Sinéad Gleeson

But I think it's that thing.

It's also like I talk about Nora Holt, another writer in The Long Gaze Back sometimes who left Ireland because her parents had died and spent a lot of time being shunted back and forth between the UK and Ireland.

And Louise Kennedy, the great Irish writer, has has written an introduction to another book about Holt and said she kind of fell between two stools.

And I think that happened a little with Maeve, the fact that.

You know, it was enough for her to get the acclaim over there, but nobody in Ireland was talking about her.

She wasn't.

She didn't come back very often.

She did in the later parts of her life.

Came back to Roddy Doyle's family.

She's related to Roddy Doyle and Roddy Doyle reads Christmas Eve on the New Yorker Fiction podcast about it.

But yeah, it's surprising to me that the volume of work was there.

In terms of Talk of the Town, and we may talk a bit about that in a moment, it's been called columns and magazine-y and it's quite throwaway to some people.

But I think of her as one of the early Irish female essays.

for sure based on those columns.

But she's also the first woman to write those columns.

They were also unsigned, so a lot of people didn't know who she was.

And even giving herself the kind of the soubriquet of like the long-winded lady suggests she's kind of this gossipy old bag as opposed to this woman with this really sheer, sheer-eyed, kind of clear-eyed perception of walking around the city as a woman, as an immigrant, as a lone woman in that kind of psychodeographic flaneuse kind of way that, you know, that Vivian Gornick has done so well about New York, that Rebecca Solnit's done so well.

And I think a lot of people talk about the fiction, but I always like to talk about the nonfiction as well.

But yeah, it's staggering.

A huge body of work as a New Yorker.