Alice began to wonder how best to handle living alone, whether by choice or due to extenuating circumstances, and to document her progress though this most extraordinary year. This is her journey.
Category: Biography/Memoir
Many of us spend the later years of life living solo when children have grown up and moved on. Others choose this lifestyle. We get used to being on our own while also enjoying family and communal occasions. But 2020 brought new challenges to this solo lifestyle. We rose to the first challenge thinking that it would all be over in a matter of weeks. But no. Instead came a series of on-again off-again lockdowns of different levels.
This was a new, radical, solitary living experience which was really going to test our endurance and resilience. Would the coping skills we had already acquired see us through? But this was more a hermitage existence than we had ever experienced and it would really test our mettle.
Then, gradually, a realisation dawned that maybe there were things to be learnt from this unique situation? Might we discover a new understanding and appreciation of things previously ignored?
Alice began to wonder how best to handle this new, solitary experience, and to document her progress though this most extraordinary year. This is her journey.
Alice Taylor lives in the village of Innishannon in County Cork, in a house attached to the local supermarket and post office. Since her eldest son has taken over responsibility for the shop, she has been able to devote more time to her writing.
Alice Taylor worked as a telephonist in Killarney and Bandon. When she married, she moved to Innishannon where she ran a guesthouse at first, then the supermarket and post office. She and her husband, Gabriel Murphy, who sadly passed away in 2005, had four sons and one daughter. In 1984 she edited and published the first issue of Candlelight, a local magazine which has since appeared annually. In 1986 she published an illustrated collection of her own verse.
To School Through the Fields was published in May 1988. It was an immediate success, and quickly became the biggest selling book ever published in Ireland. It launched Alice on a series of signing sessions, talks and readings the length and breadth of Ireland. Her first radio interview, forty two minutes long on RTÉ Radio's Gay Byrne Show, was the most talked about radio programme of 1988, and her first television interview, of the same length, was the highlight of the year on RTÉ television's Late Late Show. Since then she has appeared on radio programmes such as Woman's Hour, Midweek and The Gloria Hunniford Show, and she has been the subject of major profiles in the Observer and the Mail on Sunday.
Alice has written nearly twenty books since then, large exploring her village of Inishannon, and the way of life in rural Ireland. She has also written poetry and fiction: her first novel, The Woman of the House, was an immediate bestseller in Ireland, topping the paperback fiction lists for many weeks.
One of Ireland's most popular authors, her most recent book is And Life Lights Up.
Emma Byrne is a graphic designer and artist. She is a graduate of Central Saint Martins School of Art and Design. She has won numerous awards for her design including The IDI (Irish Design Institute) Graduate Designer of the Year, the IDI Promotional Literature Award for her work on Brown Morning, and a Children’s Books Ireland Bisto Merit Award for her work on Something Beginning With P: New Poems from Irish Poets. She has illustrated many books, including Best-Loved Oscar Wilde, Best Loved Yeats, The Most Beautiful Letter in the World by Karl O’Neill, a special edition of Ulysses by James Joyce, and A Terrible Beauty by Mairéad Ashe Fitzgerald. She lives in a thatched house in Co. Wexford.
