My Dream of You

Perry Ogden (Author photograph) and Tim Maul (Jac New York: Riverhead Books, 2001. First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. [8], 500, [2] pages. Inscribed by the author on the title page. Inscription reads Nuala O'Faolain for Catherine. Nuala O'Faolain (1 March 1940 – 9 May 2008) was an Irish journalist, TV producer, book reviewer, teacher and writer. She became well known after the publication of her memoirs Are You Somebody? and Almost There. She wrote a biography of Irish criminal Chicago May and two novels. O'Faolain was born in Clontarf, Dublin. Her father, known as 'TerryO' was a well-known Irish journalist. She was educated at University College Dublin, the University of Hull, and Oxford University. In her writings she often discusses her frustration at the sexism and rigidity of roles in Catholic Ireland that expected her to marry and have children, neither of which she did. In Are You Somebody?, she speaks candidly about her fifteen-year relationship with the journalist Nell McCafferty, who published her own memoir, Nell. From 2002 until her death, O'Faolain lived much of the time with Brooklyn-based attorney John Low-Beer and his daughter Anna. She became internationally well known for her two volumes of memoir, Are You Somebody? and Almost There; a novel, My Dream of You; and a history with commentary, The Story of Chicago May. Her posthumous novel Best Love, Rosie was published in 2009. O'Faolain's feminism stemmed from a fundamental belief in social justice. O'Faolain, placed herself at the center of things, a high-risk strategy that worked because of her broad range of erudition, her courage and a truthfulness that sometimes bordered on the self-destructive. Derived from a Kirkus review: With her first fiction, memoirist O’Faolain offers an expansive work touching on the nature of passion, loss, and hope. Approaching 50, Kathleen de Burca finds her life a tidy ruin: a travel writer for decades, she’s led a life that may seem glamorous and exciting, yet she has little to show for her wandering years, which seem now less like exploring than simply running away. “The older I got,” she says “the heavier my burden of not having been happy yet.” At the death of her dearest friend, Kathleen decides to quit her job and return to her native Ireland, where she hasn’t set foot since she was 20, to research a little-known divorce case from near the end of the Great Potato Famine (1845–49). She hopes to discover grand passion between the English Marianne Talbot and her Irish stable groom William Mullen, but all she finds are questions—and buried, haunting memories of her own. A nesting box of stories, her narrative slips from the present to a full recounting of her past, then to the distant past in the fairy tale she begins writing about Marianne and William. Not surprisingly, she elevates their love, something she’s had little of in her own life. Involved in one debasing sexual experience after another (including a submission to her aged London landlord simply because he asks for it in lieu of paying a clean-up fee), Kathleen is now left to confront the lonely shape of the life she’s created and the Ireland she left behind. In a lyrical and often brutal account of Irish life, the Talbot affair and even the misery of her own parents become sins of the dead bearing down on the living. Kathleen’s journey home, though, provides the needed catharsis and introduces her, as well, to a man who will love her—if she chooses. An honest and poignant account of a woman attempting to build a future on the ruins of the past. Condition: Very good / Very good.

Keywords: Kathleen de Burca, Travel Writer, Wanderer, Explorer, Ireland, Divorce, Great Potato Famine, Marianne Talbot, William Mullen, Love, Sexuality, Sins, Catharsis

ISBN: 1573221775

[Book #84941]

Price: $125.00

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