EXTRACT:Next week sees both the first anniversary of the death of Nuala O'Faolain and the posthumous publication in English of her novel 'Best Love, Rosie', to which she wrote this introduction shortly before she died
I LIVE IN a cottage a few fields above the Atlantic Ocean, in the west of Ireland. But for some years now, since my first book, Are You Somebody?had a big success in the United States, I've divided my time between Ireland and a room in Manhattan. I wanted to borrow the immigrant energy of the great city. I wanted to escape the despair and lethargy that still clings to the Irish countryside.
During these years, the most insistent narrative in my life has been the story of getting older. And getting older, I perceive, is an entirely different cultural experience on one side of the ocean than on the other. For example: the years roll off a woman from an old-style country like Ireland when her plane touches down on the tarmac in New York. I call it the JFK Effect – 60 years old becomes 50 years old in an instant.
For another: the American sisterhood denies the self-abnegation of the European grandmother, defies ageing with every instrument at its command, and prefers not to dwell on death. I see, and it makes me both admiring and uneasy, that American women go on believing in their own importance to the end. Whereas in Ireland, the childless, ageing woman has no tribal function, and must invent her own self-importance.
Best Love, Rosiecame out of these two preoccupations. What can the New World do to and for a woman formed in the Old World? And how does any modern woman – who has travelled, done interesting work, had lovers, been responsible for no one but herself – meet the challenge of that time late in middle age when these things begin to fail her? How does any person find new pleasures when the old ones have lost their savour?
What surprised me, as the story of what happens to Min and her niece Rosie unfolded itself, was how much fun I had with it. And I think that was because of the vigour with which Min – the older woman – seized her chance to get out of the Dublin milieu which was too familiar and had nothing new to give her. Her adventure in the book delighted me as much as it did her.
My head is with her. But my heart is with her niece, my dear Rosie.
She is a woman whose needs are too passionate and complex to be answered by America. Instead, she returns to Ireland and to the past. She retires, in many ways hurt by life, to the primitive house of her grandfather, beside the stone quarry where he worked on a remote and beautiful peninsula. She learns about the terrible lives that were lived there, especially by women. But even as she discovers the harsh truth of her own parentage, she is also encountering forms of love. Friendship; a small, loyal, dog; the splendour of the natural world; conscious efforts to redress wrongs done – things she never valued in her youth – are the resources she gathers as she pauses on the brink of the next part of her life.
Thousands of miles away, in the States, Min is also discovering new aspects of joie de vivre – the pleasure of being paid for work, for example, and the freedom of belonging to a transient, diverse and unjudging social underworld. Niece and aunt, who were silent when they were together, learn to speak to each other. Now that they have abandoned the roles thought appropriate to their ages and are separated only by an ocean, each has become a pioneer.
There are dark undertones to all this, of course, and in the book, as in my own life, many good things have been lost forever in the passing of the years. But Best Love, Rosie– my fifth book in 10 years – is the book of my years of commuting between the melancholy of Ireland and the optimism of America. It insists on celebrating what those years showed me. That the world in all its shades of black and white is wonderfully interesting. That sorrow can be managed: it can be banished to a minor place within. And that even the most seemingly moribund life is open to the possibility of change – in youth, in middle age, and always.
Nuala O’Faolain
January 14th, 2008
Best Love, Rosieby Nuala O’Faolain, which first appeared in French under the imprint Sabine Wespieser Éditeur last September, is published next week by New Island. It will be reviewed next Saturday by Éilís Ní Dhuibhne