Authentic Life-Writing and Nuala O'faolain's Are You Somebody? the Accidental Memoir of a Dublin Woman (Critical Essay‪)‬

As long as Nuala O'Faolain's memoir Are You Somebody? has received public attention, critics and reviewers have described O'Faolain's narrative and narrative voice as 'authentic', a characterization which carries with it great significance because its signification speaks to such strongly-charged concepts like self, identity, and the modes of performance we purposefully and inadvertently employ, both consciously and subconsciously, whenever we engage in a presentation of our self--to others in the public sphere or to ourselves in the private sphere of our own minds. This article conducts an in-depth study of O'Faolain's narrative technique and proposes that Are You Somebody? is a wonderfully important text, both in its contribution to our understanding of what can constitute authentic identity as well as in its reflections on how we might conceive of the memoir's place with relation to the genre of life-writing. **********