I love listening to Marian Finucane‘s radio show. This morning she was talking to Nell McCafferty, who is recovering from a bypass operation, and is only twelve months on from losing her mother. I was saddened to hear Nell speak of her ambivalence about whether or not she wanted to live, having a cigarette yesterday, and saying that she could do with a therapist to work it out, but couldn’t afford one.
Ever since I read her brave, painstakingly honest, funny, and sad autobiography “Nell“, I have a soft place in my heart for her, and I have a sense of how devastating her mother’s death would be to her. From my first hilarious memory of her on the Late Late Show in the seventies, being brought on as a dungareed feminist and given a ridiculous “makeover”, with makeup and a gúna deas, to reading her fiery impassioned columns in the Irish Times, In Dublin and Hot Press, to seeing her speak in the Hirschfeld Centre and cracking us up with her razor sharp humour, she’s way up there in my world of people who matter. It’s characteristic of the woman to be so blisteringly honest about her deathwish, but I can’t help but hope that she finds some way out of her doldrums. I ask this as a therapist: is therapy the only route out of an existential crisis, and is it a luxury or a necessity when someone so talented as Nell could shrug her life off without, seemingly, much regret?

12th Feb 2008: I’ve just been reprimanded by Nell who says that she was never forced into anything, most especially dungarees! My apologies Nell!

April 2008: Nell speaks on RTÉ news about Nuala O’Faolain’s interview with Marian Finucane.