OBITUARY:NUALA O'FAOLAIN was a highly successful columnist, broadcaster and award-winning producer, but she will be remembered best for her memoir, the international bestseller Are You Somebody?
The intimate and painfully honest memoir almost happened by chance, after editor Tony Glavin asked if he could compile a book of her columns, accompanied by a personal introduction.
This introduction grew into Are You Somebody?which recalled an impoverished childhood and an often difficult and lonely adult life. It spoke of her sense of disappointment that she had reached her mid-50s after a series of failed relationships with no partner, children or other accomplishments to speak of.
"I sneaked out my autobiography when no one was looking," she later said. "My unconscious recognised a chance."
She appeared on The Late Late Showwhen the book was published and recalled how the host Gay Byrne had opened the interview by observing that she had slept with a lot of men. She retorted that only three of them had ever mattered, "which is modest for a woman of my age".
But the tone of the interview shifted and she later described the 20-minute interview as one of the highlights of her life "because I did reach down to a rare honesty for it".
She also spoke about her uneasy relationship with alcohol in her younger years, and her 15-year relationship with journalist and author Nell McCafferty.
The interview drew a huge response from the public and many book shops sold the books directly from the wholesalers' boxes because they did not have time to put them on the shelves. The memoir spent 20 weeks at number one in the Irish best-seller lists and also topped the New York Timesbest-seller list. O'Faolain estimated that she received about 5,000 letters from all over the world afterwards.
"It really, really hit some kind of nerve and it changed my life, and I think it matters a lot to an awful lot of people," she later recalled.
She followed it with a novel, My Dream of You, and a second memoir, Almost There. Her final book, The Story of Chicago May, was published in 2005.
Nuala O'Faolain was born in north Dublin on March 1st, 1940, the second in a family of nine children. Her father, a debonair journalist, wrote the popular Dubliner's Diary society column in the Evening Pressunder the pen name Terry O'Sullivan. "He was a dapper, clever, reticent man and he treated the family as if he had met them at a cocktail party," O'Faolain wrote in her memoir. Her mother emerged as a tragic figure, struggling to make ends meet and sinking into alcoholism.
Nuala attended St Louis's girls boarding school in Monaghan after being expelled from a convent school for wild behaviour when she was 13.
With the financial help of writer Mary Lavin, she studied English at University College Dublin. She moved in literary circles, sharing a boarding house room with poet Patrick Kavanagh and spending time with writers such as John McGahern, Kingsley Amis, Louis MacNeice and Seamus Heaney.
She studied medieval English literature at the University of Hull before earning a postgraduate degree in English from Oxford. She lectured at UCD and then left to work as a TV producer for the BBC.
O'Faolain returned to Ireland in the late 1970s and got a job with RTÉ. She worked on a series of women's programmes and was presented with a a Jacob's Award in 1986 for a series on older women called Plain Tales.
She was invited to write an opinion column in The Irish Timesby then assistant editor Conor Brady, and the popular columns continued for more than a decade, including a move to Belfast to observe the return of normality to Northern Ireland.
The success of Are You Somebody?led to her move to New York to write a novel and she went on to write a column for the Sunday Tribuneand to do a regular slot on RTÉ radio about the US elections.
She was diagnosed with cancer on February 8th this year and revealed news of the terminal illness on her friend Marian Finucane's Saturday morning radio show last month.
In the interview, O'Faolain told how she had no idea she was sick until she noticed that her right side was dragging slightly. Cat scans and X-rays found primary lung tumours and secondary brain tumours. The cancer had also spread to her liver. "I couldn't deal with it. I was so shocked," she recalled, "and it took me a long time to work my way a little bit out of shock."
She was living in Manhattan at the time and decided to return to Ireland where she underwent radiation. She had planned to have 18 weeks of chemotherapy but discontinued treatment because of side effects.
"Whether it's the disease or the brain radiation, [it] reduced me to such feelings of impotence and wretchedness and sourness with life, and fear, that I decided against [the treatment]," she said.
She added that aggressive treatment could have given her some time. "Even if I gained time through the chemotherapy, it isn't time I want because as soon as I knew that I was going to die soon, the goodness went out of life."
Like the Late Late Showinterview, the radio interview generated a huge public response, particularly because of her frankness in talking about a terminal illness.
In the interview she spoke about the sadness in leaving her Manhattan apartment for the last time and mentioned that she had loved her yellow silk curtains. Several radio listeners contacted her, offering to go to her apartment to fetch them.
She told friends she was overwhelmed by the reaction to the interview and had hoped to do a second one with Finucane.
She travelled extensively in her final weeks, only arriving back from Sicily last Sunday night. She was admitted to the Blackrock hospice on Friday and died late that night.
O'Faolain is survived by her partner, John Low-Beer of Brooklyn, and by six brothers and sisters - Gráinne, Deirdre, Terry, Noreen, Marian and Niamh. She was predeceased by two brothers, Don and Dermot.