Remembering Maeve Binchy

Hello everyone, Greetings from the cottage. We are one week into the six week almost total lockdown here in Ireland. The numbers continue to rise so we need to try to get them under control again, so our government, along with our chief medical officer, a wonderful man called Dr Tony Holohan, are trying their best to create a situation where we can have a some version of a normal Christmas.  Anyway, I came across something that I thought I would share with you. Many of you have paid me a very high compliment over the years comparing my books favourably to the late, great Maeve Binchy. Something that both delights and humbles me.  Maeve was the queen of Irish storytellers, and though she is no longer with us, she lives on through her wonderful novels. As a girl of twelve or thirteen I discovered her books and devoured them. Some of the themes may have been a little adult for me but I didn’t care. She had a way of telling a story, of pulling you into the lives of her characters, of drawing them so perfectly in the imagination of the reader, that they became real and almost walked off the page. I laughed with them, cried with them, felt their fears and shared their joys. She was that good. I can only aspire to such talent. As well as being supremely gifted as an author, she was also a hilarious character and loved sending herself up. She tells a very funny story of when she was editor of the women’s column of The Irish Times back in the sixties. Another writer would contribute a cookery page to the women’s column and this particular week it was recipes for veal. Maeve, desperate to get home the evening before this edition went to print, realised the cookery page needed a picture or something to fill it up so she rummaged through her stock pictures and found one the right size and shape to fill the gap. It was an image of a pie, with forks and knives sticking out of it. Hastily, she stuck it in, sent the copy in for print and went home.  As she sat watching the nine o’clock news on TV that night, the second item on the news was of a  successful heart surgery performed by Christiaan Barnard in South Africa. To her horror she saw the exact picture of what she’d assumed was a pie with forks and knives, was in fact a picture of a chest, held open by clamps as the surgery was performed.  She panicked, ran out into the street, she had no car, and got a lift from a passer-by to the newspaper offices. The editor was there ahead of her and was furious, lawyers buzzed around like demented bees, but luckily the paper had yet to be sent out. She was dispatched to fix her error, and she frantically searched her files for another image. All she could find under such pressure was an image of a boiled egg, so she stuck it in with the caption, ‘why settle for a boiled egg when you can have a veal pie?’ Maeve passed away in 2012 and we all miss her. She was a national treasure. So any resemblance you see between my books and hers is the highest of compliments to me, one I don’t feel worthy of to be entirely truthful.  If you have never read Maeve’s books, I envy you. You have a treat in store. Light a Penny Candle or Firefly Summer are my favourites but they are all fabulous. Meanwhile I’m in the final chapters of the book set in Cobh, it will need a lot of work being edited, but I’m happy with the jist of the story. I think (!) I’m loving writing it anyway.  The fourth book in the Star Series is on preorder here: mybook.to/theworldstartsanew (mybook.to/theworldstartsanew) Erich and Liesl and the gang at Ballycreggan are back. This will hopefully be available on ebook, and paperback as well as large print paperback in early December so not long to wait. (I wish I could write as fast as you guys read!) So take good care of yourself and your loved ones, and thank you for your support, it means the world to me and mine.  Le grá agus buiochas,   Jean xx