Are You Somebody? Author: Nuala O'FaolainISBN-13: 9781835940488Publisher: New IslandGuideline Price: €16.95, 296ppNuala O’Faolain’s Are You Somebody? remains as raw and relevant as it did when I first read it 20 years ago. As Katriona O’Sullivan writes in the foreword to this 30th-anniversary edition, its excellence lies in “its capacity to describe the true experience of a woman grappling with who she is, and what she is not”. That struggle gives the book its force.O’Faolain writes with rare openness and brutal honesty. She is committed to telling the truth, even when it exposes her as angry, needy, lonely or emotionally chaotic. The memoir unfolds in a free-associative style, thoughts spilling forward as though she is encountering them for the first time herself. The effect is intimate, compelling and occasionally unsettling.Her emotional openness is matched by a formidable literary intelligence. O’Faolain moved through a world populated by Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis and Patrick Kavanagh, though the name-dropping never feels performative. Instead, these figures emerge as vividly human. Amis is “like a big, pink, particularly likeable baby”; Kavanagh “a terrible flatmate”, too consumed by his own struggles to notice anyone else.[ Nuala O’Faolain: My powerful, idiosyncratic, crude friendOpens in new window ]Books themselves were both salvation and refuge for O’Faolain, as they were for her mother, who read constantly “as part of her utter determination to avoid reflection”. “I would prefer to read something I don’t enjoy than do almost anything else,” O’Faolain writes. Yet of writing itself, she admitted in interviews that she regarded it as hard work and did not want to do it.The memoir is equally striking in its treatment of female desire and the need to be seen. O’Faolain writes about sex with frankness and flippancy, but beneath the irony lies a profound need to be loved and a deep fear of insignificance. “My life burned within me. Even such as it was, it was the only record of me, and it was my only creation and something in me would not accept that it was insignificant.”[ 30 years since Nuala O’Faolain’s Are You Somebody? ‘Vibrating with hurt. It leaves a mark’Opens in new window ]O’Faolain has been described as the dark twin of Maeve Binchy. Where Binchy offered warmth and reassurance, O’Faolain exposes loneliness, dissatisfaction and restless longing. Are You Somebody? is raw, ragged and often heart-breaking, but its refusal to soften or tidy the messy experience of living is precisely what makes it feel eternally fresh and relevant.Julia Kelly’s latest book is the memoir, Still