O'Faolain's jealousy left partner 'torn' between lover and child
Anna Low-Beer with father John and Nuala O'Faolain, who confessed she was jealous of her partner's daughter
Sunday November 08 2009
IN life the troubled writer Nuala O'Faolain confessed that she was jealous of her partner's relationship with his young daughter. In a new documentary on the late writer, her partner's teenage daughter, Anna, offers her perspective for the first time on how Nuala competed with the child for the affections of her father, John Low-Beer.
"It was a new thing for me, for a girlfriend of my father's to be jealous of me. I was eight years old," Anna told the makers of the documentary, which will be broadcast tomorrow night.
"She would complain to him about how he spent too much time with me and I would complain to him about how he spent too much time with her. But we never really complained to each other . . . It went over our heads because, actually, when we were alone together we had a really good relationship."
Nuala O'Faolain embarked on a relationship with Mr Low-Beer, a Brooklyn lawyer, late in life after moving to New York on the back of the unexpected success of her searingly honest memoir, Are You Somebody?
In her first book, she wrote how a childhood marked by an absent father and an alcoholic mother cast a pall over her adult life and relationships. In her follow-up memoir, she wrote about how she struggled to be a healthy, loving partner to John Low-Beer. Despite the fame and financial security her bestselling memoirs brought her, she struggled to come to terms with her past.
"She never really blamed me. She always blamed herself. She knew she had some problems with attention that she didn't get when she was a child, I guess. And she carried those issues throughout her life," said Anna.
Her father told the programme, Cloch le Carn: "She just easily felt that she was second. She would say that. And I would say well Anna's just a child. She would say 'well I'm just a child too'.
"I often felt very torn between Anna and Nuala."
Nuala O'Faolain, who died last year after a short battle with cancer, cemented her place as an unflinching chronicler of life when she announced that she was dying in an iconic interview with her friend, the RTE broadcaster Marian Finucane.
Other friends who reflect on her complicated and uncompromising life include the writers Colm Toibin and Hugo Hamilton, broadcaster Doireann Ni Bhrian and Nuala's sister Grainne. Contributions from some of the more prominent women in her life, such as Marian Finucane and Nell McCafferty, with whom Nuala had a 15-year relationship, are absent.
Colm Toibin described the period of her relationship with Nell as "monumental years" when "both of them raised their voices with particular beauty, eloquence and care. Both of them mattered enormously". Brid Ni Dhocartaigh, her teacher at St Louis convent in Monaghan, recalled her as a brilliant child who struggled to make close friends.
"I don't think she was able to be a close friend to anyone. She didn't have enough courage or faith," she said. "Nuala knew there was something wrong with her family. I don't think she was able to understand her mother at all."
Cloch le Carn is on RTE1 at 7.30pm tomorrow.
- MAEVE SHEEHAN
Sunday Independent
