Maeve Binchy

Was it nothing less than a saint you wanted to be?

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 that was what I'd often noticed that 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.

What about you on a desert island? Would you bring life and energy to it, or wither away in solitude?

I would find it quite hard to, I think, to live without friends and without family and without people I love. I'm not very good at managing things myself, except if I have a brochure. I believe that anybody could run anything. You could run any kind of a nuclear power station if you had a brochure telling you how to do it. But there wouldn't be a brochure on the desert island and I think I might find myself at a severe loss.

When you were twenty-two, you lost your faith. How did it happen?

It was almost as dramatic as that because I was in Israel working on a kibbutz for the summer holidays of teaching and I went to see Jerusalem and Jerusalem was not what I expected it would be and the fault was not Jerusalem's or God's. The fault was mine because I had thought that it would be a Renaissance table set for twelve, thirteen. I didn't think the room of the Last Supper would be an old cave on the side of a mountain. … And because I have always been a total ridiculous extremist, I … throw out the baby with the bathwater, I suddenly stopped believing in everything. And instead of those people who often are very glad that their faith is gone because then they feel liberated and free, I felt very lonely because all my idea of God was that he was Irish and He knew me personally and was waiting to make me a saint sooner or later.