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PRAISE FOR
Are You Somebody?
“You don’t want the book to end; it glows with compassion
and you want more, more because you know this is a fine
wine of a life, richer as it ages.”
—Frank McCourt
“This book has to be read. One of the most perfectly observed portraits
of female loneliness I’ve ever come across.…O’Faolain brings a spiky,
independent intelligence that vanquishes cliche.”
—Zoe Heller, The New York Times Book Review
“A beautiful exploration of human loneliness and happiness, of
contentment and longing.”
—Alice McDermott, Washington Post Book World
“A lovely memoir that traces the growth of a woman
and her country over the last 50 years.”
—Publishers Weekly
“ ‘I’m not anybody in terms of the world, but then, who decides
what a somebody is? How is a somebody made?’ asks Irish Times columnist O’Faolain. The answer can be found in her moving and painfully honest memoir, a best seller in her native Ireland that deserves as much attention here.”
—Library Journal
“A funny, plainspoken, heartfelt memoir.”
—Elle Magazine
“A lovely and complex mosaic out of the moments that
make up a life as it is being lived.”
—USA Today
IRISH PRAISE FOR
Best Love, Rosie
“This is a rich, frank and heartening novel. It is an excursion and an
education; a long, luxurious wander through a library of bold, beautiful
and inimitable things. It is vintage Nuala, one last time.”
—Belinda Mckeon, The Sunday Irish Times
“Everyone feels like they knew Nuala. And it is impossible to separate
Nuala from the novel—the similarities with both Rosie and Min
are most definitely there—which makes reading it a very strange
experience. The way she brought the D-word into our national
conversation—how she laid bare her life and death in an attempt to
better understand society and the way the world worked—was not
always easy to take. However, her novels are, and it is rather comforting
to have one last bittersweet journey with Nuala.”
—Independent.ie
“…Rosie generally wears her learning, and her philosophy, and her
spirituality, lightly. The novel succeeds in blending the deep and the
shallow, the wise and the mildly absurd, in a series of seamless transitions
from kitchen to library, frocks to philosophy, body to mind.…But the
mixture of the light and the serious is undoubtedly also brought about
by the author’s own attitude to life. O’Faolain was brilliant, educated,
deeply thoughtful, but she was down to earth and despised pretension.
So does her book. That is its great charm, and that is why it resists
categorisation. There will be no ready made niche for it in the bookshop.
It is just Nuala.”
—ÉIlís Ní Dhuibhne, The Irish Times
“The powerful, overriding message in this time-challenging tale
of Min and Rosie is actually a simple one: we are only ever trapped
in our own heads, not our bodies—no matter how old they are.
And so we must grab our chances while we have them, live in the
now and put our best heart forward. Always.
Who else to sum it all up then, than Nuala O’Faolain herself—in the
optimistic words with which she concludes the introduction to her
last ever book: ‘Even the most seemingly moribund life is open to the
possibility of change—in youth, in middle age, and always.’”
—Sile McArdle ©Independent.ie
Best Love, Rosie
NUALA O’FAOLAIN (1940–2008) was one of Ireland’s best-loved journalists and writers. She came to international attention for her two volumes of memoir, Are You Somebody? (1996) and Almost There (2003). She also wrote the novel, My Dream of You (2001), and a history with commentary, The Story of Chicago May (2005). Her first three books were all featured on the New York Times Bestseller list.
nuala o’faolain
Best Love, Rosie
First published by GemmaMedia in 2010.
GemmaMedia 230 Commercial Street Boston MA 02109 USA 617 938 9833 www.gemmamedia.com
Copyright ©Nuala O’Faolain estate, 2008 and 2010
This edition of Best Love, Rosie is published by arrangement with Sabine Wespieser, Éditeur.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written
permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief
quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
Printed in the United States of America
12 11 10 09 08 1 2 3 4 5
ISBN: 978-1-934848-41-8
Cover design by Night and Day Design
Library of Congress Preassigned Control Number (PCN) applied for.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Dr. Lara Honos-Webb for advice on depression quoted; Indiana University Press for permission to quote from On Aging, Revolt and Resignation by Jean Améry, translated by John D. Barlow, 1994; and Alfred Publishing for permission to quote from Cole Porter’s ‘Begin the Beguine’.
Introduction
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