Nuala O'Faolain; Irish Writer Illuminated Female Isolation

Nuala O'Faolain, 68, an Irish journalist who in midlife turned an introduction to a collection of columns into a best-selling memoir and then quickly wrote a novel, another memoir and a biography, died of cancer May 10 at the Blackrock Hospice in Dublin.

A successful radio and television producer in England and Ireland and an opinion columnist for the Irish Times, Ms. O'Faolain in 1996 published "Are You Somebody? The Accidental Memoir of a Dublin Woman," an exploration of growing up impoverished and female in 1940s and 1950s Ireland. An instant bestseller, it was published the same year as Frank McCourt's "Angela's Ashes" and captured the despair and powerlessness of her homeland in mid-century, where, she wrote, young women are hotly pursued but "not able to defend themselves against pregnancy."

Complicated, disarming, self-doubting and shrewd, she resisted admission of success, even after her first book sold 300,000 copies in the United States alone in its first three years. Her books have been praised by reviewers as beautifully written with a stark, merciless tension and a deep understanding of the loneliness of women.

"Ireland isn't a country for believing in yourself, not if you're a woman, not if you're my age," she told Newsweek. "I can't believe it, 'cause it's not sad enough."

The cancer diagnosis came three months ago in New York, and she announced her illness April 12 in an emotional interview on an Irish radio show.

"As soon as I heard I was going to die, the goodness went out of life," she told host Marian Finucane on RTE Radio One. She turned down chemotherapy because "it reduced me to such feelings of impotence and wretchedness and sourness with life . . . and fear that I decided against it."

Nuala O'Faolain (pronounced Noo-la O-fway-lon) was born in Dublin, the second oldest of nine children, daughter of a well-known but inattentive newspaperman and an alcoholic mother. Dismissed from her convent school for rowdiness, Ms. O'Faolain showed enough promise that she received a scholarship to University College in Dublin. She also studied at the University of Hull in England and received a postgraduate degree in English from Oxford University.

She lectured at University College in Dublin, where her circle included filmmaker John Huston, Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh and English writer Kingsley Amis. She also began a long-term but ultimately unsatisfying relationship with a man whom she followed to London. There, she became a BBC producer, making community access programs, traveling extensively, writing and teaching. Her relationship ended and, drinking and smoking heavily, she returned to Ireland in 1977 to work as a television producer for Radio Telefis Eireann.

At age 40, she began a 15-year relationship with a female journalist, Nell McCafferty. That relationship ended, and Ms. O'Faolain later had other romances with men, but she never married or had children.

In Ireland, Ms. O'Faolain was one of a team of women that created an award-winning weekly television program in which "ordinary" women told their life stories. Her work caught the eye of an editor at the Irish Times, who invited her to write weekly opinion columns for the country's leading newspaper. By 1996, a small publisher planned to print a selection of her columns in book form, and Ms. O'Faolain offered to write an introduction.

"I thought that it was the lowest point of my life, because I was in my 50s with nobody at all, and it was down at that lowest point that I wrote 'Are You Somebody?' which changed the very situation I was describing," she said.

She was unable to stop writing. The collection came out, to little notice, until she talked about it on a Irish television show. The first question, she recalled, was "So, you've slept with a lot of people. How many?" Only three of them counted, she replied, and "we were off and running. It seems the next day the world became unhinged."

Booksellers could not keep the collection in stock. The introduction was quickly republished as "Are You Somebody?" and created a sensation, becoming a worldwide bestseller.

In 1999, she accepted a scholarship to Yaddo, the New York artists' colony, and began a novel, "My Dream of You" (2001). New York suited her, so she bought an apartment and lived there as well as keeping a home in County Clare, Ireland. Her second memoir, "Almost There: The Onward Journey of a Dublin Woman" (2003) was followed by "The Story of Chicago May" (2005), an inventive biography of an Irish immigrant who became a highly successful prostitute known as the "Queen of Crooks."

Most recently, she covered the U.S. presidential campaign for Dublin's Sunday Tribune and Irish radio. "It's very difficult for a Clinton to do wrong in Ireland," she said in January. "There is a golf course in Kerry where Bill Clinton once played, and do you know that there is a statue of him there? Teenage girls gather around it . . . and they're called Monicas."

Six of her siblings survive her; two brothers died of alcoholism.

"There's a reason why more autobiographies aren't written, especially in small, watchful countries. People have too many hostages to fortune," she told the Denver Post in 2005.