‘Delighted,’ grateful, O’Faolain savors success of first novel

By Peter McDermott

There are those who will envy writer Nuala O’Faolain dividing her time among homes in Manhattan, Dublin and County Clare. They shouldn’t, in her view.

"I don’t envy me," said O’Faolain, who has spent the winter months in New York City since the publication here in 1998 of her critically acclaimed and best-selling memoir, "Are You Somebody?" She’s used much of that time to write her first novel, "My Dream of You," which has just been published.

"What I’ve made is a life full of peripheral good things because I feel the center of it is very empty and lonely," she said. "I’m getting better and better at furnishing a fairly solitary life with life-giving things, like the cat and the dog, and landscape and acquaintances and friends."

The cat and dog, though, are ,3000 miles apart.

"It’s all Britain’s fault, to coin a phrase," she said, holding the cat, Owl, a Himalayan.

The six-month quarantine for pets coming into Ireland is a precaution against Continental and North American rabies. O’Faolain read an article recently that took issue with that strict law. The British authorities believe, the piece reported, that the last case was caused by a French bat 26 years ago. "The article said: ‘How did they know it was a French bat? Was it wearing a beret?’ " O’Faolain said. "Well it means that I can’t bring the cat home, and I can’t bring the dog here."

Her stays in New York began as a temporary arrangement. New York University’s Ireland House helped her get her small apartment near Washington Square and she went cat-hunting at the animal shelter. Her continuing to come back is not dependent upon the success of the novel, though it would make it easier.

"One way or another, no matter what happens, I’m building New York into my life," O’Faolain said.

"I love the winters here, they’re so dramatic. They’re very low and gray at home. Here when it’s cold it doesn’t take the energy out of the air. But it’s not really because of the weather; it’s because of people and attitudes. New York is such a good addition to Ireland," she added. "It’s the perfect complement to Ireland. The one place has virtues that the other hasn’t got."

O’Faolain said that her first book appeared in the U.S. was due to a series of accidents.

It was a "complete fluke" arising, first of all, out of a pub conversation between a group of school friends, she said. One of them was the wife of an employee of O’Faolain’s Irish publisher; the other a woman home on vacation from Boston. The latter had a friend who had just been fired from his publishing job in New York and had some time on his hands.

"He took it around until a publisher offered a very modest sum for it," O’Faolain said. "We didn’t have an agent or know anything at all about American publishing, or the importance of the New York Times."

She believes that the positive reception her memoir got in that paper’s Sunday books section was crucial to its becoming a surprise best-seller.

"It got a wonderful review from a very young and stylish Englishwoman called Zoe Heller," she said. Heller identified a new sub-genre: the "ever-so-writerly" account of a lousy childhood; O’Faolain, though, had written a memoir, the reviewer said, "with more genuine, painful candor in it than all the modish, scandalous confessions of recent years put together." She concluded her piece with the words: "This book has to be read."

"That was wonderfully gratifying," O’Faolain said.

Its success in Ireland came in an entirely different way. It was due largely, she believes, to her appearance on "The Late Late Show" when it was hosted by Gay Byrne.

"I think that on that night on the ‘Late Late,’ the audience began to feel for me and that Gaybo brilliantly picked up on those signals, and it was a memorable interview," O’Faolain said.

"I’m very glad that what’s happened to me, because if the book had been presented to the literary world, I think it would have been strangled at birth. But it went from me to the telly and from the telly to people," she said. "What are wrongly called ‘ordinary people’ will buy something they understand from the telly, but they’re not reading the books pages of the newspapers."

O’Faolain, a respected and well-liked journalist, had reason to fear a hostile reception from some of her peers in the print media. She recounts in her memoir the columnist Eamon Dunphy pouring scorn on her for suggesting in an interview years before that she was poor when she was a student. There were no students from poor homes in University College Dublin in 1960, Dunphy contended, and besides, her late father, known by his pen-name, Terry O’Sullivan, was one of Ireland’s most celebrated journalists.

She’d asked that fewer than 2,000 copies of the book be printed, fearing that she would see it in on the sale shelves within months, the fate of many worthy books published in Ireland each year.

Striking a chord

But there’d been a precedent for success, even before Frank McCourt’s "Angela’s Ashes." In 1986, the memoir of socialist politician Dr. Noel Browne, "Against the Tide," which included a searing account of how tuberculosis cut a swath through his family, was hugely popular. By 1996, the public was ready for her story of an alcoholic woman, her philandering husband and their nine emotionally neglected children — a dark family saga, which, like Browne’s, was a comment of the society of its time.

The book struck a chord with women in particular and many wrote thanking her and telling her their own stories.

In the end the book was hailed by Irish critics both at home and abroad. What one praised as a "brilliant literary memoir," O’Faolain herself calls "a very ordinary account of a human life, which had nothing going for it except that it was honest."

That it could "leap over an ocean and across a culture" must be attributed in part to the success of "Angela’s Ashes," she believes.

"I’m sure I benefited from that," she said. The very success of "Angela’s Ashes," rather than its content, is emblematic of the new image of the Irish and Ireland in America these days, she said she feels.

"The Irish began to be winners with Frank McCourt, "Riverdance," Sinead O’Connor and Neil Jordan," she said.

It’s rather changed from the time, decades before, when American novelist and critic Mary McCarthy told her that whenever she was on a stopover at Shannon Airport, she wouldn’t get off the plane for fear "the bog would suck her down."

Nowadays, O’Faolain writes a column for the Saturday magazine of the Irish Times, much of which is a meditation on the cultural differences between Ireland and New York. Or rather Manhattan, she stresses. Her experience of Queens, like Mary McCarthy’s of Ireland, is confined to an airport.

It was as a columnist for the Times that she became widely known. O’Faolain, now 60, though she looks considerably younger, has also had a career making programs for Irish and British television.

Before that she had a brief career as an academic teaching English literature at her alma mater, UCD. Books have always been at the center of her life. Even her feminism, which was learned through her experience rather than theory, was reinforced by American novels, notably "The Women’s Room," by Marilyn French, and Marge Piercey’s "Woman at the End of Time."

"We used to pass them around in Dublin wrapped up in newspaper, from one woman to another. They were terribly important," she remembered. "Before then there was Doris Lessing’s ‘The Golden Notebook.’

"I don’t have any literary heroes," she said. "But I look back with great gratitude on various nuns who were English teachers.

"There’s a certain type of kid who’s too imaginative and they’re always getting into trouble and always late, and they tell lies. I was that type of child. The English teacher likes them because they write great essays.

"Through my tangled school career I never felt valued except through the English teacher. So that makes a huge difference," she added.

"It’s not that shocking that in middle age I should try to write. It’s almost the only thing I have any confidence about."

However, she never wrote fiction until she began her novel two years ago.

"Not a word, Not a line. Not even the usual tortured adolescent stuff. No, I never wanted to; it never crossed my mind," she said. "It became clear, though, that someone was going to give me a lot of money if I did write another book. And I thought: ‘I don’t know how to, but I might as well try.

"I found it difficult at first as a journalist, I didn’t know where the boundaries were," she said. However, her journalistic skills were useful to her in developing an internal story line that is based on a real divorce case of the 1850s

"I think the novel begins in the same voice as the memoir because I didn’t know how to create a new voice, but it gradually takes on a different atmosphere and voice by chapter two, to my amazement. I’m delighted," she said.

"Kathleen, my heroine, took off in a direction I hadn’t even foreseen. She’s quite different from me and makes different decisions from me."

The pacing demands that more happens on every page. "So it’s not a sentimental thing saying, ‘My characters have a life of their own’; it’s a technical thing," she said.

So far the omens for "A Dream of You" look good. For example, the writer has garnered another favorable review in the New York Times.

O’Faolain, currently on a 17-city U.S. tour, is fascinated by the mechanics of selling a book in the United States. Fielding a number of calls from her publisher, in the course of an interview, about the next city and an upcoming review, she said: "It’s very efficient."