softened by bursts of humor and the Irish gift for lyrical lament that is so evident in the fiction of Edna O’Brien. In a column called “Birth,” O’Faolain described the quiet, vigilant atmosphere of an intensive-care maternity ward in which “you hear the silence of the babies. You long for them to cry, but they can’t cry, because they are sedated. Tiny little starfish things, literal scraps of life.”

  With clear-eyed affection, O’Faolain registered the hidebound habits of mind—“the florid national inefficiency”—she saw around her. “She has a great capacity,” Brady observes, “to force us to confront some of the illusions we like to have about ourselves in Ireland—that this is, for instance, a very good society in which to bring up children.” O’Faolain commented on the political issues of the day as well as on the country’s ongoing problems, like domestic violence, homophobia, the iron grip of Catholicism, and the high birthrate. She was utterly unpredictable in the positions she took. “People find it difficult even in Ireland to categorize her,” Brady says. In the witty essay in which she came out against the antifur lobby, O’Faolain recalled being pushed against a doorway and wordlessly handed a pamphlet about cruelty to animals. She went on to reflect, “This confrontation raised in an acute form my rights as opposed to a Korean rabbit’s rights.”

  Today, O’Faolain refers dismissively to the “fake objective” and “authoritative” tone she had to adopt in order to write those commentaries. “When I entered the world of op-ed journalism,” she declares, vividly overstating the case, as is her custom, “that male world of ‘on the one hand’ and ‘on the other,’ I became an honorary man.” What is certain is that Are You Somebody? shocked everyone in the matey, closemouthed newspaper circles in which she was a member in good standing. Among other revelations, the book described O’Faolain’s consuming dedication to a proposition she had been taught to accept as self-evident: “I’d spent my whole adult life on the errand that smoothed the way to being a woman in the home—a search for a man, for love, for the one man to love and be loved by and have babies with—without wanting to be a woman in the home.”

  Her quest yielded various lovers, including such famous intellectuals as the art critic Clement Greenberg (who once signed off a letter to her, “in hopes of another orgasm”), the literary critic Leslie Fiedler (who took her on a visit to the film director John Huston, which the two of them cut short on account of the “glacial meals” served in a dining room with ornate antique Chinese wallpaper), and the well-known Irish novelist John McGahern (who, she wrote, “was recovering from pain connected with the beautiful sister of a policeman”). She also discussed, albeit somewhat evasively, her almost fifteen-year involvement with a woman who is one of Ireland’s most prominent feminist activists. When I ask O’Faolain, who was shipped off to a convent boarding school at the age of fourteen because of her brazenly flirtatious ways—“She was always climbing out the window to meet boys,” her sister Deirdre says—whether she considers herself a lesbian, she cuts the subject short.

  * * *

  O’Faolain’s cottage sits above Liscannor Bay, on a meandering little lane that ends at the shoreline. Three miles away, in the village of Lahinch, there are, as she puts it, “a couple million pubs.” If you drive as she does, with a hair-raising lack of caution along winding two-way roads, it is an hour’s trip from Shannon Airport to this underpopulated part of western Ireland. We pass a Wordsworthian landscape of stone walls, hawthorn hedges, and fields where mud-covered cattle graze. “Feisty little bullocks,” she mutters affectionately. “They can take what God throws at them.” When she is not pointing out the sights, O’Faolain, who has a streaked mop of hair and striking gray eyes that have a slightly Oriental tilt to them, analyzes the tragically flawed national temperament—“disfigured by drink,” as she puts it, “and a feeling of inner despair.” As we pass a majestic pink mansion that was once a children’s hospital, she remarks in a tone of quiet bitterness, as though the 1845 potato blight that decimated Ireland’s population had occurred only yesterday, “Sixty children died of cholera in that house.”

  The famously depressive Irish weather is nowhere in evidence when we pull up at her house; the sun glows perceptibly in a pale blue sky. O’Faolain unlocks the bright red front door of her cottage, and we have barely stepped over the threshold when Molly, her beloved collie, dashes out, barking and wagging her tail in a frenzy of welcome. Inside, the house is decorated in an arts-and-craftsy style; there are whimsically patterned curtains on the windows, yellow walls, and a colorfully tiled fireplace. Beyond the tiny kitchen, outfitted only with an ancient four-burner range and some unfinished shelves that hold a tin or two of sardines and several jars of jam and relish, an open laptop takes pride of place on the living room table. But O’Faolain is eager to sh
ow me her pièce de résistance—a new bathroom with a shower that she had installed in the past year. She leads me to it, practically crowing with pleasure, and the two of us stare at it with a reverence usually reserved for great works of art.

  O’Faolain was the second oldest of nine children who grew up in rural County Dublin in a family that looked richly cultured—“My mother read all the time,” she recalls in her memoir, “and my father taught us the words of German songs, and we played extracts from Swan Lake on the gramophone”—but was, in fact, haphazard and impoverished. Her father was a celebrity, a debonair society columnist with a car and driver. He was also an inveterate philanderer who was rarely home, treated his desperately smitten wife like a dependent child, pummeled his sons, and kept his family in a humiliatingly penurious state. Her mother—whom O’Faolain refers to as Mammy—was both undomestic and unmaternal and retreated into the solace of novels and alcohol. Gestures of affection were rare (“I can’t remember my mother ever picking one of us up of her own accord,” she says), and over the years the household became ever more dilapidated, with the younger siblings increasingly left to fend for themselves. One of her little sisters once went to school without underpants on; another languished at home with untreated TB for over a year, until a family friend noticed and took her to the sanitarium.

  O’Faolain talks with a kind of detached sorrow about her siblings, some of whom she doesn’t speak to anymore. She is closest with her sister Deirdre, a mother of seven who lives with her husband in a cramped row house without central heating in working-class Dublin. She describes the chronic emotional struggles of two other sisters but seems most saddened by the plight of her brother Don, who wasted his “brilliant potential” in a futile search for their father’s approval and systematically drank himself to death by his early forties.

  On the surface, O’Faolain was the one who got away, triumphing over the circumstances of her background on the strength of her charm and wits. Her close friend Marian Finucane, who is the host of Ireland’s most popular morning radio show and has known O’Faolain for twenty years, credits her great “survival skills.” Finucane and I talk over an elegant lunch in a restaurant across from St. Stephen’s Green, in a building that was part of University College Dublin (UCD) back when James Joyce was a student there; it was on the building’s top floor that the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins expired. “When we were all stamped out of the same cloth,” Finucane explains, “Nuala O’Faolain was different. She took the bravest route all the time.” From the start, O’Faolain shone academically, winning scholarships to University College and then to Oxford. In her thirties, after teaching briefly in the English department at UCD, she became a television producer for the BBC, filming innovative shows on volatile subjects—religious sects, pornography, transsexuals.

  But although O’Faolain had succeeded in moving forward by never looking homeward, her achievements failed to assuage the bleakness she carried with her. With her trademark bluntness, she describes her thirties as “a wasteland of misery and loss and mourning and drinking.” She spent much of this period, which culminated in a psychiatric hospitalization in the wake of her father’s death, as an emotional “derelict,” boozing away her demons in a Dublin basement flat. In spite of the early recognition she received for her intellectual abilities, O’Faolain considers herself “a very late starter” when it comes to life skills. She learned to drive when she was forty (she failed the test three times, and her instructor was on Valium, “presumably,” she says, “because of women like me”), took her first swimming lesson at fifty, and promised herself that she’d learn to use a computer and get a dog by the time she was fifty-five. While other women bemoan their lost youth, she considers her fifties to have been her prime. “I went into the phone booth and came out Lois Lane. It was the first time I lifted my head above the storm and dust that obscured everything. Until then, I had just gone from one day to the next.”

  * * *

  These days, O’Faolain is a national celebrity and a powerful presence on the Irish literary scene. She divides her time between the country, her apartment in Dublin, and, increasingly, months-long intervals in Manhattan. As I stroll with her along Dublin’s busy Grafton Street one afternoon, we bump into several people who greet her, including a dashingly dressed man whom she introduces as the city’s “best hairdresser and a great gossip.”

  Within the past year, O’Faolain has moved on to writing a more personal column—“Regarding Ireland”—on whatever catches her fancy, for the Saturday magazine supplement to The Irish Times. A recent column was inspired by a new set of capped teeth she acquired in New York, which feat of dentistry led her to meditate upon differences in national character as seen through the prism of attitudes toward self-improvement. Noting that Americans wholeheartedly embrace “looking like a winner,” she pokes wry fun at the Irish for their “fidelity to natural decay” and goes on to upbraid them for their persistent, religiously instilled allegiance to the Last Day instead of the present one. “You’re supposed to assert your gritty authenticity,” she observes, “by a display of yellowing, crooked, brownish bits and pieces of teeth that have the amazing merit of being untouched by the 20th century.”

  On my last morning in Dublin, O’Faolain uses some of her newly acquired clout to get a dusty employee of the National Library of Ireland to give us an advance peek at the Joyce manuscript recently purchased for $1.5 million at Christie’s. She stares with shining eyes at the precious pages of carefully annotated prose from the “Circe” section of Ulysses; they are preserved between sheets of plastic and covered with Joyce’s small, slanty script. “This is the greatest moment of my life,” O’Faolain says.

  Shortly thereafter, we say goodbye in front of my hotel, where she has locked her bicycle to the railing. As I stand there, watching as she rides off to a TV interview, her back ramrod straight, her red interview jacket neatly folded in the basket, I’m suddenly reminded of my first sight of her several days earlier. She had come rushing toward me in the early-morning gloom of Shannon Airport, an hour late to fetch me, calling my name wildly and apologizing in the same breath. Dressed with youthful stylishness in leggings and a pink cashmere scarf flung over a black plush jacket, she stood out among the weary-looking locals like a vivid apparition.

  O’Faolain has traveled far on her cleverness, her ambition, her insistence on being heard. It’s odd, then, that given all this hurtling life force, this hard-won happiness, my strongest impression of the writer is that she is running backward—toward the defeated mother of her childhood and toward the Ireland of the past, a desolate country of broken men and broken women. In one of her Times columns she described pubs, with the trembling sense of awe most people feel for holy wells and churches, as “numinous spaces.” Although O’Faolain assures me that she gets drunk these days only “from exuberance,” when I ask her how she envisions her future, she says she sees herself as a shapeless old woman in a tweed coat held together with string, ten empty beer bottles at her side. “I can’t wait to be an old lady,” she says. “I’m dying to wither up so I can stop hurting.” And then she adds, almost dreamily, “I’m going to live in a pub as soon as I get the old-age pension. Old ladies are always treated with great respect in pubs.”

  POSTSCRIPT

  Nuala O’Faolain died at the age of sixty-eight, in May 2008, of cancer. She and I had remained in touch after my New York Times Magazine essay about her came out and met intermittently when she was in New York, where she spent part of the year, living in Brooklyn and teaching. I always felt a deep connection with her based on our shared experience of difficult backgrounds (although they were difficult in very different ways), a common streak of depression, and our mutual love of reading and writing. One of the last times I saw her was when she came to hear me read from a memoir I was working on, to which she had a characteristically empathic response. She went on to publish several more books, one of which—a memoir titled Almost There—I read in manuscript form and had s
ome apprehensions about, not least because of her frankly critical view of the over-doting relationship between the man she was living with and his young daughter. In the event, the book got mixed reviews.

  Nuala gave an emotionally charged and deeply moving radio interview with Marian Finucane a month before she died, in which she spoke openly about her anger at her life being cut short: “I don’t want more time. As soon as I heard I was going to die, the goodness went from life.” I discovered after her death, much to my surprise, that Nuala had left me (among a select group of others) a small gift of money, which I took as a token of her expansive nurturing impulses. I miss her incalculably.

  ILLUMINATING THE ORDINARY

  ALICE MUNRO

  2004

  It is a brilliantly clear Saturday afternoon in early September, one of those days when the blueness of the sky seems to be set off to luminous effect by drifting puffs of cloud. Time slows down everywhere at this hour on a cusp-of-fall weekend, but here in Clinton, Ontario—a somnolent slip of a town (population thirty-five hundred) that is easy to miss after a three-hour drive from Toronto during which you pass nothing but mile after flat mile of fields punctuated by grazing cows and horses—the stillness is so vast that it seems almost cautionary.

  This area, southwest of Toronto and east of Lake Huron, is Alice Munro country, a place that the acclaimed Canadian writer has described as crucial to her: “It means something to me that no other country can—no matter how important historically that other country may be, how ‘beautiful,’ how lively and interesting. I am intoxicated by this particular landscape. I am at home with the brick houses, the falling-down barns, the trailer parks, burdensome old churches, Walmart and Canadian Tire. I speak the language.” Thanks to Munro’s unparalleled ability to evoke the condition of felt life at both its most essential and its most particular—the “sudden holes and impromptu tricks and radiant vanishing consolations,” as characterized in her story “Carried Away”—her terrain has become totemic, as real and familiar as our own backyards and avenues, to a rapt and ever-growing audience of readers.