Nuala O'Faolain

"The Invitation
Oriah Mountain Dreamer"
Canadian Teacher and Author

It doesn't interest me what you do for a living
I want to know what you ache for
and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart's longing.

It doesn't interest me how old you are
I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool
for love
for your dreams
for the adventure of being alive.

It doesn't interest me what planets are squaring your moon...
I want to know if you have touched the center of your own sorrow
if you have been opened by life's betrayals
or have become shrivelled and closed
from fear of further pain.

I want to know if you can sit with pain
mine or your own
without moving to hide it
or fade it
or fix it.

I want to know if you can be with joy
mine or your own
if you can dance with wildness
and let the ecstasy fill you to the tips of your
fingers and toes
without cautioning us to
be careful
be realistic
to remember the limitations of being human.

It doesn't interest me if the story you are telling me
is true.
I want to know if you can
disappoint another
to be true to yourself.
If you can bear the accusation of betrayal
and not betray your own soul.
If you can be faithless
and therefore trustworthy.

I want to know if you can see Beauty
even when it is not pretty
every day.
And if you can source your own life
from its presence.

I want to know if you can live with failure
yours and mine
and still stand on the edge of the lake
and shout to the silver of the full moon,
"Yes."

It doesn't interest me
to know where you live or how much money you have.
I want to know if you can get up
after a night of grief and despair
weary and bruised to the bone
and do what needs to be done
to feed the children.

It doesn't interest me who you know
or how you came to be here.
I want to know if you will stand
in the center of the fire
with me
and not shrink back.

It doesn't interest me where or what or with whom
you have studied.
I want to know what sustains you
from the inside
when all else falls away.

I want to know if you can be alone
with yourself
and if you truly like the company you keep
in the empty moments.

I have just discovered this wonderful person and her book, relishing every word of Are you Somebody; I savoured every observation, emotion and description of life that she wrote. I love how I walk into a library full of books and one jumps of the shelf or calls my name. What a remarkable lovely person. I am a couple of years too late to write to the author as I like to do when I finish an exception book. My heart sings and breaks at the same time and my life feels so enriched having being touched by her. So I leave this note here for the universe.

I met Nuala in 1997 when I was a journalism student and she blew me away with her tigerish honesty! There was always something strangely vulnerable about her too and she had an incredible ability to make people listen. She was a total breath of fresh air. We kept in touch and she became a solid influence over the years...agreeing to be my referee on an MA in Creative Writing at Queen's, which encouraged me to go forward with my own writing. She always made me laugh out loud which is a rare quality. She is hugely missed. I wrote an article about her in The Guardian after she died: www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2008/may/14/women.books

I am prompted to share a few thoughts about Nuala after reading her wonderful final novel, "Best Love, Rosie". I have read her other books, but in many ways in this final book she lays bare her soul more fully than ever. It is a kind of fictional autobiography, which allows her imagination free rein. As I read the book, I was reminded of writers such as Proust, who was one of Nuala's favourites, and James Joyce, especially the Joyce of "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man". "Best Love, Rosie" is itself a wonderfully evocative and precise account of someone attempting to make sense of her life and to create meaning and happiness. One of the things I especially value in this book and in her other books is her honesty. She is aware how her own childhood insecurities always threaten to undermine her adult relationships. I think it was this sense of sorrow and loss that coloured her childhood, that motivated her in her search for coherence and contentment and beauty. Nuala loved life in all its mystery and contradictions. I think that in the end she finally came to love and accept her own unique self.

Nuala O'Faolain me manque comme un ami peut manquer.
Ses livres, en particulier "Almost there", m'ont touchée par leur honnêteté, leur originalité, leur intelligence et surtout leur humanisme : une amie m'écrivait.
Sa dernière interview, écoutée à la RTE, m'a bouleversée profondément. Une fois encore, cette femme que je ne connaissais pas, m'apparaissait comme une amie. COMME UNE AMIE.
(Française, je comprends et lis l'anglais mais l'écris mal. Veuillez m'excuser)

Nuala's interview reminded me of this extract from John McGahern's wonderful 'Memoir.'

"The world of the dying is different. When well, they may have sometimes wondered in momentary fear or idle apprehension, what this Time would bring, the shape it would take, whether by age or accident, stroke or cancer ... the list is long. Then that blinding fear could be dismissed as idle introspection. an impairment to the constant alertness needed to answer all the demands of the day. Inevitably, the dreaded and discarded time arrives and has its own shape: the waitress pouring coffee at tables, the builder laying blocks, a girl opening a window, the men collecting refuse, belong to a world that went mostly unregarded when it was ours but now becomes a place of unobtainable happiness, in even the meanest of forms. The truth of what the ghost of Achilles spoke to Odysseus from the underworld takes on a new poignancy: 'Speak not soothingly to me of death, Oh glorious Odysseus. I would choose so that I might live on earth to be the servant of a penniless man than to be lord over all the dead.' "

This is surely a reminder to all of us to savour the sweetness of life in all its richness and simplicity.

Like so many people around the country I heard and was profoundly moved by Marian Finucane’s Saturday morning interview with Nuala O’Faolain just over a year ago, shortly before she died. Again like many other listeners - and I’ve heard lots of people say it since - I was only half listening to the radio, pottering around the house catching up on the domestic things that have to get done if you have a Monday to Friday job. Suddenly across the country, unaware that they had become part of a hushed national collective, hundreds of thousand of people stopped what they were doing and began to listen intently to the remainder of the programme. I never before (or since) heard anyone talk so honestly and directly about death; in this case not just death in the abstract but her own death which Nuala knew by then was imminent. It would be too strong to say that the interview changed my life but, at least for a few days, it changed my attitude to how I view the remainder of my own life, never mind the lives of the people I love and know.

About a week ago I was half listening to the radio when again I heard Nuala’s name mentioned. I pricked my ears and heard an actor read an extract from a newly-published anthology of writing intended for senior secondary school pupils. It was an Irish Times piece by Nuala from a few years ago, this time about birth. Nuala had spent a night in the National Maternity Hospital - where the latest member of my own extended family was born a month ago - following the arrival into this world of a new little Wicklow boy. With crystal clarity Nuala described the human mystery of birth just as she had also done with the mystery of death.

I didn’t know Nuala O’Faolain, but almost felt I did. Over many years I had read or heard her extraordinarily honest views on so many topics, many of them about the most intimate realities of her own life, such as her unconventional love for another woman as well as men, and the difficult relationship with her father, the socialite Terry O’Sullivan, who people of my generation knew as the epitome of glamour in de Valera’s Ireland. She was always marvellous and often very funny, especially in her articulation of the emotions that arise from our dealings with other people. All of these matters are very difficult for most of us to think - let alone, speak – about. We are very lucky that people like Nuala are with us to help, even if they leave us before we’ve heard all they have to say.

I remember reading 'Are You Somebody?' on the bus to Dublin to see my Father who was in hospital at the time and finding great solace and inspiration from the book, in many ways. The love and honesty of Nuala's words were both spirited and compelling and I became encouraged in a manner that I had not before. Her loss has been and will be greatly missed and her memory lives on bright and inspiring. Thank-you. Ina grá agus dia le deas.

I was a big admirer of Nuala’s columns in the Irish Times. She addressed all the big political, religious, social and sexual issues affecting Irish society in the eighties. She sometimes confronted us with issues we thought didn’t affect us but always did so with humour. She had her finger on the Irish pulse. She understood the Irish psyche and wrote from that perspective in her own inimitable and lyrical style.


Ní fheicfear níos mó thú, a mhuirnín,
Gan do ghlór le cluinstin lenár saol
Nuair a thigeas na blátha san Earrach
Agus binncheol na n-éanach ar gach taobh

The Intricate Rented World
by Polly Devlin


A very little while ago — only yesterday but already a lifetime — I
went to a concert in Carnegie Hall to hear Schubert’s "Death and the
Maiden," a piece to which there is paradoxically no end. It is
unfathomable. Schubert was nearing the end of his life when he wrote it,
and he knew what was approaching him in all its ineluctable dread.

I was there with my funny intemperate and beloved friend Nuala
O’Faolain. She had been in County Clare getting radiotherapy for her
cancer, and I was in New York, but nevertheless in the middle of this
horrible time she had flown over to say goodbye to her friends in New
York and to hear music this one last time. One last time.

At the best of times you listen to live music with attention. But
you cannot sit beside someone you love who is dying by inches in front
of your eyes and listen to the "Death and the Maiden" without being
affected beyond words, so I will say no more about it.

I will, though, say more about her. I loved her. I never met a truer
or keener intelligence. I never met anyone who could teach me about the
ecstasy and meaning of music as she did, though she would have been
bashful if she heard me about this. She was so chary of her own
talents, this brilliant writer, and failed to recognize their extent.

She could be wide-eyed about the most ordinary of social things. She always insisted she had no social graces and loved any arcane
example of ritual behaviour and was gleeful at social pretension. Her
stay among certain women in County Down in Northern Ireland gave her
much pleasure in that direction, but she always trod a thin wire
between despair and joy and, alas, grief ran taut throughout her life.

God, how she could write:

"The way country lanes are in Ireland at this time of
year came into my head when I read that John McGahern was dead — such
a beautiful time, with life bursting out through the flowers of the
blackthorn and the vigorous singing of the small birds, and the earth
and ourselves moving forward, the great round starting off again.
Except for the dead, who have to stay behind. John’s funeral procession
will make its way through a landscape of newly green little fields.
He’d have known every detail of them. He was
one with the place where he lived as few people are. And he was a man,
to paraphrase Hardy, who used to notice such things.

Yet when I think of him I think of the rainy, shadowy, dark-grey
Dublin of his youth and mine, where the golden light from pubs was
almost the only light along the quiet streets. "

There were women in her life who were more important to her than me
–- her sisters, Nell McCafferty, Marian Finucane, oh, many others, but
I warrant no one loved her more. What am I going to do without her?

She was funny, impatient, demanding, alchemic; going shopping with
her, which I often did, was a nightmare, and there was much flouncing
and screaming and then the calm that passeth all understanding when she
found –- or more generally when I found — something that she liked.

There was no one more generous, with time, with affection and care
and temper with money — I don’t think anyone except Marion Finucane
knows, for example, what she did for women in Africa and their children
with AIDS.

She was ironic. She deflected emotion, she couldn’t bear
compliments, she thought the worse of her self, she refused to see she
was pretty, she had a way of ducking her head when she was told she was
loved -– as if to say, "Ah, don’t say it." She didn’t see herself at
all as the world saw her. She didn’t perceive her own beauty yet saw it
so fast in everyone else.

She was straight as a die and had a fantastic critical mind. I would
ask her, say, about Henry James and she would stop — she’d halt at
such times, quivering with excitement to tell me exactly how great he
was. Or I’d say, "Have you read Colm Tobín on Hart Crane?" And she’d
burst to a halt and I knew she was talking about someone she revered.

We spent time together in isolated places and away from people; or,
rather, isolated from our usual daily lives and loves and friends. We
spent a week in Aspen in Colorado on a literary festival, the snowy
mountains towering above us, and that was the first time I found how
active she was, how much she got done. Lord, how she could bustle.

Left to myself, I would have walked ’round the town or gone to a
concert or read. Not Nuala. She did all those things, too, at breakneck
speed, but she also hired bicycles and we cycled for miles discovering
lakes and forests. And all the time there was her talk — evidence of
that original true mind of such raving intelligence and integrity.

Then we spent a month together at the McDowell Writing Colony in
darkest, snowiest New Hampshire, and I have a vivid memory of her
running down Peterborough High Street in the snow with tiny steps like
a geisha in a red woolly hat; why was there so often snow around?

We were together in New York, always from January to May — she
sometimes teaching at Bennington, and me up at Barnard. And in all
these places where we saw a lot of each other, I have endless visual
images of her larking about. No one could do larking –- or despondency
-– better, or being apocalyptic, joyless, joyful. It was often
extremes. I’d have a glass of wine; she wouldn’t. "I don’t see any
point in drinking unless you drink too much," she said, dead primly.


Not long ago we hired bikes, again, and took a fast ferry to New
Jersey for 45 glorious, scudding, sunny minutes, with Manhattan
receding under the Verrazano bridge, to Sandy Hook, where the criminals
and insane landed before being allowed to go to Ellis Island and where
she set part of her book "The Story of Chicago May."

It was a little bit of dreamy lost archetypal America, and we were
cycling all innocent alongside the ocean in the sunshine when the
weather came up over the horizon without warning and slammed us off our
bikes. Freezing hail and ripping wind tore our clothes half off. In the
space of five or six minutes, we were wet through — our knickers and
bras sopping wet, our shoes gushing, our bodies streaming water. We had
by chance brought plastic macs. Nuala got her head stuck in a sleeve,
like a pink condom, and I couldn’t get her out of it.

You couldn’t see much through the rain, but I could see her two
desperate eyes staring out of the pink sheath and her lips under the
plastic shaping the words, "For fucks sake, get me outta here," but I
had gotten myself lost in a big brown poncho and looked like something
DHL had dropped out of the back of a van. And, in any case, we were
laughing so much that we couldn’t help each other, that hysterical
laughter that incapacitates.

We pushed back with real difficulty to a clam house where there was
no heating and wrapped as much of ourselves as we could in towels
without breaking the decency code and frightening the horses. We hung
our clothes out to drip onto the wet porch where they got much wetter.
I had my first steamed clams, which was one of the best meals I’ve ever
had.

We both loved dogs and missed ours when we were away. She wrote
about her beloved mutt Molly’s reaction when she got home to Clare:

"It was enough to make me weep. she was so beside
herself. I got out of the car and whistled and she hurtled up the lane,
and she’s a fat little thing, but her little muddy legs blurred
practically and then she wouldn’t leave me. Even in the shower she sat
outside looking through the glass. I face 5 months without her. I don’t
know how to bear it."

She used to fret that Molly would outlive her, but Molly died last year.

She seemed to know everything but wore it lightly and was never
didactic. She had a great sweetness of nature mixed in with general
fury and extraordinary intellectual capacities. I’ve never met anyone
who was so well read, and she could be hysterically funny. The English
class system made her angry — she lived for years with an upper-class
Englishman and got know their deeply prejudiced little ways, and would
say, prodding me, "You beat them at their own game." And I would nod
happily, delighted to be ratified in any way by her, even though I
discerned vaguely that it was at best an ambivalent compliment.

I don’t think I’ll ever come across another woman who brought such
vivid apprehensions of daily life, such energy, quickness, delight,
profound knowledge of the arts, literature, music, passionate feelings,
surprise and pleasure to living as she did. You could never be bored
for an instant with her around, though you could be alarmed by a
freakish change of mood.

She wrote to me not long before the diagnosis of her illness:

"Maybe it’s the season but black anxiety wakes me up too.
Though, like you, I know how fortunate I am and can count all the
things up. And I try to pray. I think it becomes too hard, the whole
thing, Poll. I think time loads too much on us. And we have to
negotiate our way into grey hair and dumpiness and of course that
breaks a woman’s heart. The only answer I know is to turn out from
ourselves. Work is part of this. And you have such a family, and
friends, such opportunity."

I was with her on Super Tuesday night. We were having supper in
her apartment, and I saw she was walking funnily and asked her what was
wrong. She said she had been exercising too much, and I laughed fit to
bust because Nuala never exercises. But she insisted no, no, she had
turned over a new leaf and knew now for the first time that what she
wanted was a beautiful old age with cats and dogs and Proust and then
to spend time in Clare and Dublin and Brooklyn with her friends and
John, her partner.

I was so sure it was a trapped nerve, but the next day (so short a
time ago how this can be) both her arm and leg felt funny and she went
to the emergency department of NYU Hospital and they pulled her in
immediately. John phoned me from the hospital, and I got down there in
a glaze of panic — all our lives changed by a sentence. I imagine many
of you reading this will have heard her talking about her own death in
a way that makes one know that some people are vatic.

We had such plans: to go to Colmar to see that most terrifying of
all masterpieces, the Isenheim Altarpiece by Grunewald; to Paris in
July where she was teaching; to Vienna.

She went to Sicily with her family just before she died and to
Madrid with her friends Brian and Luke. She told me in excitement that
Luke was making her read everything about Velasquez — "and you
wouldn’t know, Poll, how much I have learnt."

And on top of it all, she was a most wonderful and felicitous
writer. She finished that obituary of John McGahern with these words;

"He had embarked on a life of heroic honesty. He already
knew what he meant by being a writer. He gave me, what he could ill
afford a copy of Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet. Now, I see that
John, for all that he was shabby and provincial-looking and unregarded
and about to incur the hatred of the deathly Ireland of that time, had
already absorbed Rilke’s advice: "that you may find in yourself enough
patience to endure and enough simplicity to have faith; that you may
gain more and more confidence in what is difficult and in your solitude
among other people."

There should be sorrow today, that that passage ends –- "And as for
the rest, let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right,
always." No more life for John. But there was a distance from
experience in him from the start — the distance he used, I suppose, in
the making of his art — that prevents me from pitying him even for his
death. He had pieced his broken heart together after he lost his
mother. He had made himself into a true stoic. I don’t think I’ve ever
met anyone who so fully accepted the way things are. In the simplest
way, he was always ready to die."

She knew what she was writing about, but I don’t think she ever
pieced her heart together. She wrote to me from Clare a year ago with
terrible presentiment:

"I am okay but uneasy. Very uneasy. And my first ever
ever boyfriend, his obit was in the paper, it is as if the grim reaper
is at the edge of the field sharpening his scythe.

Goodbye for now. Not for long xx nuala"

And now it’s forever.

I don’t know what I’ll do without her.

-----------------

This tribute is published with kind permission of Women's Voices for Change.

www.womensvoicesforchange.org

I always enjoyed reading Nuala's columns in the Irish Times. I loved her personal style of writing, especially its humanity. She was able to show how it is very often society, and institutions that cause people to behave in the way that they do.

We miss you Nuala.

A year has passed since Nuala O’Faolain’s radio interview and her challenging words still speak, with their eloquence and honesty, of the mystery of life, death, and afterlife. She referred to the beauty and spirituality of the Donegal song Thios I Lár an Ghleanna:

Shiúlfainn leat fríd chanach, fríd mhéilte ar chiumhais na mara,
'Gus dúiche Dé dá gcaillfinn, go bpógfainnse do bhéal.

“And the last two lines are two things, asking God up there in the heavens, even though you don't believe in him, to send you back even though you know it can't happen. Those two things sum up where I am now.”

Nuala, may your wonderful courageous spirit continue to inspire us.

www.irishtimes.com/blogs/presenttense/2008/04/14/nuala-o-faolain/

God rest your soul, Nuala!