Read Nuala O'Faolain's last interview

Nuala O’Faolain, then 55, had been writing a current affairs column on The Irish Times for almost ten years and was rather feeling that life had passed her by when, in 1995, a publisher offered to make a book out of the best of her articles. To show where she was coming from, she decided to write a short introduction about her own life.

It ended up as a book of more than 200 pages entitled Are You Somebody? — The Accidental Memoir of a Dublin Woman, spilling the beans on her dysfunctional background and her rather disordered love life. She revealed a 15-year lesbian affair with her fellow-columnist Nell McCafferty that had just ended, like her previous romances with men, in tears. “I was unable”, she wrote, “to bring a moral sense or even common sense to my dealings with the opposite sex — and my own sex.”

It was the first time that an Irish woman writer had written quite so frankly about such matters; even Edna O’Brien had wrapped up her memories in fiction and confined herself to heterosexual romance. In her book O’Faolain caught the mood of a country where, after generations of silence, the veil was being lifted on many hidden areas of life. She appeared on Irish television to tell her harrowing tale and to promote her book. The compere Gay Byrne greeted her with the remark: “Well, Nuala, you have slept with a lot of men, haven’t you?”. She did not allow herself to be belittled and her honest account won the hearts of the nationwide audience.

Nuala O’Faolain was born in Dublin in 1940, a nobody, she liked to say, who came of an unrecorded line of nobodies. In fact, her father Tom Phelan (gaelicised as O’Faolain) was quite a celebrated journalist who, under the pen-name of Terry O’Sullivan, wrote a much-read diary for the Irish Press newspaper about social events. When the early passion of his marriage had subsided, he acquired a mistress and rather neglected his wife and nine children, the second of whom was Nuala. This might not have mattered too much, but the wife succumbed to alcoholism and also neglected the children. He was violent to her and also his sons.

Nuala was wild and was packed off at the age of 14 to a boarding school in Monaghan run by the St Louis nuns. In 1956 she won a prize awarded by the Alliance Française for the best student of French in Ireland. She went on to study English at University College Dublin but got diverted by bohemian parties, a surfeit of alcohol and left-wing politics. She failed to sit her first-year exams but was enticed back to finish her degree by the writer Mary Lavin.

O’Faolain’s unusual ability did not go unnoticed, and her teachers found her a scholarship to study Old English at the University of Hull. A travelling studentship awarded by the National University of Ireland enabled her to do postgraduate work at the University of Oxford, where she wrote a thesis on George Moore.

She had read so much about Oxford that she felt that she belonged there and forgot about being Irish. She was chosen to direct the annual play of the Oxford University Dramatic Society at the Playhouse Theatre, the first woman to have been so honoured for 40 years. It was not a success. She formed an attachment to an upper-class Englishman that lasted, on and off, for ten years and, but for the last-minute objection of her father, would have culminated in marriage.

After Oxford she returned to teach at University College Dublin, which she described as a friendly shambles. She participated in the carousing of literary and academic Dublin. However, she fell foul of the student rebels of 1968, who complained that she was so authoritarian and sarcastic that she frightened those she taught.

Her heart (and her main lover) was still in England, and in 1970 she got a job in the BBC producing programmes for the Open University, which gave her a chance to travel widely. She found the BBC stately and hierarchical, more like Oxford as she had believed it would be than the reality she encountered. She moved to its access television unit and produced the “Open Door” programmes giving a voice to fringe groups. She also wrote book reviews for The Times.

In the mid-1970s she began to feel the weight of anti-Irish prejudice in the wake of the IRA atrocities in Britain — “Your people are murdering my people,” her long-term English lover exclaimed as their relationship petered out.

She had renewed contacts with kindred spirits in Ireland at the annual Merriman Summer School in Co Clare. In 1977 she returned to Dublin as a producer on Irish television, professing herself relieved to be free of Britain’s rigid class structure. Her life reached what she later described as its lowest ebb. She was not confident in her new work. She was drinking heavily. She got pregnant at last after years of unprotected sex only to miscarry. Her father died miserably. She spent Christmas 1980 in a psychiatric hospital.

She was rescued by Nell McCafferty, a militant journalist from the Bogside, the Catholic area of the city of Londonderry. Their relationship was later described by O’Faolain as the most life-giving of her life. But, she added sadly, “we were made helpless by our angers in the end”. They parted bitterly about 1995.

Are You Somebody? caused deep hurt to McCafferty and offended some others, including former lovers. Sensitive to hurt herself, O’Faolain was not, as she admitted, all that sensitive about how her behaviour affected other people.

The unanticipated success of the book turned her life in a new direction. It was republished in New York in 1997 and topped the bestseller list there. She was commissioned to write a novel, took leave of The Irish Times and divided her time between New York and a cottage in County Clare. The novel, My Dream of You, appeared in 2001. Its theme is, predictably, a woman prepared to sacrifice everything for passion, except, in the end, she thinks better of it.

In Almost There (2003), an updated memoir, O’Faolain revealed a recent series of sexual encounters with an uneducated lorry driver that mirrored the theme of her novel, and a subsequent more stable relationship she had formed through a dating agency with a twice-divorced Jewish New York lawyer. With her usual engaging candour she admitted to the jealousy she felt observing the lawyer’s affection for his young daughter. The book itself, although better written, was much less noticed than her original memoir. She moved back to her apartment in Manhattan.

In 2006 she published The Story of Chicago May, a semi-fictional work about a dishonest Irish girl jailed in France for her part in her lover’s robbery of American Express in Paris who ends up as a prostitute. The French translation won an award for female writers in France.

In February O’Faolain was found to have a terminal cancer. She went on a radio chat programme sharing her misery and hopelessness with the listeners. It was not encouraging to other sufferers. Intrepid as ever, she undertook a frantic round of trips to her favourite cities, enjoying the galleries and sights, retiring to a hospice only in the last days of her life.

Nuala O’Faolain, journalist and writer, was born on March 1, 1940. She died of cancer on May 9, 2008, aged 68