Patricia Hampl notes that successful memoir evidences a “hunger for the world,” yearning which “expands beyond its subject…into the endless and tragic recollection that is history.”

Not long before her recent, untimely death, the memoirist Nuala O’Faolain referred to this hunger in an interview published in Ireland’s The Independent. Devastated by a terminal cancer diagnosis received only six weeks before, O’Faolain cried bitterly, “The world has turned its back on me, the world said to me that’s enough of you now and what’s more we’re not going to give you any little treats at the end.” Beauty no longer meant anything to her, said the writer, who had passed on chemotherapy. Not even Proust, whom she had loved, gave her succor.

I thought of Yeats: “But is there any comfort to be found / Man is in love and loves what vanishes / What more is there to say?”

Faolain’s acquaintance with the dark and her blunt reaction to death is unsurprising. Her 1996 memoir Are You Somebody? noted that she “was born in a Dublin that was much more like something from an earlier century…among the teeming, penniless, anonymous Irish of the day.” She spent her life recovering from the effects of a distant father and a neglectful, alcoholic mother, who were not able to emotionally or financially provide for their many children. Nevertheless, O’Faolain became a prominent Irish media personality and journalist. Are You Somebody? traced a stumbling passage out of familial dysfunction in a rapidly changing Ireland.

It is not easy to transcend the personal when writing of the difficult. O’Faolain’s narrative voice could suffer from “the solipsism of the long abused,” as Barbara Myerhoff termed it. This tone was evident in the final interview—for which, of course, one can hardly blame her. But it is still jarring to read, “As soon as I knew I was going to die…the goodness went out of life.” And: “It was nothing to me anymore—the beauty.”

It poignantly brought to mind a chilly night some years ago, when I heard the writer speak at a local college. O’Faolain was radiant with happiness at the reception of Are You Somebody? It had unexpectedly put her in touch with thousands of ordinary Irish, who had seen their lives mirrored in its pages. Her story paralleled theirs and gave them succor; the book had given her a new life.

As I read about her last days, I was horribly sad. But I admired O’Faolain’s bluntness, the courage to confess her anger, confront her mistakes.

I had always found her writing slightly flawed by a certain aggrieved romanticism; in Are You Somebody? she wrote that passion was the most important thing in life. By this, I believe she meant thwarted passion, a central theme in her narrative and that of her mother. But now, O’Faolain said suddenly that she thought, in the end, what mattered in life was “health and reflectiveness…I would like it if I had been a better thinker,” continuing, “passion can go and take a running jump at itself, that’s what it can take.”

O’Faolain could not bring herself to profess a belief in an afterlife, she said, although she grew up with all the accoutrements of religion. And not God, either: “Although I respect and adore the art that arises from the love of God and although nearly everybody I love and respect themselves believe in God, it is meaningless to me, really meaningless.”

But then, as this profoundly human writer often did, she contradicted herself, saying that Thois I Lar an Glanna, a modern song by Donegal’s Albert Fry, best described her attitude at the end of life: “Asking God up there in the heavens, even though you don’t believe in him, to send you back even though you know it can’t happen.”

Help Thou my own unbelief, I thought on reading this.

Farewell to this flawed, lovely, talented soul.