Book review.

An Irish Woman Bravely Faces Down Her Past

July 20, 1998|By Reviewed by Jean Patteson, The Orlando Sentinel.

Are You Somebody: The Accidental Memoir of a Dublin Woman

By Nuala O'Faolain

Henry Holt, 215 pages, $21

Before becoming absorbed in this book -- and it is absorbing -- it is useful to know a little about why it was written and how the title came about. Nuala O'Faolain, a columnist for The Irish Times, was asked to put together a collection of her columns and to write a personal introduction. Once she got started on the story of her life, she couldn't stop. This memoir is the result.

Searingly honest, it is a fascinating and inspiring account of one woman's triumph over a daunting heritage of abuse and neglect at home, and ofcharming, philandering, abusive father. But she never views herself as a victim. Rather, the book is a brave effort to face her past, to understand how it has colored her life and to make an effort to brighten those colors in the future.

As a little girl, Nuala was able to blot out the depression and violence in her impoverished, overcrowded, rural home by escaping into books. Her love of reading was inherited, ironically, from the person who also hurt her most -- her mother, who escaped the realities and responsibilities of her life in books and gin.

By age 14, Nuala is running wild and is sent away to a convent boarding school. She is expelled a couple of years later for too openly expressing the innocent crush she