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In 2004 she published a memoir titled Nell, in which which recounted her upbringing in the Bogside and relationship with her long-term partner, the novelist Nuala O'Faolain.

O’Connor grew up in 1970s Dublin, and her early life is threaded with the lyricism, fatalism and horror that mark many Irish memoirists, from Frank McCourt to Nuala O’Faolain, creating an inextricable knot of love and hate for her homeland.

O’Brien has sometimes been challenged on feminist grounds—the novelist Julia O’Faolain, writing in the Times in 1974, noted that “Miss O’Brien’s sex-dazzled heroines continue to race like lemmings toward unhappiness.”

Recently, I discovered that person in Nuala O’Faolain.

Are You Somebody? by Nuala O’Faolain I had always wondered, when reading Nora Ephron, if Ireland ever had an equivalent.