Feminist columnist and writer on social upheaval in Ireland

Nuala O'Faolain, the Irish journalist and author celebrated for her 1996 autobiography Are You Somebody? died on 9 May, 2008, aged 68, after succumbing to an aggressive cancer.

She described the book as an "accidental memoir" having never planned to write her life story, but a collection of her journalism for the Irish Times evolved into a revealing account of an eventful life.

She wrote a follow-up book, Almost There (2003), and a novel, My Dream of You (2001), but she came to be haunted by some of the revelations in her books, including details of affairs with men and women and her mother’s alcoholism.

The toils attached to a life in journalism were a prominent part of Nuala’s life from an early age. She was born on 1 March, 1940, into a family of nine children. Her father was the noted newspaper diarist Terry O'Sullivan who wrote for the Dublin Evening Press.

His vocation meant he had little time to spend with his family and this in turn drove Nuala’s mother to depression and drink. A bright teenager, Nuala coped with neglect and life in cheap housing with rebellion, sneaking off to dances and being expelled from the convent she attended.

Nevertheless, at 14 she showed enough promise for her parents to send her to boarding-school in County Monaghan. From there she went to University College Dublin, though temptation into a wild 1960s lifestyle once again halted her education.

The loss of her scholarship and the resulting poverty forced her to work in England for a time, but she eventually returned to Dublin to complete her degree and graduated with distinction. Her academic prowess then secured her a scholarship at Hull and ultimately the chance to study nineteenth-century literature at Oxford.

Her first job was lecturing at UCD, but she moved to London soon afterwards where she worked as a television and radio producer with the BBC and Open University, during which time she would associate with the likes of Philip Larkin and John Berger.

In 1977 she joined a women’s current affairs programme on Radio Telefis Eireann (RTE) as a producer, a job that earned her a Jacob's radio award and a weekly opinion column in the Irish Times. She gained a loyal readership and a reputation for unpredictability, helping her win the title of ‘Journalist of the Year’ in 1986, her first year with the Times.

But despite her professional success, her private life remained something of a shambles. Since her teens she had drunk heavily and had affairs with a string of married men, something which she would later regret, saying, "I’m very sorry for other women I have hurt and particularly because half-way through my life, feminism happened."

She was also known for her 15-year relationship with Nell McCafferty, the renowned journalist and feminist. Ms O’Faolain never married but she lived with Ms McCafferty for many years in a loving but stormy partnership that broke up in 1995.

The following year she sat down to write the introduction for a collection of her columns, but didn’t stop writing for 200 pages. In a frank and unsentimental look back over her life, she explored many of her most painful experiences, as well as discussing her work which had seen her reporting from the frontline of social upheaval in Ireland, a country she described as a "damp little shambles of a democracy on the edge of the Western world".

As well as her second memoir and novel, she wrote a biography of May Duignan, a notorious turn-of-the-century criminal. The Story of Chicago May won the 2006 Prix Femina award for best non-French book. She continued to write for the Irish Times and filed reports from America (where she now had a New York apartment), Africa and Europe. She also spent a year living in Northern Ireland, reporting on the changing socio-political outlook there.

In February 2008 she was diagnosed with incurable cancer of the lungs, brain and liver. "As soon as I knew I was going to die soon, the goodness went out of life," she said in a pragmatic but emotional radio interview shortly afterwards in April 2008. She died in a Dublin hospice a month later.