Marian finucane interview with nuala ofaolain biography

Their spirituality is their own. My way of looking at the world is my own. We each end up differently facing this common fate. Every single professional will tell you that they cannot say how long it will be Funnily enough I don't care about losing the hair. What I do care about is that sometimes I see people frightened or repulsed and that is why I went and got a wig in which I look like a rather striking but elderly chorus girl.

Nuala O'Faolain died 10 years ago today.

Marian finucane interview with nuala ofaolain biography

Her work is as vital as when it was written. No subject was taboo, her honesty refreshing. Now I am beginning to put the auld bald head out there and I still have a few eyebrows, but what do I want them for? I don't care about anything any more. I know everyone says the hair matters, but that is not true. You can put a little cap on or something for the hair.

That is irrelevant compared with having to leave the world behind. NO'F: I thought there would be me and the world, but the world turned its back on me, the world said to me that's enough of you now and what's more we're not going to give you any little treats at the end. Ireland's most iconic interview: Nuala O'Faolain on dying from cancer The Irish journalist and writer Nuala O'Faolain died in Mayjust months after learning she had cancerous tumors in her brain, liver, and lungs.

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Save the Date! This super-easy vegan bruschetta is the bomb Meg Walker. O'Faolain will always, of course, be associated with the woman with whom she lived for 15 years, Nell McCafferty. Along with Finucane and a handful of others, they spoke for the women's movement, blazing a trail for women's rights in the bleak 's and 's when Catholic bishops declaimed that feminists were engaged in a conspiracy to destroy the family, and social workers argued that incest could be good for a child.

The personal was the political, they insisted. They put women's voices out into a media so male dominated it hadn't even noticed that there were no women in the building except the cleaners. They let the cleaners speak out too, as well as the feminist fighters. The feisty McCafferty was, in those days, the more brilliant journalist. O'Faolain was too in love with suffering.

She could be preachy and was, as she would later admit, muddled about many things. The little girly voice she sometimes put on could be excruciating. O'Faolain's true voice really emerged only in the memoir, published inwhen she was She was one of the first to identify alcoholism as a national problem, and to lay bare its ravages as well as its powerful allure for the lonely, thwarted and unhappy.

They came out in a barrage of hurtful, published exchanges, when the affair was over. O'Faolain wrote that far from being gay, she'd climb over ten women to get to a man. McCafferty wrote that Nuala was at her best in the morning, before she'd had a drink. Each accused the other of being obsessed with their mother. That was certainly true. O'Faolain's account in her work of her mother's lonely, alcoholic life as a neglected, battered wife who never showed affection for her children, is incredibly powerful.

So was McCafferty's dogged refusal to acknowledge the woman with whom she shared her life as her lover in case it would upset her elderly mother in Derry. Finucane asked O'Faolain about old, unfinished business. Everyone knew she meant Nell.