Maeve Binchy - A life very well lived and loved

Maeve Binchy was a conduit of the warmth, kindness, honesty and happiness we all want to, need to, believe rest at the very heart of humanity.

These are the life-giving virtues we hope to find in all of our hearts.

In a world too often inamicable to the gestures, instincts, flights of fancy — great or small — that makes all of us the person we are, Maeve Binchy, through her deceptively simple writing, recognised the commonality of the great forces shaping every one of us.

She knew we all want security, hope for the confidence and the courage needed to match the day. She knew that we all relish achievement but most of all she knew we crave love. She knew, in an especially uncluttered way, the profoundly simple truth that our most basic need is to be loved and to love others in turn. She knew too that it is all but impossible to get through life with stumbling occasionally.

This recognition, this humanity and her great, often underestimated, skill as a writer, were the cornerstones of her wonderful success and popularity.

Since she published her first novel, Light a Penny Candle in 1982, she has sold over 40 million books and her work has been translated into 37 languages. She has won so many awards and accolades that she makes all of today’s fuss around Olympic multi gold-medallist Michael Phelps seem disproportionate.

And she did all of this without pretence or hubris, vanity or the destructive bombast that can so afflict some artists as they come to enjoy the first flushes of success. She was always Maeve, never contrived or fake.

A recurring theme in the myriad tributes paid to her yesterday was the help and encouragement she offered — and sustained — to others. In a world that can be as catty as any the tributes from her fellow writers were warm, effusive and almost but not nearly as positive as the woman herself.

Maeve Binchy has deservedly enjoyed more than three decades of success. Even before she published a play, a short story or a novel she was a very formidable journalist.

Her observations of the absurdities of life, the inevitability of pain and the redemptive glow of happiness eventually realised sustained her Irish Times column for many years. In a quickly changing Ireland that weekly column, as well as many other pieces of her writing, was a road map and a weather vane all at once. It is not the-past-is-best foolishness to say that her great skill as an observer and provocateur, skills that so animated those columns, have not been equalled since, much less surpassed. Her column may have been low-key and subtle almost to the point of deception but it was so challenging as to be almost revolutionary.

Her great gift was her happiness in her own life, in her writing and in sharing the happiness of others. These were gifts she freely acknowledged and shared. This glowing characteristic may be the kernel of what made her so attractive, so popular and so very well loved. Her writing will live on but maybe her greatest legacy is the example she has left of how optimism, joy, courage and love can overcome anything except the passage of time.

A life well lived and loved indeed.