Author(s): Nuala O'Faolain

Biography & Memoir

In 1966, a small Irish press approached Nuala O'Faolin, then a writer for The Irish Times, to publish a collection of her opinion columns. She offered to write an introduction to give the opinions a context - to explain the life experience that had shaped this Irish woman's views - and, convinced that none but a few diehard fans of the columns would ever see the book, she took the opportunity to interrogate herself, as fully and candidly as she could, about what she had made of her life. But the introduction, The Accidental Memoir of a Dublin Woman, was discovered, and Are You Somebody? became an international bestseller. It launched a new life for its author at a time when she had long let go of expectations that anything new could dislodge patters of regret and solitude well fixed and too familiar. In Almost There, she begins her story from the moment her life began to change, in all manner of ways - subtle, radical, predictable, and unforeseen.