Maeve Binchy, the Irish journalist who transformed herself into a best-selling novelist, has died, aged 72. She was warm and witty and wonderful company.
There was a total absence of malice in Maeve. She loved people and, in return, they loved her. For her, life was all about laughter.
She was the very opposite of what people expect a journalist to be like. It is fair to describe her, as the Irish Times does today, as "one of the best-loved Irish writers of her generation."
Her immense success as a novelist did not change her in the least. And what a success it was. Her 16 books, beginning with Light a Penny Candle in 1982, sold more than 40m copies across the world.
Three of them, Circle of Friends, Tara Road and How About You, were made into movies, while two more, The Lilac Bus and Echoes were made into TV films.
She also wrote a play, Deeply Regretted By, and four collections of short stories. She was nothing if not prolific. She liked to say her head was full of stories and she woke up each day eager to share them.
Maeve, born in Dalkey, south of Dublin, first worked as a teacher after leaving University College Dublin. She hated teaching, as her life-long friend, Renagh Holohan, notes in an article headlined, Life was always a laugh with Maeve.
She later travelled, working in kibbutzim in Israel and in children's summer camps in the United States". Her letters home about her exploits were considered so amusing by her family that they sent them to on a newspaper. A career in journalism, with the Irish Times, followed.
In 1968, she became the paper's women's editor and in the early 1970s moved to the Irish Times's London office and met her husband, Gordon Snell, whom she loved ever after.
My wife, Noreen Taylor, knew them well during their London years and interviewed Maeve a couple of times. Maeve once told her that Gordon, who worked for the World Service and travelled to Africa, managed to achieve an ambition by spending one day in the Sudan, thus enabling him to send Maeve a telegram marked "Gordon in Khartoum."
Renagh Holohan recalls: "Maeve wrote wonderful features, diaries and colour stories – most notoriously on the British royal family and their weddings – and I covered the hard news. She started work very early – for a morning newspaper person – and finished at about 2pm. There was then, inevitably, a long lunch."
Eventually, after leaving the Irish Times, Maeve and Gordon moved permanently to a house in Dalkey, where they remained wonderful hosts.
In an interview with her old newspaper earlier this month, Maeve said she had no regrets about her life: "Everything went well... I've been very lucky and I have a happy old age with good family and friends still around."
See also the National Union of Journalists' tribute. Maeve was an NUJ life member.
Source: Irish Times/The Guardian
