HOW MAEVE STILL ECHOES
As a new documentary is shown to mark the tenth anniversary of the beloved writer’s death, some of Ireland’s top authors reveal the impact she had on their career and which of her novels is their favourite
JULY marks ten years since Ireland lost one of its literary greats and on Monday, RTÉ will celebrate Maeve Binchy with a documentary examining her life and the legacy she left behind. Maeve Binchy: The Magic of the Ordinary will offer a heartwarming look at a remarkable woman who broke global records with the scale of her success.
Her books sold millions all over the world and were transferred to the silver and small screens with her debut Light A Penny Candle breaking a litany of records for a first novel.
Her fans were passionate about her writing and Tara Road was honoured by Oprah Winfrey’s famous book club, while Barbara Bush invited Maeve to visit the White House.
Though it’s ten years since her passing, Binchy’s legacy lives on in today’s writers. Here, some fans turned authors reveal how her work inspired them to write.
EDEL COFFEY
EDEL’S first book Breaking Point became a number one bestseller when it was released earlier this year. She lives in Dublin.
WHEN I was growing up we had a little mobile library that came to Ballybrack village about once a month. It had shelves full of books and I can remember getting Circle of Friends out. That’s my favourite book but I also think some of my favourite work of hers is from the book of her newspaper columns.
In my head she is very linked with Dirty Dancing as well because aged about 12 or 13 I was obsessed with that film and I used to watch that every day after school and I’d also read Maeve’s books and Patricia Scanlan. I remember Circle of Friends had a really dark storyline and as a young girl who really didn’t understand how that stuff happened I can remember thinking that it was so adult. But there is a lovely warmth and there is a realness about her stories.
They remind me of things like my Aunt Kay’s kitchen table, being in a safe place and that kind of feeling is what her books evoke in me. If I am very stressed I will read one of her columns and there’s something about them that can reignite your belief in your ability, even to tell a story. They are so beautifully and simply told they can reset your own brain a little bit.
I always find if I am stressed or tired and I read her, I feel so much better about everything. I think that’s why people love her because she is so comforting, she writes about ordinary people living ordinary lives you can relate to.
As she said herself, ‘I don’t write about ugly ducklings turning into swans, I write about them turning into confident ducks.’
It’s so relatable as it helps you realise you don’t have to be the most beautiful, the most intelligent or successful. They are not aspirational books, they just tell you here’s how to live, you just need a bit of self-respect and selflove. Ultimately you don’t even need romantic love, just friendship. They are great lessons in how to live a fulfilled life.
There was always a message of independence in her books, even with Benny in Circle of Friends, how far she comes from the naive student who is madly in love to the very end of the book where she is in the one in the position of power, even though she has had to be disillusioned to get to that point.
She has grown up a lot but she is the one who is powerful, confident and independent at the end of it. I really like that and the fact that it is a message in a lot of Maeve’s stories. She had a piece in the paper once, it was her lessons in life and it was brilliant advice. There is a thing at the end where she says, ‘Don’t wait for permission to be happy, don’t wait for permission to do anything. Make your own life.’ That’s almost the essence of her books. You make your own life — that is such a brilliant message for any person. BREAKING Point by Edel Coffey is available now, published by Little, Brown.
CLAUDIA CARROLL
CLAUDIA is an author and playwright whose 17th book, The Fixer, has just been published in paperback. She’s also an actress and starred as Nicola Prendergast in Fair City. She lives in Dublin.
MAEVE Binchy’s newspaper column was required reading in our house. She had this brilliant column called Maeve’s Times and she wrote in language I understood, stories I got. I was like a kid but it made me feel like a grown-up.
My mum started reading her books when they first came out — Light A Penny Candle was the first one — and I read them after her. They were just so accessible. She wrote about girls like me, teenagers, and she just got it.
My favourite is Circle of Friends because I think of myself going to UCD. I was 16 when I started college and it was the whole adventure of it and meeting female friends who became your tribe.
It was the little vignettes that stuck with me in Circle of Friends. There was a beautiful scene that really stuck with me where Benny is very self conscious about the way she looks, she meets Jack the college hunk, the cool kid on campus and everyone fancies him.
They are great pals and get on like a house on fire and he asks her out. She is all excited as she thinks it is a date, she is commuting up and down from the country — the sticks as she calls it, although nowadays it would probably be on the M50. For her it is a big deal.
She goes for the date and it turns out there are about 40 other people there and it’s a bit of a reality check. Then Jack rings her and asks her out for dinner again and she thinks, well, at least I know it will be you, me and a gang and he says no this time it’s just you and me.
I just thought it was so romantic as he sees her for the beautiful person she is. I actually went to see the stage version of Circle of Friends in Dublin this week, which was brilliant.
Any writer would have been influenced by Maeve because she was prolific. She wrote for stage, she wrote short stories, she wrote for the paper, she wrote novels. She was a brilliant media presence.
If you listen to her interviews, they are hysterical. It would be like a musician saying, ‘I wasn’t influenced by U2.’ You’re Irish, that just can’t happen. THE Fixer, Claudia Carroll’s latest novel is out now in paperback.
SINEAD CROWLEY
SINÉAD is a writer and broadcaster, whose three DS Claire Boyle crime novels were all nominated for the ‘Best Crime’ category at the Irish Book Awards. She is currently Arts and Media Correspondent with RTÉ News. Her first non-crime fiction novel, The Belladonna Maze, came out yesterday. She lives in Dublin.
MY MOTHER was a big reader, as was I, and we were big users of the library. I remember reserving Light A Penny Candle from the library and there was such a long queue you would reserve it and then try and forget about it because you knew you would have to wait a long time for it.
I was very young — it was the mid-to-late 1980s and I remember reading it with my mother and it was a book we could both enjoy.
I was about 13 when I read it and then that was always a thing — we
would both read whatever Maeve wrote. I have a collection of her writing at home which is actually really rare called My First Book by Maeve Binchy, a collection of her writing. We had everything she ever wrote really.
Especially in those days, when there were fewer distractions, I found you could really escape into a book and read Light A Penny Candle and Echoes, you were just lost to the world.
I was that type of a reader — as a teenager I used to get curled up in a book and I could get lost in these characters, like you could just look up and you would be nearly blinking that you are back in the real world.
Nowadays, life moves a bit quicker and there’s a lot more to do but in those days there was nothing better than getting a big, chunky book at the start of the summer holidays.
She wrote those sort of books, with loads of characters who moved through time, so she really sold me on that idea where you are just caught in the story and you see people change over years. But the thing is, reading them as an adult I see something completely different in them and that’s what I find fascinating about her. Light A Penny Candle starts off with two young girls and as a child I identified with them.
But going back as an adult I can see so many more layers in the story I hadn’t got the first time, particularly in relation to the treatment of women and their relationships with each other and with families — there was so much going on.
So actually rereading them as an adult was like coming to them fresh, which showed me how brilliant she was.
I would say Light A Penny Candle is one of the best Irish novels, never mind the best Maeve Binchy novel or the best women’s novel. It is up there with the great Irish novels. I also love Echoes, her second book, which has similar themes but it gets very dark as well towards the end.
What’s interesting about it is the dilemma isn’t solved by the marriage and the story continues and it gets quite dark after that. It gets very interesting and it is a very brave thing to do for a writer, particularly one who gets put in the box of women’s fiction.
She had the courage to write about the marriage that wasn’t perfect and had its own problems.
If Echoes was published now, it would nearly be a psychological thriller, there is so much darkness in it. It’s another one that is really worth re-reading.
Maeve invented a genre really — she invented women’s commercial fiction, which is fantastic in itself but also retrospectively people like me are going back and reading the books and realising how much was going on about society and relationships and women’s place in society as a whole.
She painted it with such a light touch that sometimes it takes a second reading to see the grit that is in there.
I recently discovered that my editor was also an editor for Maeve — when I heard that I was delighted.
THE Belladonna Maze by Sinead Crowley is out nowt, published by Head of Zeus.
I GREW up in Glenageary, ten minutes from Dalkey, where Maeve lived, but I never actually saw her in all that time. Even so, we were huge fans in our house. My mother Sheila loved her articles from the early days when she had been working in Israel.
I remember her first book coming out and they were on the bedside tables. Probably in my mid-to-late teens I started reading them and she really drew you in with her stories. She is really important to me because he really gave you this feeling for people.
I feel she was someone who open my eyes to storytelling as I got that little bit older.
I also associate her work with my mother as there is a connection there as well. Maeve was someone my mother really loved and she felt she had a connection with her in some way as a reader, in terms of just feeling she was speaking for her. It was that feeling like she was a friend, my mum definitely felt that and I inherited that from her too I think.
I was a big reader and I loved diving into her books — I associate them with summer holidays and getting time to spend reading in the garden.
Firefly Summer was mid-to-late 1980s and I would say it was one of the first books I read, and Echoes I really loved.
I think Firefly Summer is my favourite. There is a lot of tragedy and sorrow in the book but it is just handled so well. This is why I think she is so amazing — in terms of the cast of people she brings into a book. I know this myself from learning to write, to be able to make a whole village or town come alive and, even if they are minor characters, they are completely believable. I think that’s such a skill. I do think that being able to paint those canvases and make them so real shows real craft. She is one of our greats THE Beauty of Impossible Things by Rachel Donohue is published by Corvus and out now.
‘Everyone has a favourite Maeve Binchy book’
AMY CRONIN
AMY is from Cork and lives in Kinsale. Her first book, Blinding Lies, came out earlier this year.
I WAS a very avid reader when I was growing up, I was in the library all the time. When I was coming into my teens and pulling away from Enid Blyton books and that, Maeve is what we were reading.
I was in my early teens when I read my first Maeve Binchy book, which was Circle of Friends. Now that is going back about 30 years, but everybody knows that book and it was so easy to fall in love with her characters.
For me it was the first time I realised the feeling that a book can give a reader. I was quite hooked on the story and I still remember how I felt reading it. The character Benny, her heartbreak, Nan’s desperation when she got pregnant — it was really a powerful feeling and something new to me that a writer could make the reader feel really strongly. You could feel it, it was palpable coming off the pages.
It is a powerful gift she had and one that I am really envious of. As a young girl who wanted to be a writer, to see Maeve Binchy talk about her career and then read her books and be completely in love with them was very inspiring. To realise that this can be a career was life-changing.
Another book of hers that I love is Tara Road — I have read that repeatedly and I still love the characters every time. It’s like meeting up with old friends.
There is a sense of familiarity and it’s like reconnecting with friends or people you know in all of her books. Maeve was a very powerful writer with an immense talent and I don’t think she will ever be forgotten. Her writing will stand the test of time. Everyone has their favourite Maeve book, don’t they? BLINDING Lies by Amy Cronin is out now, published by Poolbeg.