Tag Archives: autobiography

A Year in Books/Day 68: Are You Somebody

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  • Title: Are You Somebody The Accidental Memoir of a Dublin Woman
  • Author: Nuala O’Faolain
  • Year Published: 1996 (Henry Holt and Company, Inc.)
  • Year Purchased: 2000
  • Source: Barnes & Noble clearance rack
  • About: Nuala O’Faolain could write. That seems like a simplistic assertion but it’s true: she could write, and she did so beautifully and well in five books. This was her first. She was 56 at publication, and everything she had learned in nearly 6 decades of  living was poured, eloquently and firmly, into this exquisite volume. This is what I would term a “quiet” memoir, not because of the contents but because of her unflinching yet lyrical voice: the battles and iniquities and joys of her life are recounted without hyperbole, bombast or dramatics. It’s lovely, moving, humorous, without pity: it’s straight-up what a memoir should be.
  • Motivation: The title and the jacket blurbs were a huge lure (unusual for me). The cover photo is alluring, the concept compelling.
  • Times Read: 2
  • Random Excerpt/Page 36: “I’m not ashamed of our fervours. But I am ashamed that twice I stole the gifts I gave to my heroine. I took Tweed talc or round soaps in tissue paper from other girls’ cubicles. I had to. I had no money. I didn’t take them for myself, just to give to her. I think that she may have known-and that the nuns knew and never came out with it. They knew I told lies. They knew I read under the blanket. They knew (this was nearly the end of me) that I smoked, perched in the window embrasure of a lavatory high up in the attics, listening at the cold glass to the noises of the town, like the great roars from the rallies for the IRA men-one of them was a local-who were killed on the Borders in 1956.”
  • Happiness Scale: 10

A Year in Books/Day 25: Beginning Again

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  • Title: Beginning Again An Autobiography of the Years 1911 to 1918
  • Author: Leonard Woolf
  • Year Published: 1963/This Edition 1975 (A Harvest/HBJ Book)
  • Year Purchased: 2002/2003
  • Source: Barnes & Noble clearance rack
  • About: The third installment of Woolf’s 5-volume autobiography covers the early years of his marriage to budding novelist Virginia Stephen and the start of their famous Hogarth Press. Famous spouse Leonard Woolf gave more than a name to his famous wife. He was complex, fascinating and incredibly well-respected in more than one field.
  • Motivation: Although I am a fan of Virginia’s writing, and find her character and life more than a bit riveting, I have always been drawn to the deep, intellectual and exacting nature of her husband. He was also a damn fine writer.
  • Times Read: 2
  • Random Excerpt/Page 16: “I was born an introspective intellectual, and the man or woman who is by nature addicted to introspection gets into the habit, after the age of 15 or 16, of feeling himself, often intensely, as ‘I’ and yet at the same time of seeing himself out of the corner of his eye as ‘not I’, a stranger acting a part upon a stage.”
  • Happiness Scale: 10

A Year in Books/Day 20: The Outermost House

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  • Title: The Outermost House A Year of Life on the Great beach of Cape Cod
  • Author: Henry Beston
  • Year Published: Original Edition-1928/This Edition-2003 (An Owl Book Henry Holt and Company)
  • Year Purchased: 2004
  • Source: Bas Bleu
  • About:
    Cape Cod

    Image via Wikipedia

    Henry Beston’s classic masterpiece details his year spent on Cape Cod ,in a house of his own design, amidst nature’s ever-changing cruelty and splendor.

  • Motivation: I was moved by a really stellar reader review in the Bas Bleu catalogue. I’m immensely satisfied that I did, as it subtly yet powerfully changed my life.
  • Times Read: 2
  • Random Excerpt/Page 118: “One great sea drowned all the five. Men on the beach saw it coming and shouted, the men on the deckhouse shouted and were heard, and then the wave broke, hiding the tragic fragment in a sluice of foam and wreckage. When this had poured away, the men on the afterhouse were gone. A head was visible for a minute, and then another drifting southward, and then there was nothing but sea.”
  • Happiness Scale: 10++