THIS book would be a treasure if all it did was to assemble the best of Nuala O'Faolain's weekly opinion columns from The Irish Times. Here is her controversial article on Charles Haughey on the eve of the 1989 general election; the piece "On Ireland" (which should really be available as a Christmas card, complete with airmail stamp); the essays on "DARTishspeak"; and on Irish in Ballymun. More importantly, the 31 columns here reprinted include "Schools and Sadism", "Knowing Travellers", "Sexual Harassment", "Crime and Punishment? the X Case Sentence", and other pieces which have marked shifts in public consciousness in Ireland. It is heartening to find them published now in more enduring form.
Patiently, with wisdom and compassion, these essays have urged us over the years to pay attention to the weave of the society we live in, weft as well as warp. From the kitchens, classrooms, dance halls and musty bedsits of the "bitter, unloving 1950s" to "the Gold Coast of County Down" in the 1990s, Nuala O'Faolain's columns notice always the threads that run crossways: the lives of women, of children, of quiet men; the hurts inflicted and forgotten, or suffered and remembered. Class politics, gender politics, power relations are her particular themes.
Some find her writing uncomfortable. The sound of a woman's voice insisting "Yes, but you see is more than they can stand. "So what's the point?" they want to know. But it is not a point - or it is many points: the reality that so much gets lost or trampled on when one goal is relentlessly pursued. It is a call for a more ecological approach to social and political life - to understanding, as fully as possible, as often as necessary, that the political is personal, and the personal political.
Nuala O'Faolain has put her money where her mouth is in this book; or, if you prefer, has put her own life on the line. For it is an immensely courageous undertaking. Asked to write an introduction to her selected journalism, she found herself writing an extended autobiographical memoir. It runs for 200 pages, with lyrical grace and intellectual stamina, telling the painfully honest way and who of the opinion columns.
Autobiography can be a vehicle for self congratulation or justification, a way of filling the cracks in a remembered life and sanding them smooth. And it has often been remarked that women's lives do not easily fit into the standard heroic pattern obstacles overcome, goals striven for and steadily achieved.
Memoir is a more reflective form, not so tied to factual recording. It is also more literary: an exercise in achieving understanding through arranging words on a page. Books and authors acre its characters, as well as people, for it almost always arises from a lifetime of reading. It belongs in book form rather than in the broad public sweep and litter bin destination of a newspaper page. It is essentially private, and repays rereading. At its finest, it can offer an unparalleled portrait not only of a life, but of all that life's co ordinates: landscapes and weather, not only physical (and O'Faolain does this beautifully), but political and social as well. It can be a spiritual exercise, like meditation: a way of discovering truths not reachable in any other way.
Writing about her family, her childhood and womanhood, Nuala O'Faolain unsparingly renders the many bewilderments she has survived as well as the things that have delighted, amused or outraged her. The result is a profoundly textured, truthful memoir, loving and acerbic, vividly told, and so free of blame or bitterness that the reader shudders to think what it must have cost her. Her story is, of course, unique, but her way of finding meaning in it for an adult life could work for anyone. Words spoken long ago still reverberate: "I like you thin," her father told her mother; "Sure, who wants it?" was a grandmother's dismissal of her unmarried daughter's sickly baby.
The selected journalism which follows this memoir is bracketed between a memorable piece on childbirth as day began in Holles Street Hospital, and another, less obviously heartfelt, but equally thoughtful, on a funeral in Dublin. Then there is one more essay: on "The Other World", about apparitions, ghosts, and moving statues of the Virgin Mary. The successful journalist who wrote it has just told of the often neglected child of a romantic, disillusioned mother. At the end of her book, she says of Knock and Medjugorje, "[W]e need to believe that we have a mother, who loves us. Coming where it does, the sentence is luminous, as though the world had, for a moment, split open.