A memoir may be a summing-up of a long, interesting life, or it can be a sort of self-examination so addictive the writer joins the ranks of the "serial memoirists." O'Faolain's a repeat offender, effectively rechewing material incompletely digested in her previous memoir, Are You Somebody?
She opens by listing what she doesn't have, as she enters her mid-50s—someone to love, someone to love her, money, a workplace, a pension—but it's clear love is her biggest problem: "How have I ended up with nobody?" Her early boyfriends were apparently unremarkable, her 15-year relationship with "Nell" ended awfully and her subsequent affair with an elderly married man was mostly imagined. Toward the book's end, she's almost ditching her relationship with a divorced father, resenting his intimacy with his daughter. Her anger at her dysfunctional parents seethes throughout, culminating in a fantasy of joining her (now deceased) mother in a bar, and walking out just when Mom's ordered her a drink. By ending on that note, O'Faolain hints that her parents' lovelessness made it hard for her to love, an unsatisfying conclusion to such a nuanced account. Still, readers will enjoy O'Faolain for her witty turns of phrase: as an ex-smoker, she follows street smokers "to gulp their slipstreams," and she fears she's aging so badly she's "joining the rejects of the next-to-Last-Judgment." Her self-deprecation—so reminiscent of Jean Rhys—can be oddly comforting. (Feb. 24)
Forecast:Irish writer O'Faolain's popularity in the U.S. (My Dream of You was a 2001
New York Times Notable book and it, along with
Are You Somebody?, hit bestseller lists) will help this book's sales. Expect St. Patrick's Day tie-ins.
