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New Hibernia Review 11.2 (2007) 50-65

Nuala O'Faolain and the Unwritten Irish Girlhood
Jane Elizabeth Dougherty
Southern Illinois University, Carbondale

In his 1984 study of the literary childhood, Richard Coe asserts that there is no "revealing difference" between male and female childhoods.1 Whatever the truth of this assertion might be when applied to other national literatures, when speaking of the literature of Ireland it is clearly false. Even casual readers could probably name an example of an Irish literary boyhood: the Irish boyhood is canonized, prize-winning, best-selling, and even parodied.2 The Irish boyhood by now constitutes a well-established literary genre of its own. Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes (1996) has gone through at least sixty-five printings, totaling a reported four million copies worldwide.3 The ur-Irish boyhood, Joyce's Portrait, is foundational not only to the Irish bildungsroman, but to the childhood genre as a whole; Coe argues that the childhood, no matter where or by whom it is produced—whether fiction, memoir, or something in between—is always a "portrait of the artist."4

By contrast, few readers, whether casual or scholarly, can readily name an example of the Irish literary girlhood—unsurprisingly, as there are not many from which to choose. Those books that do fall within this category are obscure, and often formally or stylistically peculiar. This was true when Joyce was writing and it remains true now, despite the enormous changes that have taken place in Irish society since Portrait was published, including the emergence of a gifted cadre of Irish feminist writers.

One of these writers is Nuala O'Faolain. O'Faolain, who was born in 1940 and spent most of her career as a journalist, has now published three memoirs and a semi-autobiographical novel that Mary Fitzgerald-Hoyt has called a [End Page 50] "midlife bildungsroman."5 The first of these was the surprise transatlantic best-seller Are You Somebody? (1996), originally published in Ireland with a selection of O'Faolain's Irish Times opinion columns and subtitled The Life and Times of Nuala O'Faolain. It appeared in the same year in the United States, but the American edition omitted the columns, included a modified introduction, and was subtitled The Accidental Memoir of a Dublin Woman.6 O'Faolain followed her first memoir with a roman à clef, the 2001 novel My Dream of You; with a 2003 sequel to her first memoir, titled Almost There: The Onward Journey of a Dublin Woman; and with a 2005 "third-person memoir," Chicago May, a fictional account of the life of the Irish-born criminal May Duignan.

O'Faolain both identifies with, yet remains somewhat uneasy with, the goals of feminism. Her first memoir in particular presents a life partially reconsidered through a feminist lens. One thing that Are You Somebody? does not do is present a portrait of the artist as a young girl; it does not recollect, or recreate, O'Faolain's childhood in an extended or immediate fashion. In this, O'Faolain continues a tradition, or countertradition, among those authors who have sought to write Irish women's lives, in fiction or in autobiography by refusing to—or being unable to—write the Irish literary girlhood in terms similar to those of the Irish literary boyhood.7

In Almost There, her second memoir, O'Faolain rightly notes that in her first memoir "the way I wrote about myself was more candid than any Irish woman had yet been, outside of the more oblique forms of fiction and song and poetry."8 In her approach to narrating her childhood, however, O'Faolain is entirely typical of Irish women life writers as well as novelists. Although she emphasizes experiences of childhood as the wellspring of her adult identity, O'Faolain tells us little about the child she once was. She is, nonetheless, also well aware of the silences that attended her childhood; tellingly, she cites the 1996 news story of the trial of the murderer Brendan O...

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