Sinéad Gleeson

So I love the idea that you don't ever stop learning if you're a writer or a performer or a musician.

There's always something, even if you're as brilliant as Polly is, there's always something new that you can learn.

So, yeah.

Well, I didn't come to Maeve via the stories, first of all.

And in fact, my first experience of Maeve was on, do you remember the old Guardian Saturday Review used to be a full colour photograph as opposed to a kind of text?

And they had this now iconic photograph of Brennan on the front, taken by Carl Bissinger, where she's sitting looking very elegant, smoking a cigarette, dressed in black.

And I just looked at the photograph and thought, who is this?

I'm very intrigued.

And I read on.

And there was a large extract from Angela Burke's Homesick at the New Yorker.

It's the first kind of landmark work about Maeve.

And I think a big act of reclamation, a big act that without that book, a lot of people wouldn't be talking about Maeve at all.

So I read on and immediately thought I was in a book club at the time and I told everybody in it.

And one of the women in the book club said, I have a book of hers.

I have a small book called The Visitor.

Do you want to borrow it?

which was a novella which had been published in Ireland by New Ireland, who published The Long Gaze back in 2000.

So I just dived into it and thought, OK, I have to read more.

And again, as David said, it was very hard.

It was only the US stuff available.