By Martin Chilton, Digital Culture Editor, The Telgraph
Maeve Binchy: Ireland’s National Treasure
Maeve Binchy, who has died in Dublin at the age of 72, was an extraordinarily adept storyteller who had a resolutely loyal audience.
She was always delightfully self-deprecating, saying once: “I was very pleased, obviously, to have outsold great writers. But I’m not insane – I do realise that I am a popular writer who people buy to take on vacation.”
Well, a lot of people on a lot of vacations, because she sold more than 40 million copies and her books have been translated into 37 languages. Elif Safrak tweeted this morning about how much Turkish book-lovers appreciated Binchy’s work.
Binchy is a national treasure in her homeland of Ireland and she lived where she had grown up – in Dalkey, County Dublin. Born on 28 May 1940, she had a traditional Catholic upbringing – attending the Convent of the Holy Child in Killiney – and stumbled into writing by accident. As a young teacher travelling in Israel, after graduating from University College Dublin, she wrote an emotional letter home to her parents. Her father typed it up and sent it to The Irish Independent, which published the dispatch and started what would become a career spanning several decades.
Asked once about the greatest influence on her writing, she replied: “The biggest influence on my books was the fact that I had worked in a newspaper for so long. In a daily paper, you learn to write very quickly; there is no time to sit and brood about what you are going to say.”
Her two most popular novels were adapted into films. Circle of Friends was a 1995 film starring Chris O’Donnell, Minnie Driver and Tara Road was made into a movie starring Andie McDowell and Olivia Williams.
Binchy called her novels “escapist writing” and although some critics pointed to a lack of plausibility in some of her tales, Binchy had strong female protagonists and was able to astutely capture the atmosphere of sexual repression in 1950s small-town Ireland. It’s no surprise that she was an admirer of American author Ann Tyler and she shared an ability to weave wonderful stories out of the lives of ordinary people. She was hailed by The New York Times as “a remarkably gifted writer”.
Binchy should also be remembered as a joyful and generous person who enjoyed life. She loved Irish music and jazz – choosing music from the great pipes player Liam O’Flynn as well as Dave Brubeck and Ella Fitzgerald on her Desert Island Discs appearance in 1990 – and was happily married for four decades to the children’s author Gordon Snell. Their writing routine was to work together in the mornings, writing at the same long desk, and then play chess. “We are still hopeless at it, but loved chess to bits,” she joked. One of her true pleasures was also playing what she called “very bad over-talkative bridge”.
Binchy never hid her love of popular culture, from television to cinema, but she was a wide reader who would sing the praises of treasures such as Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road. Binchy continued writing after her heart failure in 2002 and recently read her latest short story at the Dalkey Book Festival. In all she published 16 novels. Her last – Minding Frankie – was published in 2010, the same year she received a lifetime achievement award from the Irish Book Awards.
Among the literary community she was known for her generous help and advice to aspiring writers and Ian Rankin tweeted today: “Maeve Binchy was a gregarious, larger than life, ebullient recorder of human foibles and wonderment. I’m taking a drink to her.”
She also got involved in community projects and Voice Our Concern, an Amnesty-backed project in Ireland aimed at educating the public about human rights, was the brainchild of Binchy and Roddy Doyle.
It was apt that she chose Édith Piaf’s Non, Je ne regrette rien as one of her favourite songs and she answered the question “Have you been lucky in life?” once with the splendid reply: “I have been luckier than anyone I know or even heard of. I had a very happy childhood, a good education, I enjoyed working as a teacher, journalist and author. I have loved a wonderful man for over 33 years and I believe he loves me too. I have great family and good friends, the stories I told became popular and people all over the world bought them. If anyone heard me complaining I should be taken out and shot!”
