Irish writer Nuala O Faolain is dying of cancer. In an emotion-charged interview with Marian Finucane broadcast on Irish radio network RTE last weekend, she revealed that she was diagnosed six weeks ago in New York where she lived. This week the Irish Voice reprints the interview.

Marian Finucane: Nuala O Faolain, you've been on the program a number of times in connection with your writing and you wrote your memoir Are You Somebody in a way that it seemed it explained yourself to you. Now you're doing this interview in a completely different context - I understand that it's to explain yourself to yourself as well as to us as well. Nuala O Faolain: Yeah, it must look as if I'm an awful devil for publicity altogether. Since I wrote Are You Somebody and it created a huge response, I have in a sense put myself out there. Now I am actually dying. I have metastatic cancer in three different parts of my body. Somehow it helps me to set up the other bookend, to say to those people who were interested in me, "Well this is how it is for me now for what it's worth."

MF: When were you diagnosed?

NOF: About six weeks ago I was in New York. Now I have a terrific life to be absolutely honest with you. I'd applied for a fellowship to write a book and I had Ireland. So everything was well. But I was walking along one day after fitness class and my right side began to drag and I eventually went to Accident and Emergency in a New York hospital, a thing I wouldn't wish anyone to do.

MF: Why?

NOF: Because it is full of chaos and people who have been shot and run over. I spent 13 hours there on a little gurney. Anyway, I was sitting there waiting to hear what was wrong with my right leg when the guy came past and said that your CAT scan shows that you have two brain tumors and we're going to do x-rays to see where they're from, they're not primaries. And that is the first ever I knew.

MF: He said that in the middle of Accident and Emergency?

N.OF: He just passed by and I was on my own, you know. A few hours later he passed by again and said the x-rays show you have lung tumors and since then others turned up.

MF: How did you deal with the information?

NOF: Em, I couldn't deal with it. I was so shocked I would pay attention to anything except what I had just been told. And it took me a long time to work my way a little bit out of shock.

MF: Did they even ask about treatment and your chances and those kinds of questions?

NOF: The thing about my cancers are they are incurable, and that's the central fact about them. There's a chance with aggressive treatment that will gain you time, often good time.

The question arrived. I was supposed to start chemotherapy. I was supposed to start 18 weeks of it. But whether it was the disease or the brain radiation I don't know or care, it reduced me to such feelings of impotence and wretchedness and sourness with life and fear that I decided against it.

MF: Very often you hear of people being told "Oh, you have got to have a positive attitude." What's your own view on that?

NOF: Even if I gained time through the chemotherapy it isn't time I want. Because as soon as I knew I was going to die soon, the goodness went out of life.

MF: As I understood it, for you life was very sweet. You had sorted out your American life, you had your life in Ireland and you were going to write. Why does it not seem to you that if you went through treatment life could not be sweet again?

NOF: It amazed me, Marian, how quickly life turned black, immediately almost. For example, I lived somewhere beautiful, but it means nothing to me anymore - the beauty. And that is one of the things you learn.

You see, the cancer is a very ingenious enemy and when you ask somebody how will I actually die I don't get an answer because it could be anything. It can move from one organ to the other, it can do this that or the other. It's already in my liver, for example. So I don't know how it's going to be. And I don't want six months or a year. It's not worth it.

MF: Do you believe in an afterlife?

NOF: No, I do not.

MF: Or a God?

NOF: Well that's a different matter somehow. I actually don't know how we all get away with our un-thinkingness. Often last thing at night I walk the dog down the lane and you look up at the sky illuminated by the moon and behind the moon the Milky Way and, you know, you are nothing on the edge of one planet compared to this universe unimaginably vast up there and unimaginably mysterious. And I have done that for years, looked up at it and given it a wink and thought "I don't know what's going on," but I can't be consoled by mention of God. I can't.

MF: Would you like it?

NOF: No. Oh no I wouldn't. If I start doing that something really bad is happening to my brain. And though I respect and adore the art that arises from the love of God, and though nearly everybody I love and respect themselves believe in God, it is meaningless to me.

MF: The reason I asked you is because it is a source of comfort for many people?

NOF: Well, I wish them every comfort, but it is not even bothering me.

MF: How do people deal with you, I mean friends. Do they crowd you out?

NOF: Sometimes, in fact often. I pray for them to go away, for the very essence of this experience is aloneness and, anyway, it is the steroids keep you awake at night. So it is two in the morning or four in the morning and you're walking around, and all you know is that whatever it is you are feeling or thinking is yours and nobody else's.

And there is nobody else to lay it off on, and that aloneness is the center and the thing that you never know when you are well.

The two things that keep me from the worst of self-pity is that everyone's done it so that ordinary people are as brave as I could ever be.

The second thing is that I think look how comfortably I am dying. I have friends and family, I am in this wonderful country, I have money, there is nothing much wrong with me except dying.

MF: One of the things that you wrote about and wrote about is that what you thought mattered in life was passion?

NOF: That seems a bit silly now. What matters now in life is health and reflectiveness. I just shot around. I would like it if I had been a better thinker.

MF: What about the passion?

NOF: The passion can go and take a running jump at itself, that's what it can take.

MF: And love?

NOF: Well, love's different, but I always get the two mixed up anyway. Well, here I am, I am glad I didn't have a child, that's all. One of the reasons why is that since I heard about this I have been thinking about men and women, parents who are trailing around their houses with metastatic cancer like me, trying to hide it from them, trying to say goodbye, even though they are too tired to move. And it seems to me to die leaving children behind is so bad.

MF: It is natural.

NOF: I don't know, to me it seems the most terrible thing. If I had my life again I wouldn't drink and of course I wouldn't smoke. It's about 16 years since I had a cigarette.

MF: Did it start in the lung?

NOF: Yes it did.

MF: If there are people who have cancer or loved ones who have cancer and passionately believe that the treatments are going to work for them, there is the possibility that this could cast a despair over them.

NOF: My despair is my own, their hope is their own. Their spirituality is their own. My way of looking at the world is my own. We each end up differently facing this common fate.

I wish everybody out there a miracle cure. It is my choice not to go the route of chemotherapy. I know everyone says the hair matters, but that is not true. You can put a little cap on or something for the hair. That is irrelevant compared with having to leave the world behind.

MF: You said it wasn't so much you leaving the world as the world leaving you.

NOF: I thought there would be me and the world, but the world turned its back on me, the world said to me that's enough of you now, and what's more we're not going to give you any little treats at the end.

MF: Like...

NOF: Like, let's say, adoring nature. Music is not quite gone, but I'm afraid it will go if I overdo it. So I'm trying to listen to as little as possible.

One of the reasons I went to New York was to hear live music, which I did the night before last - a wonderful string quartet, and thanks be to God my heart responded, because if I had had to sit there listening to Schubert's quartet meaning nothing to me I really would have thought I am going to throw myself under the subway train, but it wasn't. I came out elated. There's things left.

My cancer is already in my liver and I don't know what that means, but if that means that sometime in the middle of the night on your own as you must be, you know you are just about to go into the dark that's what I want. (Weeping)

MF: Well, just on that point, because you have traveled your journey now in your head and in your heart, and I don't want to give other people despair because people do get cured from cancer, many people, the majority of people do and I don't know if you can give people advice.

NOF: No.