: John Clarke
: Finucane& Me My Life with Marian
: Gill Books
: 9780717195534
: 1
: CHF 20.60
:
: Biographien, Autobiographien
: English
: 288
: Wasserzeichen
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB
Marian Finucane was a trailblazing broadcaster, the first to champion women's issues on air, and respected for her fairness, empathy and doggedness. One of a small group of Irish people known simply by their first name, the nation mourned when she died suddenly, aged 69, in January 2020. But John Clarke, Marian's widower, doesn't use her moniker - instead, he calls her 'Finucane'. It highlights the gap between the woman so many felt they knew and the woman he loved - the real Marian - who was by turns curious, fiery, emotional, stubborn, charming and endlessly excited by life. When John and Marian first got together, they promised each other that they'd never be boring. What ensued was forty years of conversation and thousands of miles travelled. Finucane& Me is an unexpected love story: the story of two people who 'made a pact for madness'; the story of a never-ending search for meaning; the story of two people who lived life to its fullest.

John Clarke is the widowed husband of Marian Finucane. He now lives in Kildare, where he is building a Buddhist zen garden.

The public saw only a sliver of the Marian iceberg. She was quite deliberate about that. But there are whole parts of her that even I didn’t know. We were as close as any couple can be; we soldiered in all sorts of weird places and did all sorts of daft things.

‘But do we really know each other?’ I asked her one day.

‘I don’t think so,’ she said.

Have you ever sat there looking at the person you’ve been sharing your life with for 40 years, sharing your grief, laughter, love, hate and everything else, and thought,Who the fuck is this? How did I get here?

*

What did I see first? A tall blonde woman in red trousers. Gabby. Laughing. Surprising. A rare sight coming down the steps of Stephenson Gibney& Associates, the brash young architectural partnership shaking up the capital city, when women made up just a handful of the profession.

She was on a year’s placement from Bolton Street’s School of Architecture. Arthur Gibney was her boss and my closest friend. It was around half past five on a sunny summer’s evening, and he and I had arranged to have a drink in the Crookit Bawbee, where Mr Charlie Haughey featured among Gibney’s regular drinking companions.

We said hello. ‘Are you waiting for the quare fella?’ she asked. I said yes, and we chatted about her views on the demolition of old city buildings, while also noting that she was doing her internship with a company profitably designing their replacements.

‘So you’re joining the enemy?’

‘I want to learn how to be a good architect,’ she said gravely.

Would she like a drink, I asked. We were all heading for the pub, as it happened, so she and I went ahead together and talked about books, which morphed into a heated debate about Hemingway and his book on bullfighting. A discussion ensued about blood sports, which was satisfactory for neither party, until we were joined by Arthur, with a crowd from the firm, and the drinks started.

At around eight o’clock she said she had to go. I offered to walk her to the door, then to the corner of Baggot Street, from where she went on about her business, wherever she was goi