So when I was told late Monday night that Maeve had sadly passed away my first thought was that this was a joke. A bad joke, but a joke nonetheless. In the same way that I never really believed my own Mother would ever leave us, it just didn’t seem possible that this doyenne of women’s fiction could ever really, well, not behere.

And then, all day Tuesday the tributes to this great writer flooded in, from every corner of the globe. And as I listened to the various radio shows, her legacy to me started to become very apparent…

You see, as a woman writer I’ve been experiencing some difficulty. In fact I’d started a blog post entitled ‘Genre-Misalignment’ at the weekend but got too depressed to finish it… The thing is, one of the first things people ask you when they hear you write is ‘Oh, what do you write?’ And when I answer ‘Women’s fiction,’ I can literally see their eyes glaze over as they think ‘Oh right, chick lit.’ I actually dread the question so much that I’ve tried to come with various other answers like ‘Oh you know, funny stuff’ or ‘It’s kind of romance but it’s well, a bit different….’ But let’s face it, a rose by any other name and all that…

And then my more recent problem has been trying to publish a book in the summer when every literary record of all time is being smashed by another variation of womens’ fiction. I’m not going to go into what I think of the book in question, but suffice to say its not a market I’m interested in (the phrase chick-lit is bad enough, can you imagine how I’d feel about Mummy-porn?)

So there I’ve been, book finished and as morose as a week of wet Mondays… But by mid-morning on Tuesday I’d started to come to my senses. Every single person that spoke of Maeve’s un-matchable talent reminded me that women’s fiction is so much more than pink covers and sparkly titles (though trust me, I’d take any cover at this stage). She was a story teller, she wrote about ordinary people with ordinary lives but she took us inside those lives, inside those minds in a way that makes her stories stay with you forever. Yes she wrote ‘women’s fiction’ and what some would consider to be ‘chick lit ‘ but as the person who broke Monday’s news to me once said – obviously having listened to far too much of my genre-related wailing -‘It’s ok to be a good writer in a bad genre…’

Bad genre/good genre; I’ve stopped worrying. Maeve Binchy, along with Marian Keyes and Deirdre Purcell, is one of the women writers I admire most on the planet. Do they write chick lit? You call it whatever you want, I actually don’t care any more. They write fiction. For women. As do I. Is there’s a club I’d like to be a member of someday? You bet.

And just like that teenager dipping her toe into Big Girls Books, I’ll get there… I might have to wait until Irish women have tired of handcuffs and silver ties, but I’ll keep writing in the meantime.

For women.