Yesterday I read Are You Somebody? by Nuala O’Faolain, a memoir of her life up to the mid-point (she herself quotes Dante’s “nel mezzo del cammin”). She died last year, just over twelve years after stating her mid-life stance in Are You Somebody? and although she had fewer years left than she had planned on, I am comforted by knowing that O’Faolain was someone who used the most of what she got. Even through bouts of drinking and depression, she tried to live her entire life fully engaged. One of her constant laments in Are You Somebody?is that she is waiting for the person who will complete her but I found that she was never waiting for anything: throughout the pages of her memoir she is always moving, acting, thinking, writing, and reading. Above all, she is reading; reading novels is her most favorite pastime.
O’Faolain was a great reader, coming from a family of great readers. She also came from a family of alcoholics and suffered throughout childhood from deprivations, physical and emotional, related to her parents’ drinking. Her mother was an alcoholic, a devourer of books and miserably imprisoned by home and family; her father drank, and had mistresses and a successful career. There was no equality between the sexes in Ireland through the twentieth century, and that went for alcoholism as well: a man could drink and still carry on, a woman who drank was alone, even in the midst (or especially in the midst) of a large family.
Towards the end of the book O’Faolian writes quite a bit about the approach of middle-age, the difficulties of being a woman no longer at the height of her sexual attractiveness, and the daunting prospects of loneliness and lack of physical affection. In those passages, her writing reminded me of a book I read last week,Grief, a novel in which middle-aged gay men are dealing with the pain of no longer being physically appealing to the younger men they still desire. O’Faolain has no easy answers nor did the novel. Perhaps at the mid-point of our lives is when we start to value the connections of deep affection that occur between family members and with friends. Perhaps we rely less on the frisson of attraction and more on the warmth of understanding. Physical affection is important always but need not always be sexual: a hug from a friend, holding hands with a child, sleeping next to a warm but snoring body. O’Faolain writes “It is not about sex, the desire to share with another person. But it is about creation.“ I think it is about the creation of a shared and safe space: we all need those spaces.
O’Faolain seemed a bit scared at no longer being part of the sexual hunt, in part I think because of the inherent human need, especially in situations of deprived childhoods, to appear valuable and worthwhile: Are you somebody? If we have attached our value to our looks, yes, we’re in trouble and bound for the operating table. But for a person like O’Faolain, well-fitted with brains and the discipline to use them, well-read and so well-versed in the truths presented in novels that we are never alone if we can connect with another person or event or ideal, how can she worry? As she herself counsels people, “maybe something marvelous will happen.“ Those words are trite, but they are true. Life flips us back and forth (as I wrote in my review of Grief) from sorrow to joy, and surprises do lurk — and I do mean “lurk”, for O’Faolain had both the thrilling surprise of a later love and the brutal surprise of cancer.
O’Faolain’s lines about trying to love her aging self are especially hard to read knowing that she died just twelve years after publishing her complaints: “I note every day the physical detail of middle age. The transparent polyps that have formed on the skin of my neck. The first white hair in my eyebrows. Pigment spots on my midriff….How do people arrange to love their aging selves?“ If she had known she had so little time left, would she have maligned her body so? It is the vessel only: as long as it carries us successfully around, we should be so grateful for it. Better alive and chubby and wrinkling, than dead.
O’Faolain’s memoir had a huge response, which she chronicles in the most moving chapter of her memoir, the Afterword. The Afterword is not only moving because of the torrent of letters and phone calls she received on the subject of family misery related to alcoholism, but also because I found her to be her most reflective in these pages. O’Faolain is unflinchingly honest throughout the book, and she has moments of great insight, for example on marriage (“so unconsidered a condition, no wonder there were so many bitter wives around“) and on sibling failures, (“there must be huge amounts of a particular hopeless pain in the world that no one seems to mention – the pain of someone who didn’t do their best for a young person and can never make it up”) and on identity (“a new concept of ‘home’ came into my life when I realised that Ireland, in all its aspects, present and past, was mine.“) But in this final chapter O’Faolain takes a step back from the self-gazing and reporting, and instead becomes genuinely involved in meditating on the forces in her life. She reaches an understanding of those forces and is forgiving of the people and events that shaped her: all of it “worthy … of many better things than pity, even when I brought to mind memories that had once seemed impossibly sad.”
O’Faolain will find a man she loves dearly and then she will get cancer: joy to sorrow, flip flop. What is the point? We do not know what comes in the next breath, the next day, the next week, of our lives. O’Faolain advice at the end of Are You Somebody? is to “be just myself, like the cat, which is so perfectly and unself-consciously a cat and does not know it will perish.” I find the trick of living to be much more complex: to live as if we do not know we will perish (thus without terror) but to live knowing that indeed, we will perish (and thus with gratitude).
