Maeve Binchy, Queen of the Bookshelves ... and Friend

I saw the film Tara Road in the Savoy cinema, Dublin. In front of me sat a group of elderly ladies. When the nasty Danny began to come on to Marilyn, played by the beautiful Andie MacDowell, the ladies decided to give her some advice and yelled up at the screen, “Don’t even look at him, love, he’s already ruined two women!” and “Leave her alone, you little snake!”

They clapped and cheered loudly when Brenda Fricker’s character Mona turned out to be something of a moneybags, the woman who held all the cards. As the men got their just desserts, we were treated to shouts of “That’s it, you tell them Mona!” When the credits rolled, they continued to say, as if talking to a friend, “Good girl, Maeve, never let the baddies win …”

When I got back to France, I wrote to Maeve about the hilarious afternoon in the cinema and the ladies reaction to the film. A week later I got an e-mail from a close friend of Maeve’s, Mary Sheerin, telling me that her phone had rung and Maeve’s voice said briskly, “Now sit down and listen to this; I’ve got a most entertaining letter from Jane, who went off to live in the Pyrénées …”

Maeve Binchy, her books chosen by Oprah, made into movies, somehow managed to remain one of us, to stay absolutely the same warm, giving, human being. Beyond generous, she gave away both time and money as if she had double the amount to spare. I once sent her a card, complete with stamped addressed envelope, and asked her to please sign it, then post it to St Vincent’s hospital, where a close friend of mine was due for some serious surgery. When I visited the very next day, the card, with a marvellous uplifting get-well message in Maeve’s huge writing, was sitting on the bedside table. Had she sent it by taxi? I never found out.

Queen of the bookshelves, very few Irish novelists of Maeve’s generation had studio executives flying in from Los Angeles to Dublin to discuss their writing being made into movies, their characters played by international stars.

Ireland’s most successful and best loved novelist, whose sudden death leaves all of us shocked, was literally a towering presence in the writing world. An extremely tall woman, definitely on the heavy side, Maeve was, in every sense, larger than life, with a superior imagination and an uncanny ability to tell a story.

Someone who could overhear a snatch of conversation in the morning, Maeve could produce a short story before lunchtime based on a single remark. One of her big, fat, successful novels, Silver Wedding, came from overhearing two girls on a Dublin bus, talking about their parents’ upcoming wedding anniversary.

When I moved to France, she continued to encourage my writing career, sending me inspiring, wonderfully bossy notes, telling me to “Sit down every day and keep at it.” And perhaps her most famous one liner, “Don’t get it right, get it written!"

Maeve was a fantastic journalist and her newspaper columns had a massive following. But in her early days, she admits to having no knowledge of cooking and knowing nothing whatever about fashion when she was suddenly asked to become editor of a new ‘woman’s page’.

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Maeve Binchy, Queen of the Bookshelves ... and Friend

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