[In the following interview, Binchy discusses Tara Road, her career, and Irish literature as a whole.]

Maeve Binchy is the author of Light a Penny Candle, Evening Class, The Glass Lake, The Copper Beech, The Lilac Bus, Circle of Friends, Silver Wedding, Firefly Summer, Echoes, three volumes of short stories, two plays, and a teleplay, which won three awards at the Prague Film Festival. Her latest book, Tara Road, is an Oprah Book Club selection.

[Frumkes:] Maeve, tell us a bit about Tara Road.

[Binchy:] It is the story of two women—one Irish and one American—and the problems they face in one particular year of their lives. The Irish woman is Ria Lynch. She's married to a drop-dead handsome man named Danny, a real estate agent. They have two children and live on Tara Road, a street on which the houses are becoming worth more every week in the newly affluent Ireland. Ria is perfectly happy, and thinks it's time to have another baby, that's the only thing she'd like. When she starts to tell her husband about this, she gets the most terrible shock in the world: He tells her that he is having a child with another woman and he's about to leave her. So that's the first big bang on the solar plexus. I tried to imagine what I would do if such an awful thing happened to me. I think I'd probably want to get away from the pity and the sympathy of everybody in familiar surroundings. So I decided that Ria would swap houses with an American woman named Marilyn who has a totally different problem: She is bereaved, can't get over it, needs some space, and decides to leave America.

It's a wonderful premise, and the book is a very good read. Now, I want to talk a little about you, Maeve. Your books have sold more copies than those of James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Brendan Behan or William Butler Yeats. That's an incredible statistic. Did you have a breakout book, or did you sell well right from the beginning?

I started with two books of short stories. Though people seemed to like them, they weren't very successful; apparently people don't like short stories unless they are by very well-known writers. I find that odd because I buy short stories by people who are not well-known, thinking that if I don't like the first story, I might like the second one. But this is not the way it happened. When my first novel was published in 1982–83, things suddenly became very different. It was translated into twenty languages. It wasn't what I expected. I take all this publicity about “more than James Joyce” or “more than Yeats” very lightly in the sense that it is true, of course, it is true in terms of sales. I mean, they were not writing for airports. The thing is, if you were going on a journey and you were thinking, I must read something on the plane, and if you had read any of my books before you would think, well, she tells a good story. It's very unlikely that you would take Finnegans Wake to get you across the Atlantic. Therefore, these books are read by an entirely different clientele. So it really isn't comparing like with like. It's a function of today's kind of marketing of books.

People everywhere love your books.

For some reason I have hit upon a form of story telling that appeals to people in different languages. But I always say to myself, why would these people really be interested in the stories I tell? But then having asked myself the question, I answer it by saying that I suppose they have also felt love and hope and pain, and they have had dreams and had the delight of close families and the more irritating aspects of close families. They have, perhaps, also loved people who haven't loved them in return and also might have wanted to go up to the bright lights of a big city—it might be Tokyo or Seoul or Athens or Dublin—but the principle is the same. You have people who are young and enthusiastic and want to try to achieve their dream, and I think that is why people everywhere like them.

Ireland has a great literary history. The Irish have always been able to tell a good tale, but Americans are becoming more and more aware of good Irish writing.

There is indeed a resurgence in Irish writers. When I was a young woman going into bookshops in Ireland there were only two Irish woman writers—Mary Lavin and Kate O'Brien. In the sixties, Edna O'Brien came and that meant three. Now, when you go into an Irish bookshop the walls are full of them.

Do you think some of this had to do with the fact that recently there have been a number of Irish Booker Prize winners?

I think it has a lot to do with the Irish having become a lot more confident in themselves. We don't apologize for being Irish. We don't have to write about deprivation and loss anymore. Ireland is a country that has come out into the sunshine. I never feel that the past is always looking over my shoulder because I think that everybody is writing differently. New people are writing, young people are writing. They've found a voice for themselves; their own voice.

How did you get into writing?

By accident, as an awful lot of people do. My accident was ludicrous. When I was young I was going to be a saint. There was going to be a Saint Maeve's day, like Saint Patrick's Day, and people were going to walk in a procession after a statue of me tottering along through the streets. Then I wanted to be a judge because my father was a lawyer and we always knew that the judges were the most important people. And then I became a teacher, and I was very happy. I loved teaching.

What did you teach?

I taught history and Latin in a girls' Catholic school. And I taught French in a Jewish school in Dublin.

An interesting mix.

A great mix. The Jewish parents were so pleased with me and the way I taught their children—for instance, I taught them little songs that had to do with Israel for Chanukah—that they gave me a ticket to go to Israel. I wrote my parents all about the lovely time I was having: I told them about how the communal farms in Israel worked and how the children didn't sleep with their parents and they had to learn how to be grown-up and independent from their parents. I remember talking about the extraordinary dining. I was in the desert and it was near the time of the war, so there were air raids and I wrote all about it. My father in particular was so impressed by my letters, he had them typed up and sent them to the newspaper, and they were impressed as well, and published them. I didn't think I was writing for anybody except my parents. So when I came home my work was there in print, and it was then I realized I was a writer. What I discovered in writing those letters was that if you write as you speak and you write what you know about in your own voice rather than trying to imitate anybody else, then you're much more authentic and people are going to like it.