Hello, I'm Kirstie Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive for

rights reasons we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1990, and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

My cast away this week is a writer. Brought up in a small Irish village, a devout Catholic

girl, her childhood ambition was to become a saint. All adolescent problems were simply

God, testing her devotion. The would-be saint eventually found solace in journalism and

then moved to London as a correspondent for the Irish Times. It was in her early forties

that she finally sat down to write her first novel, A Fat Family Saga about life in Dublin

and in London. Called Lighter Penny Candle, it was a huge success and has been followed

by more, all translated into several languages and some of them onto the television screen.

adulthood may so far have eluded my cast away, but success has certainly not. She is

Mae Binci. It was Mae, then, nothing less than a saint you wanted to be, not simply saintly.

No, I'm afraid that I've always had a very ambitious attitude towards life and it wouldn't

be just good enough for me to go to heaven like anybody else. I wanted to be at the top

table and I didn't want to be a martyr because I often noticed the people who saw visions

often became martyrs so I didn't look up at trees in case I would see a vision. I looked

down on the ground a lot, but I think a lot of this was my own idiocy and trying to

interpret what I was taught about religion in a way that would glorify myself.

But why? I mean, can you remember when the feeling first came upon you? I suppose it

was listening to the lives of the saints at school. I wanted to think that some day

people at school would be sitting down and listening to my life being read out. The whole

thing was a part of monstrous selfishness and egocentricity and it's something I'm

...