Backlisted - Are You Somebody? by Nuala O'Faolain

Episode Date: June 21, 2021

Joining John and Andy this week is novelist and host of the books podcast Sentimental Garbage, Caroline O'Donoghue (Promising Young Women, Scenes of a Graphic Nature, All Our Hidden Gifts). We are discussing Nuala O'Faolain's revelatory memoir Are You Somebody? (1996), the original publication of which caused a sensation in her native Ireland. The book went on to top the New York Times bestseller list for six weeks; it still has the power to astonish. Also in this episode Andy has been exploring John Higgs's new book William Blake Vs The World and John is moved by Consumed: A Sister's Tale, the family memoir of Arifa Akbar, a former guest on Backlisted.Timings: (may differ due to variable advert length)10:08 - William Blake Vs The World by John Higgs14:44 - Consumed: A Sister's Tale by Arifa Akbar20:33 - Are You Somebody by Nuala O'Faolain* To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops.* For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm*If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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And when you get to the main event, skip to the good bit using the card member entrance. Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by card. Other conditions apply. Caroline where are you today? Today I'm in Ladywell in South East London, which most people haven't heard of because it's mostly just a marketing term to mean Catford. Is it? If you left where you are now, how long would it take you before you reached the Catford Cat? The Catford Cat? Oh, about 11 minutes, I would think. Very accurate.

The cat for cat? Oh, about 11 minutes, I would think. Very accurate. Yeah. Although there's so much sort of cat for cat graffiti around the place, they really do lean heavily on the cat stuff around here. But not in Ladywell. Not in Ladywell. No, it's all about the well in Ladywell. Of course, yeah. And have you been in Ladywell for the last year and a half? Or have you been able to move around a lot? We've done the real cliche thing of like like we were living in a one-bedroom flat much closer to the city and then quietly

went mental during uh the last year with yes we know that yes we recognize those symptoms yes um no yeah it was one of those it was that kind of vibe where i remember i turned 30 in lockdown and my boyfriend arranged this beautiful mural out of my favourite mountain goat song. And it was a gorgeous day. And then 11 weeks later, the mural was still up and we looked like we were serial killers. air of a dog's mouth all the time it was it was a real devastating uh couple of months so we moved out to this balmy lovely much bigger space in lady well where we both have our own offices and the dog's mouth can be in a different room do you like the mountain goats i'm obsessed with the mountain goats yeah yeah john from the mountain goats listens He is. He's a massive fan. Get out of town. He's one of our patrons. Yeah, he is. Thanks, John.

What? You think I'm messing with you? I'm not. Why couldn't you have told me that at the end of this podcast? Now I have to go the rest of this thinking that my hero since I was a teenager is listening. And this is already one of my favorite podcasts anyway. So the nerve level was fairly high, lads. It'd be like a lovely warm

bath, Caroline. Actually, this is quite fitting because this book is so name droppy and it's so littered with people meeting their heroes and heroes being somewhat disappointing that this actually is a very fitting way to frame this whole thing. Well, I think we should crack on, Johnny. I feel the same. Hello and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast that gives new life to old books. Today you find us in Dublin in the early 1960s in a musty basement in Leeson Street. There's a woman stirring stew with one hand, a volume of Baudelaire in the early 1960s in a musty basement in Leeson Street. There's a woman stirring stew

with one hand, a volume of Baudelaire in the other. On the couch, under a pile of coats, an old poet is coughing and groaning. I'm John Mitchinson, the publisher of Unbound, the platform where readers crowdfund books they really want to read. And I'm Andy Miller, author of The Year of Reading Dangerously. And today we are joined by the writer Caroline O'Donoghue. Hello, Caroline. Hello. Welcome. Lovely to be with you. Thank you for beaming in from Ladywell. We are honoured to have you here. Caroline is the author of three novels, Promising Young Women, Scenes of a Graphic Nature, both published by Virago,

and most recently, the YA fantasy series All Our Hidden Gifts, which was published by Walker Books in May. I want to ask you a question about Scenes of a Graphic Nature, which came out last year. It came out in June last year, didn't it? Yes, it did. Yeah, it came out in June last year. It was slated to come out in February of last year so that was a that was a lovely phone call um but yeah I am I

assume you're asking me because I am one of the many novelists who was affected by the uh by the great disease yeah clearly if I'd asked you this a year ago I might get a different answer but now we're a we're a year on do you think having to publicize talk about publish things in this way has changed the way people are going to do it from now on do you think do you think this is a permanent state of affairs it's an interesting question I bloody hope not anyway because like definitely like like I'm always prided myself because there are thousands of novelists in the world and it's bloody hard to sell a book and it gets harder every day right but yeah I've always prided myself on being an author who really enjoys events who really enjoys meeting people I'm quite extroverted I've got a lot of energy to give other people

and not a lot of novelists are like that. So I always saw that as being my competitive edge. Can confirm. And when you take away my competitive edge, I'm just another Irish chick trying to sell a book. And there's plenty of them. On a Zoom. That's the thing, isn't it? On a Zoom. On a Zoom, yeah, I know. On a Zoom, yeah. On a Zoom.

On a Zoom. That's the thing, isn't it? On a Zoom. On a Zoom, yeah, I know. On a Zoom, yeah. So All Our Hidden Gifts is out now. You also are the host of the culture podcast Sentimental Garbage, which you very kindly allowed me to come on. Technically, it was part of a long game so that you would eventually invite me

and I would end up here, but I enjoyed it for itself. Look how well it works. Like two ladies at a dinner party, you know, just returning invites. Do you want to just tell people, backlisted listeners, why Sentimental Garbage is different from Backlisted and why they should listen to it? Yes, well, Sentimental Garbage is a podcast I started about three years ago. And the whole aim of it was actually because I'm such a backlisted fan and because the reverence that you give to old books and books that a lot of the time people haven't heard of and they get this wonderful resurgence. the Marion Keyses, the Sophie Kinslays, even to a greater extent, the sort of Nancy Mitfreds and that kind of thing,

of just giving these books that everybody has read. Philippa Gregory is another one where there's, everyone's read them. They've been adapted into movies, but there's sort of a lack of critical consensus around them. There's a lack of respect for like the construct and the formality and the genre and the fact that chick lit and rom-coms, they have, you know, beats the same way other genres have

beats, but possibly don't get respected the way sci-fi and fantasy does, you know? And it was just a real, the perfect thing I'm just trying to make up for the lack of what you didn't see. Like I'm a huge fan of Marion Keys and I was desperate for a big, chunky long read on like why Marion Keys deals with these sort of interweaving sisters and the kind of how close it was to the Bennett sisters. And that long read didn't exist. And I was like, oh, it's up to me to make them. And so that's what we do. We sort of go for the kind of commercial women's literature that's been sort of derided over the years and try to give it the love and critical attention it deserves. It's such an interesting point. I have to believe that the only reason that they're not taken, looked at or taken seriously is because

they're popular. Because, you know, hundreds of thousands of people, millions of people read Marion Keys. Yeah. John, tell us something about the book that Caroline's chosen. The book Caroline's chosen is Are You Somebody? A memoir by the Irish journalist and documentary filmmaker Nuala O'Fallon. The book was published in 1996 by the Irish publisher New Line Books, became a runaway bestseller, hitting the top spot on the New York Times bestseller list. The story, the child of philandering father and an alcoholic mother, Nuala survives the poverty and pain of her childhood through her love of books. And the memoir really, the core of the memoir is how she struggles to establish herself in the claustrophobic

and misogynistic cultural world of Ireland in the 60s and 70s, with a candour and emotional bravery that shocked and inspired in equal measure. This was a very, very famous book in Ireland, and still is. As the writer June Colwell describes it, Are You Somebody did for memoir what Edna O'Brien had done for fiction. Colm Tubin has called it a classic of Irish autobiography. I should just say there is in fact running, I didn't know about this until today,

but there is an exhibition running, an installation curated by June Caldwell at the Museum of Literature in Dublin, specifically about this book, Are You Somebody? So we've cross-promoted accidentally. That's nice, isn't it maybe they'll do the same for us uh but but so so yes as john says this book is a really famous famous successful important book that i must have sold when i was a bookseller in the 90s and i have no memory of it

whatsoever and we will investigate why that might be. Yeah. Do you think that just, because oddly, I think it did very well in the US. It did very well in Ireland, very well in the US and very well in Canada, but not in the UK. And I wonder, it's so interesting when you think of the interest in Irish women's stories that there is right now versus the utter lack of interest that seemed to be happening when this book was published you know yeah yeah yeah for sure it well we'll come on we'll come on to it when we get to the yeah it's probably the same year as ben for home as it turns out dermot hilly's memoir that was i hadn't read it but that was where i was aware of it but i had never read it i'm so pleased i've read it now as as we will discover why. Anyway, Andy, what have you been reading this week?

Thanks, John. I have been reading the new book by John Higgs, which is called William Blake vs. the World. Marvellous. I've talked about John's books before on Backlisted. I talked about his last big book, which is called Watling Street, History of Watling Street, on episode 83. But that was about D.H. Lawrence,

so people probably haven't heard it. But I talked about John on that. He's also written biographies of Timothy Leary and books about the KLF. And he had another book out about William Blake in September 2019 to tie in with the big retrospective exhibition at the Tate called William Blake Now, Why He Matters More Than Ever. John is a polymath, I think it's fair to say. He is investigating the

topic of William Blake as an artist, as a visionary, as a religious figure, as a spiritual entity. He's looking at him from, he's trying to decode the mythos of William Blake, both that which is attached to him since his death, but also the stuff that Blake created in his own universe, his own series of symbols. And near the end of John's book, he says, I know this is hard to understand, reader, but what you've got to understand is it's taken us 200 years to get this far.

Blake wrote and created in such a consistent but mysterious way. It's taken generation after generation of people to unpick or understand what he was trying to get to and how he was trying to get to it. And one of the things that I love about the book is John comes at the subject from different disciplines, from a kind of psychological discipline, dreams, a psychedelic aspect, the printing trade in the era in which Blake was alive. doesn't give you one William Blake. He gives you Blake in all his multiplicity and tries to make the point you need to feel Blake more than you understand him. And we've got a clip here. This is from the end of the introduction of this book. This is John Higgs himself reading here from the audiobook. And I thought this would be a nice way to just give you the feel of what John is trying to do very successfully, in my view, in this book. Blake's art contains rare gold, but to mine it is not always easy. It forces you to

grapple with abstract philosophical ideas and arcane mythologies of the type it is not always easy. It forces you to grapple with abstract philosophical ideas and arcane mythologies of the type it is much easier to ignore. It is powerful and strange and it may indeed change us for good. But what sort of life would it be if we shunned opportunities like this which might just transform both ourselves and the world around us. Many thought that the world had beaten William Blake, but there was a reason why that fight seemed like such a one-sided battle. Blake never agreed to a material struggle, and he made no effort to defend himself on that level.

Instead, his time, energy and work were dedicated to an entirely different set of objectives and he fought for those on a battlefield of his own choosing. Blake's attention was focused somewhere that it is not easy for us to define or label. We do intuitively feel, however, that it exists. Our desire to understand it better is the reason why we are so drawn to Blake and part of the reason why he has received such immense posthumous fame and praise. William Blake versus the world, we will discover, turns out to be a far more interesting story than that of the world versus William Blake. that of the world versus William Blake.

That's just a terrific, terrific book. I learnt so much. I was thoroughly entertained. What more can you ask for from a piece of non-fiction? Absolutely tremendous. Reading at the moment, loving it. William Blake versus the world by John Higgs, published by Weidenfeld and Nicholson.

John, what have you been reading this week? I've been reading a really, really powerful, as it turns out, memoir by Aretha Akbar called Consumed, A Sister's Story, published by Scepter last month. We should declare an interest to Aretha, who is now the chief theatre critic for The Guardian. She's also a former guest on the podcast. She came on for the very popular episode on Hilary Mantel's Beyond Black.

But she also was the founder and editor of Boundless, an online magazine that Unbound started three years ago. This is her first book. And it is about the death of her sister, Fawzia, who dies mysteriously in her mid-40s. And so on one level, the book is an attempt to understand why her sister died medically. It transpires without giving away, as it were, too many spoilers that she in fact dies of TB. of TB. So one of the many things that works for me about this book is that you get a sense of how precarious even now in the 21st century, and of course, we're all thinking about disease and

infection and how to protect against infection. So it wasn't, I'm pretty sure that, you know, Arif didn't know that it was going to be published at the moment of a global pandemic. But there's a lot of really into a history of TB and the treatment of TB. And not just that, she also, through the book, she references some of the great artistic kind of presentations of TB, particularly La Traviata and La Boheme, the great operas, 19th century operas, but also through the life of John Keats. And there's a really, really moving passage where she actually ends up sitting in the room in which John Keats died, thinking about her sister's death. The TB aspect is really interesting, but what really makes it work is it's an attempt to understand what went wrong with her relationship with her sister.

As children, they lived in Lahore in Pakistan. Their parents had a fractious, difficult marriage. Fawzia Arifa's sister had a difficult relationship. Her father, their father, they didn't get on. She developed eating disorders, but then became seriously depressed, bipolar. So they were estranged until, before she was in hospital, and Aretha goes, they had been estranged for four or five years. And trying to understand why they had been estranged,

trying to understand why she died, trying to understand what her sister's inner life was about. And she writes beautifully. I was just going to read a tiny little bit to give you a bit of flavour. And this is about her mother saying and claiming that she knew that Forzia knew she was dying when she's in the hospital bed. What did she look like when she said it? I have asked. What did she sound like? My mother says her voice was steady as if she was stating a fact and her expression calm, devoid of pain or fear. I can understand why she would need to say the words aloud if she did realise that her unknown illness was leading inevitably to death. It must have felt like

surreal knowledge. Declaring it to herself might have been one way to make it feel more solid, real, and perhaps this was the preparation of which Catherine Mannix, a writer on disease, speaks. There is more evidence of her foreknowledge now that I've begun looking for it. In her hospital bed, as she lay gasping and out of breath, she asked my mother to bring in a piece of embroidery she'd been working on. It's on a background of white cloth, and it's a kind of triptych with three female figures that seem as if they're from a Renaissance painting. On closer study they are three different versions of the same woman undergoing a process of transformation. Running vertically down the cloth

are human spines sewn in thick green thread so that the figures are separated as if in their own panels. On the far right hand side side, the woman lies agonised and naked, with her arms raised in pain and a spinal column is stitched across her body. The second shows her upright and in a state of ecstasy, as if she'd been freed. In the last image, she's turned into a winged, angelic creature sewn in silver and yellow thread. I see the wish for release from the carapace of a diseased body in these three images, which capture the same woman's morphing states. The physical body is gradually being cracked open, it seems, and peeled away. It is an envisaged escape from the burden of a body

that had given Forzia nothing but torment. Disembodiment as liberation. Was this what Forzia was thinking as she sewed in hospital? Did the woman represent different states of herself? Was this a fantasy of her own transformation? Or was it a premonition in which her body was revealing to itself the imagery of a deadly disease travelling up her spinal column? Does our body carry a visceral understanding of its mortality when it's being attacked from the inside. This last unfinished embroidery withholds more than it reveals, but also offers distant tantalising comfort. There are a lot of books about grief and there are lots of books about family. It's also wonderful about being an immigrant family in Britain in

the 70s. But the writing is, she never doesn't miss a beat. It's a really, really good book. And weirdly, kind of an interesting place to go into the main topic of discussion today. Who's it published by? It's published by Sceptre. What's it called? It's called Consumed, A Sister's Story, Aretha Akbar. The book chat will continue on the other side of this message. So Nuala O'Fallon's book, Are You Somebody?

is a very Irish memoir. And so I wanted to set the scene with an amazing... Go to YouTube and find this. This is an edited version of it. But this is a fox pop that was conducted on the streets of Dublin. I think this is Dublin in 1979. And, well, it speaks for itself. Is there a devil?

Yes, there is. Where is he? In hell. In hell. Do you believe in a devil? Yes, there is. Where is he? He's in hell. Do you believe in the devil? Well, not as a natural person, but I believe in his power. Do you believe in the devil? Well, kind of.

I don't believe he's got a big long tail and a big thick foot. Oh, God. I'd say there is. There's something there, you know. There is a hell. Why would somebody end up in hell? Well, I mean... To willingly do something. That they know is wrong, you know. To hurt another person willingly. What you'd call sin, I suppose. Yeah, well, yeah.

Do people go to hell? Yes. Why do they go to hell? Yes. Why do they go to hell? Because they're doing the wrong thing during their life. Is there no way of getting out of that? No. Go with confession and tell the priest all your sins. And what happens then?

You forgive it and try and do it again. Okay. What happens to you after you die? You go to poetry. Your soul goes to poetry. And after that? You might go to hell. I've never really kind of thought about, you know, about hell or anything, about there being a place. I really believe that life is our hell.

That we are living in hell. That we are living in hell. Real red flag there at the end. Let's keep the energy up there, everybody. Oh, it's so good. I thought that was just spectacular, right? And the reason why, Caroline, I wanted to play that in before we start this discussion of Nuala O'Fallon's memoir

is that Nuala O'Fallon was a product of that island. Yeah. I think it's... In a way that I hadn't really... I'm not sure I've ever read a book that communicated in her, you know, from her point of view, what the country was like after the Second World War. I'm sure if we listen to that clip again and carefully,

we would find that she's every single character. You know, she's the kid who's like, yeah, you go for something, doing something bad, something bad, you get it on purpose. And she's that woman at the end saying, hell is the life we live every day. That's what I love about Nuala is that she's everybody, you know. There's so much in this book, really. There's, yeah, there's the standard sort of Irish misery thing that you feel like you're used to, but immediately feels quite fresh and different

when Nuala's talking about it. And also because it's, you know, self-admittedly a little bit bohemian, a little bit middle class, while still being so entrenched in this sort of Dublin poverty. And then we have this sort of artsy, existential, sort of quite distant woman.

And then we have this, you know, TV producer living in London during the feminist movement. And then we have this middle-aged woman trying to reckon with her own ageing towards the end. And it's just, she's everybody. She's everything. I adore her. She would have hated me.

We're going to come on to that later i've got a thing i've got a thing to ask you about um she wouldn't have hated you she was tricky though right she was tricky tricky and i think as well i'm i'm not a big memoir reader myself i find myself i'm i get very frustrated with' self-construction of themselves. Do you know what I mean? When I can sense somebody is hiding their arrogance, hiding their vanity, trying to appear more interesting than they are, trying to appear like more of a victim than they are,

there's something sort of, it's very uncanny valley for me in my head and I find it very difficult to finish a lot of memoirs. But for Nuala, she's so vain. She's so arrogant. She's very selfish. She's really demanding. She is needy.

She's depressed. She's depressive. And she is self-aware enough and she's a smart enough writer to know that she's coming across this way. And she chooses to leave it in anyway. And I find that such an act of bravery. And people talked about this memoir when it came out as being, oh, it's the most startlingly honest thing. And I assume what they meant was because she spoke about her father in such a way and he was a public figure and because she spoke about her sex life and you know being queer and all this kind of stuff but i think what's really amazing it's the real honesty and the real brutality is just how much she leaves in of herself the flawed needy depressive vain arrogant person and that

just turns me on every time i read it john had you read this book before? You hadn't, had you? No, I hadn't. And I was vaguely aware of it. What's blown me away about it is, yes, the honesty is palpable on every page. But it's very interesting the way she structures it. I mean, it's the fact that she starts and ends with her parents. It isn't a book that tries to give you a kind of, I'm going to remix my life to make it more acceptable or to make more sense of it. She confesses at various points during the book

that her life doesn't make much sense. Yeah. You know, she doesn't try and fit it into some kind of neat pattern. As you say, the word tricky is a good one. I suspect she would be quite difficult. Tricky can mean all sorts of things. What it can mean is you have a good understanding of how things work and you want them to work right. And sometimes that can be hard to deal with, but sometimes it's necessary. So that's not a negative thing it's just she strikes me as someone with a big personality and a sense of a good sense of herself and what works and what doesn't work

what's interesting is I often see her in my own mind as being the kind of dark twin to Maeve Binchy. Yeah, that's good. Brilliant. You know, I love Maeve Binchy and I love watching all Maeve Binchy interviews and the kind of the bigness of her, not just physically, but in spirit and the way she's so good at being entertaining and she's really crafted that public facing character. And she's got all these anecdotes and she's wonderful.

that public facing character. And she's got all these anecdotes and she's wonderful. And I feel like Nuala is that sort of shadow side of that personality, is that sort of, that version of Binchy that doesn't quite get expressed, the sort of the frustration, the sort of need, the need to be recognised, the anger. No, I like it. Dark Pinchy is the spin-off we've been waiting for.

But also, don't you feel it's like watching feminism happen on the page in front of you? That's one of the things I thought was a historical document, you know, her childhood. And the thing is that she begins to notice, there's a really, I found quite shocking passage about, you know, a book, the Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, which was published by Seamus Dean.

And there's kind of no women. There's no women in it. And she was calling that out. I mean, from a very early age. And it's almost like, you know, it's being a Martian in a landscape. As a woman, you know, she was able to observe things that maybe a male writer would not have... Would have taken for granted. There's this extreme, really funny,

it almost feels like a David Sedaris anecdote or something, towards in the middle of the book where she's talking about this guy who she's having an affair with in New York and they hate each other. They obviously cannot stand each other. He's some kind of art critic or something. I actually wrote down one of the things he says about her.

He's very anti-Irish. He went into a full rant of physical distaste for me and people like me. People as I understood it, who had no edge, who weren't in the game, who were unimportant, who were soft and melancholy and depressed instead of out there in the bright, hard world fighting towards success and she goes on to talk about how he thought that irish people were soggy which is not untrue yeah yeah this thing when you're talking about the sort of evolution of feminism on the page where she's very frank where she's like i wanted to be near interesting things and

interesting people and the only way to do that was to have sex with people i didn't like yes she's once said it sometimes just for exercise And the only way to do that was to have sex with people I didn't like. She's once said it sometimes just for exercise. Oh, it's so funny. So listen, we've got some clips. And what we're doing today is we've got a series of clips that, as the program goes on, are chronologically throughout her career. So we're very lucky to have access to some of this stuff. And why don't we begin at the beginning? So this is Nuala on a US book tour with Frank McCourt.

This is like 1997. You'll hear how good she is with the audience, right? And you'll hear how full of life she is and joy and how much she's enjoying herself as she explains the title, Are You Somebody? I'm going to explain the title as she explains the title, Are You Somebody? I'm going to explain the title. You see this title, Are You Somebody, which in the Irish edition has a question mark.

It's based on, sometimes I used to be on the television in Ireland and then I might be in a bar a few nights later and there'd be maybe a few women out for a few scoops and you'd see them talking to each other and a few scoops and they'd you see them talking to each other and looking at me and then one of them would wobble across and stick her nose right into my nose and say are you somebody and that's a very important question like am i somebody and if so what type of a body would would i be was a question it turned out i had to ask myself like in my 50s and also are you somebody neatly got rid of what i knew would be the reaction in dublin to my saying

that and about myself at all which was who does she think she is you know and i wanted them to know that i knew i was nobody just as much as they knew I was nobody. Caroline, I have to ask this because we always ask it on Backlisted. So you're way too young to have been to any book events. We know that. We've established that beyond all doubt. Way, way too young to have been to any events. I just learned to read.

Thank you very much. Yeah, the Nuna O'Fallon might have done, right, around this book. So when did you first encounter either her or this particular... So I thought about this a lot. And I do think my very emotional relationship with this book is because I found it during a very emotional moment. So a few years ago, my grandfather was being put into a nursing home and we, me and my family were sort of gutting his house where I had spent every day after school growing up. So we could rent out the house so we could pay for the nursing home. It's quite, you know, quite sad day. But my grandmother who had died when I was 13, her room had been completely preserved and everything was the same. And, you know, her little pearl handled brushes and her mink coat and all that was all there.

And her stack of books by the bed and her prayer book on top of that. And there was a few, you know, Jean Pleiades. She loved like historical romances and that kind of thing. you know, Jean Pleiades, she loved, she loved like historical romances and that kind of thing. But at the top, the only one that had a bookmark in it was Nuala's book, was this book that I have right here in front of me. And I think when, when, you know, she, she died when I was not even a teenager yet, really. So we never had that sort of intellectual relationship. And so when you see a bookmark in something, you kind of went, well, what was the last page my grandmother read, you know, when I was, you know, before she went into hospital. And it was this page from quite early on in the book about this moment when Nuala is stuck in Dublin. Now she's stuck in

London. She can't, she hates it. She's doing domestic work. She can't get back to Ireland. And I'm going to read it a bit later on. And the way she gets back is quite unique. And I just thought it was so moving. And I sat there and I just read the whole book and let my family clear out the rest of that. On the floor of my grandmother's old bedroom. And for me that time as well, I was, I hadn't, I had written, but I hadn't yet published my first novel. And that novel was based entirely in London with English characters. And I felt this sense that, you know, a lot of people were asking me why I hadn't written Irish characters, why I hadn't written an Irish setting. And part of it was because I had at that point been living in London for so long, I had felt

a kind of a rootlessness and that I was a bit like, you know, what, what do I actually have to say as an Irish adult, considering I've never had a real job there and I've never paid taxes there. And this book just, I read it the whole day and all night and it became a sort of a road back in a way. And it's become, it's an extremely emotional text for me ever since then. And then a few years later, I was asked to come back to Cork because they were doing this event called Naked Boys Reading, which is exactly what it sounds like on the tin.

Good Lord. And so it's kind of like a cabaret slash political queer sort of night where they were putting on this old church that was since become a performance art space and I as the visiting author was supposed to collate a selection of readings that naked men would then have to read on stage and it was hilarious and they were all such good sports and they were from 18 to 60 and I stood up on stage with them me fully clothed of course

and one of the one of the readings I put together was the exact same reading that I read on the floor of my grandmother's house. And afterwards, that boy came up to me and he's like a real country boy and he played hurling and all this. And he said, you know, I was practicing this for my mom the other night and she told me she had to give up a baby when she was 17. And it was just, it was the most incredible. So this book is, and this work has just sort of laid eggs in me in a way that no other book has, you know? Well, look, you've talked about your very strong

emotional connection with it and Ireland. It was a sensation when it was published in Ireland. But I thought, and therefore let's do a Nuala-style thing and hear from the woman herself of how this book came about. What happened to me was, you see, I write this column, and from time to time, very small publishers would come to me and they'd ask could they collect old opinion columns, not because anyone at all wanted to read them,

but because it's a quick, cheap piece of bookmaking. Flap a cover on it, it looks like a book. And it's so despicable a form of publication that even I said no. But there I was two years ago, and I had nothing, it seemed to me. I had nothing. I had no fella. I had no nothing. And, you know, nothing, had no fella I had no nothing and you know nothing actually So I said yes, and then because I was ashamed I said I'll write an introduction Then at least there'd be something new and of course I put it out of my mind because I didn't want to write

I look on right now hard work, and I don't want to do it, and it was due in March So by April I'd stopped answering the phone in case it was him. He was polite as he was. He did keep mentioning it. But I couldn't write that in person. I couldn't write the first sentence. I'd written loads and loads of impersonal columns.

A little bit personal, but never anything that went me, me, me. Because it's terribly hard for a middle-aged Irish woman, however confident she may appear, to make that claim, you know, and say, I can begin a sentence with I. John, you said correctly, I think, that this Are You Somebody is a book about reading. She's almost the perfect backlisted author in as much as her commitment

to reading and what reading did for her was not merely escapism. It was, well, no, actually, it was escapism in the true sense. It helped her escape, physically, literally escape her upbringing. So I wonder if you could just give us a little bit of that. Yeah. If there were nothing else, reading would obviously be worth living for. Saul Bellow, Alice Munro, Chekhov, Keats, Owen McNamee, Monterland, James, James Joyce,

Tolstoy, Mailer, Dacia Mariani, Dermot Healy, Douglas Dunn, Trollope, Richard Ford, the Queen Ertoliri, Dunn, Collette, Robert Lowell, I don't have to observe any hierarchy, but I recognise that there is a hierarchy. There is great and less great and so on, down to trash. When I was a teacher, I had to avoid quoting some things because they moved me so deeply that I was afraid I'd cry in front of the students. The big speeches in King Lear did that, and the end of the Tempest, and death be not proud, and so will no more go, no more a roving. And what Ralph says to Isabel Archer just before he dies in Portrait of a Lady. And Keats' wonderful letters. I presented writing like this to my students with confidence,

just as it has been confidently presented to me. I think classic literature is deservedly so-called. I might never have read Phaedra or Dejection and Ode or Samson Agonistes or Les Laisons Dangereuses or Pope or Hopkins or Ben Johnson, but that they were prescribed texts. I don't have any objection to the art being made by dead white males, far from it. The thought that I might have missed this literature, that I might have been born later when it was decided it was too difficult for young people, fills me with horror. I never think of gender when I'm reading. If questions about it force themselves on me, I have to come out of reading into this world.

themselves on me. I have to come out of reading into this world. And then this is a nice little, I like what derives from literature, fine commentary like Cynthia Ozix or Seamus Heaney's or Henry James's prefaces, biography, autobiography. The only thing I don't read much of now when time is so precious, are middle range authors. Yeah, this is great. Kundera say, or Paul Auster, writers who play middle-level games. When I want pleasure, I want perfect trivia. Romances by Judith Krantz, thrillers by Scott Turow, moral tales by Maeve Binchy, or else I want the real great thing.

Isn't that brilliant? Amazing. One of the things about her, it strikes me, is how open she is, right? That's not a glib dismissal of Kundra and Paul Auster, those middle-range authors. That's a kind of, well, I've read them and I've taken them at their word

and this is what I feel about it. No, it's the middle-range games that I love. It's just perfect, isn't it? So, Caroline, we heard Nuala talking there about how the book came about. I know. Do you think there's a kind of spontaneity in the prose if we believe her about how she wrote it is that one of the things that that kind of endears it to us? It's funny because it feels mildly embarrassing now going on this big monologue about all the the ways in which this book has meant things to me. And then there's Nuala being like, yeah, well, I didn't want to write it.

And it seems like a cheap, nasty way to make a book. Yeah, but your experience is clearly shared by, you know. Many people, yes. I do agree with you, though, because so in this version that I have the first edition um with the columns uh all at the back she does sort of say you know she does give an explanation a forward saying ah yeah they've asked me to do this and all this kind of thing um and you can tell when she starts to write it she thinks it's going to be 2 000 words long and then she you get a feeling that she can't stop herself you know yeah i agree yeah absolutely and that's what's

so compelling about it and she's it almost feels at the beginning like um like a wikipedia page she's writing for herself and it's like here here's who my parents were and here's who my granddad was and that's that and you don't need to know much more. But it's like she scratched a scab and it won't stop bleeding. And the fact that then 200 pages later, we end with her parents and they're sort of tacit neglect of her and their neglect of one another. And the sort of emotional games that were going on there. And it really feels like something that she had to write for her, you know? Yeah.

And totally by surprise to herself I mean it's so interesting to contrast her with Dermot Healy but you could say they have the same need you know Dermot Healy took 10 years to get a book right and Nuala wrote this in six weeks or something right but there's still a need to be present and to let the reader know that you are reading something that really matters to the writer in the moment, right? In the moment of your reading, it really matters. She flings out fragments almost of revelation that you almost feel she's surprised that she's put them on the page and then she has to speed past them for a few paragraphs before she circles back round to pick it up again because she didn't know she was going to do that.

It's very exciting to read, I must say. So accurate, I think. It's like, John, the bit that you were reading about how when she was a teacher and she had to refrain from giving her students things because she would get so overwhelmed with emotion as she was reading The End of the Tempest or something. But you feel that in the book as well, where there are often times where she kind of slips into what I think of as an almost Nora Ephron type of voice of like, well, I'm a sassy lady and I have a thing to say. And then she'll suddenly be overwhelmed by feeling. There's the chapters where she's talking about her time in Oxford and she's kind of talking somewhat abstractly about like Beatlemania and what it was like and the kind of the sceniness

of it all. And then she sort of gets like trapped in this scene of her big heartbreak that she's having in Oxford. And she suddenly sort of like looks down at the pavement and she can't believe that for the amount of sorrow she felt on those slams, how they can't be cracking in two. And that comes out of nowhere. And then end of chapter, let's skip on. Caroline, you've got the original first edition of Are You Somebody There?

And this is, you know, the copy we've got, the modern copy, has virtually no blurb except some quotes and a little passage from the book. But how did they pitch this book originally? It's very interesting because this is all blurb and no quotes. Okay, right. So I don't even know if they were sending out any proof copies or they couldn't get any quotes or what but what's interesting even looking at the front cover

and we have a bit of kind of folk art of an angel here We do, yeah Which I don't love personally But then it's the life and times of Nú Leó Fáilán and they've even put the times in the typeface of the Irish Times. So clearly it's a bit of Okay.

You remember the newspaper, right? So it feels a little bit desperate already. So on the back, the back copy reads Given to watching the world like a spy behind enemy lines,

Nú Leó Fáilán now turns the exceptional sensibility upon her own life in one of the most personal Irish memoirs ever written. in the early 1960s and the exuberance of Beatles-era Oxford as well as her years as a university lecturer and BBC it's a CV and BBC and RTV television producer. Always candid,

she also touches on some of those affairs of the heart that have coloured her struggle for a sense of self as an Irish woman. This remarkable memoir is followed by a selection

of Núleó Fáilán's columns on people, issues and places from the Irish times over the past decade. Taken together, the heartfelt memoir and equally ardent journalism of Are You Somebody provide a fascinating portrait of both Ireland and one of its most popular and respected commentators. It's so accurate, yet entirely fails to represent the spirit of the book. Sorry, if you're listening, whoever wrote that, I mean,

it was a brave effort, but you would not think that a book answering to that blurb would be published and cause a sensation in both Ireland and America, which it did, right? It's six weeks at the top of the New York Times bestseller list or something like that. It's amazing. I would love to know how it happened exactly. Because they're relying on so much here. They're relying on her father's name. They're relying on the BBC. They're relying on RT.

They're relying on all these institutions that she's been tangentially related to. Please care. Please care a little. And by the way, here's some columns just to pad out the back of the book. Exactly. And it's interesting because there's so much name dropping in the book,

and especially in the early pages. And it's almost like she's trying to convince herself that she has weight, that she has legitimacy, and she should be publishing a book. And then we have this, how did that domino effect of its popularity happen, especially overseas? I would love to know. This is an extract from an interview with an American interviewer called Terence Winch. This is from 2002.

So we're talking five or six years after the success of Are You Somebody? And, you know, it is true to say that that success was not anticipated, I think, by anyone involved in the book, including the author. by anyone involved in the book, including the author. And Nuala had to get used suddenly to being this public figure in a way that she hadn't really been before. So this is from 2002. This is very interesting to hear her talk about what that means for her at that point.

I think in Ireland it's found fairly unseemly. A, that anyone should write so much, so care so much about the body, and B, that anyone of my age should care so much. They might forgive me if I was young. But there's a satirical radio show in Ireland, Fellas, of course, and they mock me all the time. Really? Yes.

Well, they mock me anyway some of the time. Really vicious mockery. I imagine it would be threatening to a lot of people. Yeah, and they think it's horrible that a woman my age is still going on about bodies. Really? Yeah, because there is a thing that I call the JFK effect. When I land in America, I become younger because this society allows women and men to be younger longer than my society or than any of the old European societies.

We are written off very soon after the age of newbility. Is that changing at all, do you think, in Ireland today? On the face of it, Ireland, you know, was last year the third fastest growing economy in the world and the fastest growing in the EU. And, you know, people don't go home to their mummy for their dinner. They go to restaurants and there's all kinds of superficial changes. But deep down, Ireland's a very conservative,

very woman-hating society. The big change in Ireland is the same as the big change everywhere in the first world. Children, the attitude to children has changed. Every interview is golden. I've got to tell you, it's so hard finding, just chopping these things down. You know, this book was published in 1996. Now, to me, that doesn't seem that long ago, right? Something Colin Tobin says, you know, when it was published, he said it was like a glass exploding. you know, he said it was like when it was published, he said it was like a glass exploding. You know, he said it was no Irish woman had written with this degree of honesty and clarity about sex and about abortion affairs.

You know, it was like, I think it is maybe harder for English people who hadn't lived with that degree of shame. That's what I mean. That's why this is 1996. I just wanted to reiterate that, you know. But, you know, it's also 1986 is a funny year because it's also the year the last Magdalene laundry closed, you know. And I think what happened in Ireland specifically, and it's very cliched and very, you know, do to keep coming back to the laundries. But so much of it, so much of Irish female interior life, both literally and metaphorically, does come back to the laundries because it is this thing that happens where we start with this 19th century ideal of.

We start with this 19th century ideal of, you know, how are we going to, you know, these fallen women, these sex workers, these whatever, how are we going to, how is. And my own parents and people and older people in my life have talked to me about this, about how when someone became tarnished, became fallen, and they could be put in these institutions for the rest of their lives with no warning, the culture of fear that creates in a woman and then that becomes inherited by subsequent generations, and I think is still being inherited, never goes away. And the fear of the body and the fear of how your own body can turn against you. And these are arguments that have been so well trodden by so many Irish female authors. And I don't think it's, you know, we keep digging, you know, and we keep trying to get to the centre of it she keeps

writing about the fear of getting pregnant and yet the recklessness of that not preventing her right that's a big theme in the first half of the book lucky how lucky she is not to get pregnant because what getting pregnant would mean in that society in that era even in as i say the 1970s i know i know it. It's dreadful. I'm like, can I read that little bit, actually? Yes, please. Let's hear it. In particular.

So, yeah, I mentioned a little bit earlier on about how she's working as a domestic worker in England, but she has no way of getting back to Ireland, even though she's deeply, deeply miserable. An accident got me the fare back to Ireland. Lives were ruined at that time, thousands and thousands of them, quite casually, by the rules the patriarchy made for young women. They were hotly pursued and half long to yield, but they were not able to defend themselves against pregnancy and they were destroyed if they got pregnant. I got the fare back to Ireland through one of these tragic pregnancies.

An Irish woman I know, a successful, well-dressed executive assistant who normally wouldn't have mixed with me, thought she might be pregnant. She came to me and we went to the doctor. She took off her jumper and bra and he just peered at her and said, yes, she was pregnant. He said it coldly. She paid him. Outside, it was a winter night. She held onto the wall, dry-eyed, trying to grasp the ruin that faced her. Almost the worst thing was, how would she tell her parents? In the end, I was given the fare back to Ireland to tell them, while she waited in London to hear how they took it.

That was how I got back to Dublin. This young woman, who had barely begun her life when pregnancy struck her. But that is her story for her to tell. All I know is that she hid out in Belfast and that I was there with her for the last few days before the baby was born. We walked around all the time aimlessly because we had no money to go anywhere. I saw her a few hours after the birth weeping in her bed, her milk seeping through the bandages

she was tightly bound with. Her father came up from Dublin and he and I were the only people in the side chapel when a priest baptised the baby. Then I took the baby to the train to Dublin. In Dublin I got a bus to Black Rock. I handed the baby into the nun at a home there to be kept until it was adopted. All that way the baby never cried. I didn't know until many years later that the mother used to go out to Black Rock to that home and look through the hedge of the children's playtime in the hope of seeing a child who looked like herself. And still I was having unprotected sex myself. I didn't know how to get out of having

sex. I never thought of the man as having responsibility to me. Though now I don't forgive the older man, for instance, who took me on a holiday to the west of Ireland, which I'd never seen before when I was 19. This man was Irish, but he had been travelling abroad. He was the first travelled man I'd ever known, and I revered him for his knowledge. I felt I had to sleep with him to keep him interested in me, but I only knew how to court. I remember him bending over my naked body. I hated it being out in the open.

In the bed, in the damn cottage we had to pretend to be married to get. He was pulling at the hair under my arm as a soft, playful, initiatory move. Relax, he ordered. Come on, relax. Jesus. It's just so, it's such brilliant writing though. It's such brilliant writing. It's so economical. And so the pacing of it is incredible. That's what I kept thinking. I kept thinking, how are you doing that? How are you doing that? You know, just on a technical level, how does every chapter keep its momentum rolling along? It's not, it's not because she zooms past everything. That's not what I mean. It's, it's, it feels to me like every little paragraph is emotionally weighted. And she understands, perhaps not until a couple of paragraphs later,

what her attitude to it is. And then she builds it and keeps going. It's amazing writing, Caroline. She really seems to be having an organic experience with her own memory, you know? Yes. And it does seem like free association in a way that seems so natural and so unplanned. And then to go from this like hideous story about the woman and her child and then to be told in a cottage by an older man

to relax and it's like how could anyone possibly react and it's just oh it ruins me yeah there's so many of those shocking moments with the man i mean that's one about the american who comes and basically sort of rapes her yeah and then says that he's got a telegram he just got a telegram at the door saying his mother had died it's a really haunting scene it's really haunting and yet she frames it as being like the only time she understood what sex was about was that this man yeah this this compulsory release after his mother had died it's's like, is that what sex is about? That's one of those moments.

That's one of those moments where I put the book down and stared out the window for 10 minutes. What? What? What? Well, look, I... Anne Enright tells a very funny story about being on a panel with Nuala and

she you know Anne Enright had stood up to give her speech and she'd not done very well and she sat down and Nuala whispered something in her ear and She doesn't say what it is, which we described as being like basically a knife between the ribs. But then Nula goes up and gives the greatest speech she's ever seen in her life, you know. But Anne Enright says that in a kind of, and the reason why she did that is because she was committed to telling the truth. Telling the truth was the engine of her her creativity and so the breakthrough that she has

uh she was talking about on that clip we heard once she gets over the fear of saying i once she gets over the fear of of her upbringing and as a quote-unquote irish woman that she can say I once you start saying I all this stuff comes out yeah um Caroline uh so on the lot on the line that she would always tell the truth I've got a thing for you now which is I found a review uh you the are you are the host of the podcast sentimental garbage of course Nuala didn't live long enough to see podcasts she'd'd have been very good. Oh, what a guest. Yeah. But I found a review by her in the Times in 1970, so it's like 51 years ago,

of the novel Love Story by Eric Segal. Right. And which is made into a very famous film with Ryan O'Neill and Olivia de Havilland. Ali McGraw.

You're right, Ali McGraw, not Olivia de Havilland. That would be ridiculous. Yeah, I was thinking. Shut up. That would be absurd. But I'm just going to read you a couple of paragraphs from this. And I want you to imagine that you have to respond to Nula in the moment, Caroline, okay?

All right, here we Okay. All right. Here we go. Once we knew where we were with bestsellers, we were in Never Never Land. Since Lady Audley's Secret, bestsellers have been made from sex, violence, and exotic location. The first two elements durable, the last the one that dates. Who thrills now to Hall Cain's Isle of Man? That's a great line american bestsellers are the most sexy and the most violent they are set in mythic communities like hollywood or the mafia they are very very long but love story is an american bestseller hundreds of

thousands of americans have bought a book which is short, pure, unviolent, and written by a man who, besides writing film scripts, teaches classics. And then do you want to hear the last paragraph? It is genuinely dispiriting to think of this book's huge readership. There is a hopeless disproportion between the world of teachers, librarians, solid commentators on Joyce, and the world which has chosen to make Love Story a publishing phenomenon. This trivial book is more important to the death of the novel than what happens inside literary history. Bestsellers have always been escapists. They've always been acknowledged as a temporary alternative to reality,

which remains intact. Escapist pseudo-realism is new, successful, and thoroughly disturbing. Come on, Donahue, please react on the spot. Well, I'm a big fan of escapist pseudo-realism, so I am slaying on that one, on that account. However, I do kind of agree with her to an extent. Often when I tell people what my podcast is about, they interpret it as, oh so you um discuss bad books

no and uh and i often have you know i say to people and they say oh are you gonna do um 50 shades of gray or are you gonna do this that or the other i was like no i liked it's good books it's it's it's simply good books i think i I think New Love would get that possibly. I think she would know the difference somehow between The Other Bolin Girl and Fifty Shades of Grey or A Love Story or something. My take on it, Caroline, is she probably wouldn't have written that in the year 2000. That is a 1970 way of looking. We're still thinking about high culture and low culture and how they are opposed to one another. And she says that at one point when she's talking about

how the academics have learnt the trick of writing about literature and it really wounds her that her students have kind of, they're not feeling it in the way that she, you know, she wants, she says books have got to change you, you know, they've got to change you completely. This little thing that she writes about the Irish literary scene, biographers of Irish writers will be scraping the barrel very deep if they ever come to me, but I'm representative of a certain milieu.

For every real writer around, there were ten merely literary-minded people like me. Perhaps literary Dublin needs both kinds. So, well, I want to listen to a couple of things and I'm going to warn, I'm giving a slight warning to listeners now. This is pretty emotionally strong material that we're about to play, but it seems to me important in understanding her approach to telling the truth, even if the truth might not be what you want to hear. So on April the 13th, 2008,

RTE broadcast an interview with Nuala O'Fallon, conducted by Marianne Finucane. And this was a big deal. They were great friends, weren't they? Yeah, they were very close. Nuala had been diagnosed, she knew she was dying and she wanted to give this interview. And so we're going to hear a few clips from this. And the first one is her talking about why she wanted to give the interview.

And now you're doing this interview in a completely different context. And I understand it is to explain yourself to yourself as well as to us as well. Yeah, it must look as if I'm an awful devil for publicity altogether. And in a sense, I am in that since I wrote Are You Somebody and it reached what it is the truth to say, was a huge response. I have, in a sense, put myself out there. And the interviews I did back then, 10 or 11 years ago, are like one bookend in which I presented myself. And lots of people didn't like me, and lots of people did. But one way or another, it was company for me, who happens to be a childless, middle-aged woman. And now I'm actually dying and I have metastatic cancer in three different parts of my body.

And somehow or other, it helps me to set up the other bookend and to say to those people who were interested in me and did care about me, well, this is how it is for me now, for what it's worth. include it because i'm trying to to emphasize to uh anyone listening to this that the artistic method is the same the medium is different but the desire to tell the truth about what's happening is is the thing that has driven her forward from the writing of are you Somebody? But on that telling the truth thing, what I'm interested in is because she does mention living people so liberally and many of those living people have had great, huge things to say about it. Chief of which is Nell McCafferty, who was her partner for 15 years. Yeah, yeah. And it's not as if Nuala at any point is lying about their relationship,

but she is obscuring it massively. It is the only place in the whole book where she is veiled, you know? Yeah. I don't know enough about the personalities involved, right? To me, let's say I knew nothing about the author and I were reading the memoir, that wouldn't seem veiled to me. Or if it seemed veiled, it would seem important to the writer and it would seem legitimately held back. But what did we learn subsequently then that makes you feel it's veiled? Well, Nell has subsequently gone on and talked in the press about her relationship to how she's mentioned in this. And basically, you know, her argument is, to very graciously summarize, is that she's kind of making out that the two of them were sort of roommates or gal pals, where elsewhere in the book,

she has these sort of riveting, sort of very physical, very sexual, quite graphic for considering the genre she's writing in relationships with men that are full of emotional turmoil. And I think to Nell, it seems as if like, it's that classic and quite homophobic lens of, oh, you kind of needed a break from men. So you took a time out with a nice lady for a while and you both went to Bogota, you know. And Nell sort of seems to internalize it as a kind of internalized homophobia kind of thing of she didn't really want to be characterized

as being a lesbian or a gay woman or a queer woman because there really wasn't a space in the 90s for an openly bisexual woman i think it would have confused a lot of people so yeah so as well nell talks about her need to be fancied was was quite uh ever present like even in her 60s she has this moment in that Enright piece when she's like, you know, nobody's asking me to dance. And this is sort of a 65-year-old woman and you'd think she'd be over such concerns, but she still wants to be asked to dance. She loves men.

She loves their gaze. She loves being around them. And I think that's quite difficult for her to square when she's also so bloody furious, you know. Tricky. That's what I said, tricky. Anne Enright says a wonderful thing. She says that she was truthful to the point of being self-destructive.

And it was just that point of combustion that sparked my interest as a writer. And it is that thing, isn't it? It's that sense of she's touching stuff that most people will not get. They won't go there. They won't take that risk. Well, let's give the last words to Nuala from that final interview. Your listeners who've stuck with us will recall we heard people in Dublin in 1979 being asked, did they believe in the devil? Did they believe in hell? Did they believe in an afterlife?

Here's Nuala O'Fallon being asked a similar question. Do you believe in an afterlife? No, I do not. Or a god? Well, that's a different matter somehow. You know, I actually don't know how we all get away with our unthinkingness often last thing at night

I've walked the dog down the lane and you look up at the sky illuminated by the moon and behind the moon the Milky Way and the Milky Way and the Milky Way and you know you're nothing on the edge of one planet compared to this universe, unimaginably vast up there and unimaginably

mysterious. And I've done that for years, looked up at it and kind of giving it a wink and thought, well, I don't know what's going on. And I still don't know what's going on. But I can't be consoled by mention of God, though I respect and adore the art that arises from the love of God and though nearly everybody I love and respect, they themselves believe in God, it is meaningless to me, really meaningless. Amazing. Amazing. And now it's time to leave Nuala and return home sadder, richer, wiser. Huge thanks to Caroline for sharing this brave and beautiful book with us, to Nicky Birch for making us sound better to you than we sound to ourselves, and to Unbound for the tin of tweed talc. Tweed by Lothric.

Yes. You can download all 140-something previous episodes plus follow links, clips and suggestions for further reading by visiting our website

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Our version of the open university where we get to stay home and study all the books, music and films we care to and then share them with you. A lot of listeners also get to hear their names read out on the show as a mark of our thanks and appreciation. So thank you this week to Jenny Bygrave and Roger McMorrin. Caroline, is there anything else you wish to add?

We'd like to thank you for being a brilliant guest and making us read this book and do you recommend this book to lots of people i do and they never read it well they should they really really should hey this one's in print everyone imagine that you could just go and buy this or borrow it and read it and you should so as as you mentioned earlier, I'm a Virago author and I wrote this impassioned email to Donna, who's the head of modern classics over there. I was like, Donna, you have to republish this book. It has to happen. I will bravely write the foreword. You know, those emails you send. And then she was like, yeah, they've just republished

a beautiful edition. Here it is. I was like, oh, well, I guess great. That's all for now. Thank you for listening. Thank you for your support. And we'll be back in a fortnight. If you prefer to listen to Backlisted without adverts, you can sign up to our Patreon. It's www.patreon.com forward slash backlisted. As well as getting the show early,

you get a whole two extra episodes of what we call Locklisted, which is Andy, me and Nicky talking about the books, music and films we've enjoyed in the previous fortnight.