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O'Faolain's mother, married to a Dublin social columnist who was charming in public and largely absent at home, bore nine children in poverty and withdrew into drink and compulsive novel-reading. Her daughter sets this against the narrow options open to Irish wives of her generation, but also records the mother's own neglect and its lasting harm to the children, without reducing either to the other.
The father was admired in print as a genial chronicler of Dublin's social life, while the family he left behind went hungry and unsupervised. A man's reputation outside the home tells you nothing about what he does inside it, and a society that celebrates the first can make the second invisible.
The title comes from a woman on the street asking O'Faolain 'Are you somebody?', meaning 'are you famous?' The book overturns that question by treating an ordinary woman's loneliness, failed loves and middle-aged solitude as material worth a full account. The flood of letters from unknown readers showed that many people had been waiting for permission to see their own unrecorded lives as significant.
Scholarships and reading carried O'Faolain from a chaotic home to university, Oxford and a career in broadcasting and journalism. The escape was real, but it did not repair the damage. She carried the family's emotional deprivation into adult life as a persistent loneliness and difficulty sustaining love, so social mobility changed her circumstances without healing the wound that drove it.