STORY BY LYNNE SHANNON

PORTRAITS BY ANTONIO MANDRALIS

When Nuala O'Faolain first sat down to write her memoir, Are You Somebody? she had no notion her life would change so tremendously. She has been a columnist with the Irish Times for years. Prior to that she was a producer at the BBC, a college teacher, and a director at RTE. She lives in Dublin, but has also lived in New York off and on for the past two years. Her first novel, My Dream of You (Riverhead), has found success in the short time since it emerged in February.

On a snowy, seriously freezing day in the heart of the Village, the vivacious O'Faolain sticks her head out of an open door with a day warming welcome. She scoops up a massively fluffy cat and introduces it as "Owley." One of several cats that have shared her life in New York, it makes an environment of hospitable domesticity complemented by books, laptop and other tools of ajournalist always on the go.

So why a novel, and why now? Answers the 60 year old scribe. "When I decided to try to do something I'd never done before, I came up against not being able to believe in myself in Ireland, because by my age, I'm supposed to have a little pinney and white hair and make apple tarts. And instead, I wanted to by to write a novel about passion."

As she answers the doorbell (which Ow]ey hates), she continues, "I took leave of absence from my job with the Irish Times, and I collected the money that I had made from my memoir, Are You Somebody? I came here to Manhattan and got the first of my cats out of the shelter. I opened up my laptop, and I started trying to write a novel."

There is a plethora of novels these days written by women from her period of life. 'I think women are now younger longer than they ever were in history," she asserts. "The combination of opportunity, earning their own money, hormone replacement treatment, better health, better self esteem--has added perhaps 15 years to the prime of a woman's life. And I think that's not quite recognized yet by society. We're the first generation of powerful women and I'm absolutely thrilled to be one of them. I wouldn't be surprised if women are very energetic, joyous and powerful until they're about 70. There's nothing to defeat us, except physical bad luck, because the inner demons are being overcome." By no means, however, is the novel autobiographical. Besides being younger, her heroine, Kathleen, has lived in a London basement flat, barely able to see the light; she has spent over 20 years in the same job as a travel writer. She hadn't seen Ireland for 30 years. Kathleen finally goes back to Ireland because life is a continuum that you can never analyze on the hoof. But since the book is a meditation about women and what happens to their bodies and through their bodies, it's very interesting to me that those three possibilities are all alive at the end. And there's no real way of knowing. We can't ever know." As for it being historical, everything in italics, she promised, is exact quote. Not even a comma is changed.

What gave even more poignance to this putative love story is the fact that it took place during the years of the Great Famine. One of her contemporary characters even says, "we survived it, so that's got to mean something or we would not be here." But O'Faolain did not choose to use the Famine. She had only hoped to start her readers thinking. "If I could have avoided the Famine, I would have. You notice there are very few accounts from it, very few people have ever shared their memories. So it's an almost untouchable event in Irish life. And I was stuck with it because the love affair that my heroine is writing a book about did begin in 1849. But for that, I would never have because her best friend has died, and because she wants to write a new kind of story about a controversial love affair that occurred with people who actually lived around 1850. In trying to write that book, Kathleen learns about herself as a woman and as an Trishwoman, recovering the history and memories she needs to make herself well."

O'Faolain is delighted to hear when anyone has read the book and loves it. She leaves the audience to figure out--with writer Kathleen--whether or not Marianne Talbot actually had the affair. "In all honesty, I don't know whether she did or she didn't." A pause, then "I know what was in the note she sent in," the grey-hared author laughs triumphantly. So does this mean there will be a sequel? "Absolutely not," she declares.

"This book is not a romance, but it is about romance. It's about what people give for the hope of romance. Romantic books always have conclusions, usually something very happy. But my book is inconclusive. I couldn't bring myself to conclude anything for Kathleen touched on the Famine. There are some events in human life so appalling that actual words can't easily catch them, or even catch them at all."

As she prepares tea, she says, "I admire this country so much, for taking new people in every year. For the doctrine of separation of church and state. For the way the states and the central government are so brilliantly worked out by the Founding Fathers."

"I am an ardent fan of Bill Clinton. He needn't have bothered himself about Ireland, but he came twice, and it made an incredible difference. During his administration, his personal commitment was important for the Good Friday Agreement. Nevertheless, I don't think we in Ireland could be the modernizing, happy, lifting-our-heads-up country we are today, without the Good Friday Agreement, and I don't think we could;have gotten it without Clinton. So his pecadilloes mean nothing to me. I am so grateful to him. And I think I speak for the great majority of people on the island."

The only American man she ever knew was a boyfriend many years ago who asked her to marry him. Had she done so, she might now be living in Scotts Bluff, Nebraska. Thus the American man in the book hails from Scotts Bluff, Nebraska. "I don't think I can live without New York now. But I am Irish,love Ireland from the bottom of my heart, and I wither away from it as well as in it. So I'd love to live six months of the year in Ireland, two months somewhere marvelous, and four months here--the winter. I find the snow and the cold thrilling. I feel great. I love it all." O'Faolain is like her heroine in one respect: she has had trouble feeling she deserves happiness, and whenever she had it, she undermined it. When asked if Ireland would do the same, she replies,_"It's a very interesting question. Actually I ask this about myself because it's only in the last few years that I've had any money at all, or any selfliking, or any evidence that I was of value. I'm trying to accept it, and not think oh, it must be a mistake, they're going to find me out any minute, and everything will be taken away. It's very hard, because my whole nature is to just stick things out and no matter how miserable I am, to bear it. I'm just a baby at happiness. People my age just don't trust our prosperity, they keep on saying we're going to get everything wrong. We never had any emigrants--not even one person emigrated to Ireland in the whole century. And all of a sudden there's immigrants--the first ever colored people, the first ever poorer people than us. And it turns out Ireland has no immigration laws at all. So the same as my count~y is trying to come to terms with a new situation, I am too."

"The young are different, they are computer literate, they travel a lot, and they're very conservative. We were so poor, and we had so little hope about anything that, for example, sex meant a huge amount to us. Whereas young people these days live a calmer life." "Ireland is very good at endurance. It's very good at black humor to make up for the underlying tragedy. But it's no good at being childlike and hopeful. It hasn't had the experience of happiness until the last few years. Our history has been tragic. There's no way around it. There were 800 years of oppression and a devastating famine that broke the country in two. We did lose our own language. In this century, one of every two Irish people born in Ireland has emigrated. The pubs of London and Birmingham are full of broken old Irishmen who've never held a woman in their arms, never owned a roof over their heads, never owned a proper pair of shoes."

When asked to contrast her life as a journalist with her life as a novelist, she thinks for a moment. "The rewards for being a novelist are far greater--both financial and emotional. But on the other hand, I'm really glad that I worked in Belfast for the Irish Times. I'm glad I traveled on assignment to places like Zimbabwe and Iran, and studied people like Mitterand. And I've learned about Ireland through being a journalist. It has been marvelously educational."

It is hard to shift gears and write fiction, because "suddenly you're making the thing up after you spend years checking facts. You do not sit around, as people seem to think, waiting for inspiration. You sit down early in the day, and stick it out even though you're going crazy. You try to feed your mind with new experiences and people. I know the great writers don't need to, but a medium writer like me needs to."

O'Faolain outlines a kaleidoscope of stories about her cats, other writers and her new indoor sport--celebrity watching. She thinks about her books being made into film with Jane Campion directing, and Harvey Keitel as Shay. She would love it if somebody bought the film rights to My Dream of You not only because she thinks it would be a marvelous film, but also "because I have never had any money and it's absolutely wonderful to have money. I have some now, and me and the family have been on holiday, and we never had anything before. I'd like that little extra dollop of money to, maybe, buy a house beside a lake where I could have dogs and cats and donkeys. I think that the resource of my real old age will be animals. But that's further away today than it was 20 years ago. I'm younger than ever." · (Interview quotes by Bred Bolfour)