Nuala O'Faolain, author of "Are You Somebody" (1996) a NY Times bestseller, has been a waitress, sales clerk, and maid; a university lecturer, a TV producer, and, more recently, a columnist with the "Irish Times" living in Dublin. "She was born one of nine children into a pennilless North Dublin family... Pushing constantly at the boundaries of Ireland's confining Catholic culture, she ultimately became one of the country's best-known columnists. The story of how she defines herself outside the traditional roles assigned to women at that time provides an exhilarating example of courage, honesty, and bold living," per a book review. An excerpt -- "I knew other places besides home. They sent me to Kerry, to the relations. There were pig hairs in the yellow skin of the fatty boiled bacon the lady draped across the cabbage I had to eat. But on Saturday nights a technicolour pudding was installed in the parlour, under a white cloth; we got that after Sunday Mass. The north Dublin fields where we lived were silent and bleak, so it was like going to New York to be sent to my great-aunt in Athlone. She was the mistress of a tiny, hardly used pub, Egan's of Connaugh Street. Mr. Eagan kept a big hoinking pig in the slimy yard. Myself and Auntie Kit used to go around the public grass of the Battery on our hands and knees, collecting a certain weed for the bristly old thing with its watery eyes. The shed the pig slept in was full of disintegrating sheet music from when Kit as a young woman had been a pianist accompanying the silent movies in Listowel.. "Me and Jane in a plane/Soaring up in the sky;/No ! traffic cop/Will ever stop/Me and Jane in a plane." I loved the streets of Athlone: the lights, the chip shop, Broderick's Bakery a few doors away where a machine sliced the pans. I was even a small celebrity among the street's boys and girls, being thought to be from Dublin city. There was the big world, too, presenting us isolated children with puzzles. I went into a shop one day. The woman behind the counter was showing something - big photos - in a low-voiced, secret way to another women, bent over the counter. I glimpsed the photos... These were photos from the Holocaust. I saw gas ovens. Piles of bones. That night our friends came across the field, for us to go down the railway line and rob Williams's orchard as usual. But as we were going along I told them about the evil in the world, and we all decided to repent. We went home and upended the kitchen chairs to kneel at and said a very long Rosary."