Irish journalist and author Nuala O'Faolain died May 9 in Dublin of lung cancer at the age of 68.
A radio and television broadcaster, O'Faolain was well known as an opinion columnist for The Irish Times even before her first memoir, Are You Somebody?, made her a best-selling author.
Published in 1996, that book chronicled her childhood as the second of nine children growing up poor in Ireland during the 1940s and '50s. She described herself in the introduction as "a nobody, who came of an unrecorded line of nobodies."
O'Faolain went on to write Almost There, a sequel to her memoir, and My Dream of You, a novel about an Irish travel writer. She announced her diagnosis in mid-April.
Fresh Air remembers O'Faolain with an excerpt from a 2001 interview.
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