Are You Somebody? The Accidental Memoir of a Dublin Woman by Nuala O’FaolainOwl Books, 1999 (originally New Island Books, 1996)

Each chapter in this memoir felt perfectly paced, and pleasingly varied: family history, personal history, untangling the past, details of daily life in Ireland and England: Earl Grey and lemon cake at tea, conversations in Dublin pubs with poets. What O’Faolain writes about men and women (about patriarchy, about the rise of feminism) is interesting to me, in part because it seems so very far away. She writes about coming home from a lousy workplace experience (a male manager on a power trip), how it made her feel “glad to be living in an all-woman household.”