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Nuala O' Faolain |
Camden Feature| Review | article on Irish writer Nuala O'Faolain | podcast | Samuel Beckett
‘We laughed, cried and drank – Nuala was shatteringly honest’
A PHOENIX entered my life in October 1966, when I first met the Irish writer Nuala O’Faolain, who died on May 9.
Nuala not so much lived life, as burned through it, with an intense ferocity.
I was ready for such a meeting, since my mother was cast in much the same form.
Nuala was down from Oxford. She came with her lover, the art historian Tim Hilton.They lived with my ex-husband Martin and me in Fitzrovia. She and I were very young, in our early twenties.
There’s nothing like a close bond between women: we laughed, cried, drank and shared a lot together.
Other writers and artists would come and go and stay at our house, but she was mercurial, a genius.
She worked for the BBC, and lectured on Samuel Beckett. We shared a love of the work of May Sarton and the drawings of Goya. Those were high energy, exciting times.
On her return to Dublin in 1978, she was a producer for the Irish broadcaster RTé.
Plain Tales, the radio series for which she won an award in 1985, led her on to write a column for the Irish Times about women, communities under stress in Belfast, the terror of illness and institutionalised bureaucracy.
Then in 1996 came her biography, Are You Somebody?, which became an international bestseller. Other books followed, and in 2006 she was honoured with the Prix Femina – the highest award that France can bestow on a female writer. She was delighted by that, and we celebrated.
It was a real measure of her sensitivity and big-heartedness that, even at the peak of her fame she would concentrate her writing on the lives of ordinary, everyday people.
More recently, we connected again on a very deep level, after her diagnosis with cancer, which had afflicted me years earlier.
There was no flinching from the experience; as always, Nuala was stoic, and shatteringly honest.
Anaïs Nin wrote that “people living deeply have no fear of death”.
Nuala’s last email to me said: “I’m back in the silence of Clare with the dog. Gatwick a slum. We will – not we might or maybe – we will meet again.”
It was not to be, but she did give an amazing interview on RTé about her impending death, and it is very special.
I feel so privileged having Nuala part of my life; and part of her courageous dying.
Fiona Green
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