Nuala ofaolain documentary storm

Nuala O'Faolain -- a journalist and feminist who gained international fame with her outspoken 1996 memoir Are You Somebody? -- has died of lung cancer, weeks after revealing her illness on state radio. She was 68.

She died Friday at a hospice in south Dublin and will be cremated Tuesday after a Catholic mass, her family said.

O'Faolain emphasized during her April 12 radio interview that she had no faith in the afterlife, and instead rued the imminent loss of her lifetime's accrual of education, friends, and experience.

O'Faolain, who was a University College Dublin lecturer in literature before becoming one of Ireland's best-known journalists, said the lung cancer had spread to her liver, and brain tumors had ruined her ability to concentrate.

''Beauty means nothing to me anymore. I tried to read [Marcel] Proust again recently, but it has gone -- the magic has gone. It amazed me how quickly my life turned black,'' she said in the wide-ranging, deeply reflective interview with state radio RTE.

The broadcast inspired a national discussion about how Ireland cares for its terminally ill and a wave of sympathy for O'Faolain over her uncompromising account of her desolation.

O'Faolain dismissed the idea of Heaven awaiting her. ''I can't be consoled by the mention of God. I wish everyone comfort for those who believe, but I cannot,'' she said. ''To me it's meaningless.''

O'Faolain said she was consoled only by the knowledge that so many other people died in much more horrific circumstances.

''In my time, which is mostly the 20th century, people have died horribly in Auschwitz, in Darfur, or are dying of starvation or dying multiply raped in the Congo ... horribly like that. I think how comfortably I am dying, I have friends and family, I am in this wonderful country, I have money,'' she said.

If you missed the moving documentary about Nuala O’Faolain during the Jameson Dublin Film Festival, be aware that the movie will play on RTÉ 1 at 9.30pm this Monday. Nuala: A Life and Death, which won the Dublin Film Critics Circle’s prize for best Irish film at JDIFF, deserves to have a life beyond television.

Narrated and produced by O’Faolain’s close friend Marian Finucane, the film details the writer’s difficult childhood as the daughter of the charismatic but neglectful gossip columnist Terry O’Sullivan. There are agreeable sketches of life in Bohemian Dublin during the 1960s, musings on Nuala’s long romantic relationship with Nell McCafferty (who does not contribute) and a celebration of her late rise to international fame with the publication of her best- selling memoir in 1996.

The final section, dealing with O’Faolain’s death from cancer, is almost unbearable in its treatment of her frank, unsentimental attitude to death. “I don’t want more time. As soon as I heard I was going to die, the goodness went from life,” she tells Finucane.

Director Patrick Farrelly hired cinematographer Kate McCullough to spread her signature shades about the frame, and the picture ends up with a very distinctive, appropriately sombre look. But Nuala: A Life and Death is, ultimately, a celebratory work. Even when describing O’Faolain’s excesses, friends and family find it impossible not to smile tolerantly. Not to be missed.

As watchtowers are being taken down in Belfast and Derry and the violence in Northern Ireland comes to a possible end, Nell by Nell McCafferty is of particular interest. In it she chronicles her life as a child in Northern Ireland, which leads to her experience as a member of the struggle for Catholic equal rights in her native Derry as an adult. Most importantly, she tells it from a woman’s point of view. This is not simply a version of the troubles in Northern Ireland, however. McCafferty chronicles her life as a feminist, journalist and lesbian. It is a story of passion and lonesomeness which inspires as well as entertains. Often while reading it, I felt as if I were on a stoop with McCafferty and other women on the block, having a cigarette and exchanging stories of our history and our life as women.

McCafferty chronicles her life as a feminist, journalist and lesbian

Born in 1944, McCafferty was raised in Derry’s Bogside, a sliver of land relegated to the Catholic residents of the town. She was bright as a child and easily found a place at the university, being the first in her family to go there. She travelled to France and went on to live on a kibbutz in Israel where she experienced the realities of living in a socialist constructed life. She wanted to be a teacher in Derry to save for travelling but was unable to since, “(t)he state or Protestant schools would not hire me because I was Catholic, and the Catholics would not hire me because I was not a proper Catholic.” She was forced to take short term teaching stints and live on the dole.

Were it not for the circumstances of the times she lived in Derry, it seems doubtful she would have become a revolutionary. She proclaims: “I was not a nationalist. I was not an Irish rebel. My future career, such as I thought about it, would be in England. And yet, I was having none of this nonsense about subservience to the British throne.” In fact, she claims that the mo

“No.”

The responses are laboured and painful, reflecting the searing agony of the writer Nuala O’Faolain in the final stages of her battle with terminal illness.

She could find neither meaning nor consolation in religion, she said. “The world turned its back on me,” she told broadcaster and friend Marian Finucane, revealing she had cancer on Marian’s RTÉ radio programme.

Ravaged by the disease and with only a month left to live, Nuala turned to Marian to talk about her impending death in a radio interview in April 2008. “It amazed me how quickly my life turned black,” she said, insisting that she chose not to have chemotherapy. “Even if it gave me time, it is not time I want,” she said with the kind of raw frankness that was the hallmark of a complex and conflicted woman.

Coming of age when Ireland was an insular, church-dominated society, she struggled in a childhood dominated by a philandering father and an alcoholic mother yet managed to live a rich life, working as a documentary film maker, literature professor, newspaper columnist, novelist and memoirist.

Nuala first recounted her life in blunt and vivid detail in her international best selling memoir Are You Somebody? Her story was unique in terms of the breath of her literary achievements and the conflicts and contradictions that bedeviled her personal life.

Nuala survived a destitute childhood to become an outstanding critic and novelist.

Along the way she stumbled through alcohol problems, encountered men who treated her badly, while at the same time working on ways to improve her life and develop her writing skills.

In this feature documentary, Marian goes behind the drama of Nuala’s tortured existence to paint a personal picture of a woman struggling to find her way with only her own fierce intelligence to guide her.

She was a woman of many, contradictory parts, says Marian — the enthusiastic heterosexual whose most lasting intimate relationship was with