Nuala O’Faolain
Before Nuala O’Faolain, the Irish journalist and author, passed away in Dublin in 2008 from lung cancer, I was fortunate enough to meet her at a college event. She turned to me at the dinner table and whispered, “I’m going back to my room for some quiet – there’s too much talking here.” Having read her memoir Are You Somebody (1996) I understood how much she valued solitude even when, sometimes, she wrestled to heartbreaking terms with it. And my old college mealtimes could be a bit of an ordeal, and not just gastronomically.
Her mother had been an alcoholic trapped in the straitjacket of the 1950s, “condemned to spend her life as a mother and a homemaker. She was in the wrong job.” Some of her mother’s peers were content to spend years comparing twin-tub washing-machines and prams, while others lived lives of suppressed fury, blaming their husbands for their unrealized potential, “half censorious, half wistful” when they came across an unmarried woman. My mother, too, lived a life of suppressed fury and was “forever sending children to the shops,” (right, Susan, now mind – six eggs, brown loaf, tin of Heinz beans).
O’Faolain described her difficult Irish childhood without exaggeration or self-pity, looking back with clear-eyed consideration, and gently upbraids her own foolishness––the foolishness of waiting for that married man to divorce his wife and marry her; the foolishness of falling in love with your own country as an adult. “I knew a lot about England,” she says, “I knew almost nothing about Ireland.” A few years after meeting her, I returned home to discover my own country, having come to the same conclusion.
The last few pages of her memoir offer some of the best writing I’ve ever read about loneliness––to be “nobody’s mother, nobody’s wife, nobody’s lover. My problems are banal only because so many people share them.” One of my own fears over losing my husband is that I would have ““no right companion to marvel at the world with,” no-one to turn to, daily, and say, “Look? Did you see that?” It’s a human impulse to want to share a sensation with others, but I think it’s strongest in writers. And, like O’Faolain, I would have made a lousy mother in my twenties. And yet, like O’Faolain, I’d presumed (not entirely accurately) that “I’d be a good mother now. Too late … Sometimes I have to look away from small children. They’re too beautiful to bear.”
I admit it; I had a wee bubble at the end of her memoir. And, after hearing of her passing, I had a wee bubble all over again. And here I am, years later, now a flawed mother fighting to protect some solitude, keeping her melancholy company.
