THERE'S a huge hole in Christmas this year for me, a heartfelt absence named Nuala. For the first December since 1995, I won't have a coffee and bun with her to mark our first meeting, in Christmas week that year, at Bewley's on Westmoreland Street.
"I'm never late," she announced, when she turned up late, "but I had to wait for the binmen to give them their Christmas tip."
Bewley's was packed, so we went into a since-vanished café a few doors down, where Nuala, over a plate of beans on toast, said she'd do a book of her Irish Times columns if she could write a 5,000-word introductory, autobiographical essay to provide a context for her public voice.
That sounded fine to me, so we shook hands, and Nuala went home to begin the essay that became her memoir Are You Somebody?Of course it didn't happen that quickly, as Nuala was on her own that Christmas - no easy season for many people at the best of times - and the story she was sitting down to tell was no easy one, either. Still, she stayed at it that winter, spring and into the glorious summer of 1996, during which I would cycle over to Ranelagh a few times a week to sit at her kitchen table and go over the huge broadsheet pages on which she printed out the work in progress.
We'd break for lunch some days, with Nuala making a salad while I did the washing up, and we'd break occasionally to throw a stick for her beloved dog Molly to fetch in the tiny, sun-splashed back garden, or to throw her cat Hodge off the foolscap pages across which he loved to sprawl.
We became fast friends over that summer too, talking about everything and anything as friends do. About how white wine beats red, or the joys of cycling - which Nuala occasionally did all the way from Dublin Airport to Ranelagh, after arriving home on some flight. A lot of what we talked about that summer - and after - was books, those piled up on the table beside her small wood-burning stove, or the writers we loved, such as W.G. Sebald, or Rilke, whose novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids BriggeJohn McGahern had given her, way back when.
At home in both popular and high culture, she might as easily proclaim her love for something like American country singer Iris Dement's I'll Take My Sorrow Straightas cite "some song by Schubert that he went back to 39 times". Certainly she took her own sorrows straight, and readers around the world responded to the courage, unsparing honesty and knife-edged prose of her memoir, recognising in her home truths their own. Published first in Ireland, with a cover drawing of a small angel in red boots by Irish artist Alice Maher, the book went on to sell about a million copies worldwide.
We remained friends over the years that followed, meeting periodically, but keeping in touch always by email and phone, her slightly breathless voice sounding an anxious note whenever she picked up, while I tried to compress all I had to say or ask before she'd suddenly ring off. But then December would roll round again and we'd meet for what she called "our anniversary equivalent beans and toast".
Her love for America, where she lived part-time after 1999, was immense, and she never really got over the way in which what she called "my little book" had taken the States by storm, reaching No 1 on the New York Times bestseller list. "Do you remember when it was just the two of us?" she had laughed a month after the book first appeared here. But in truth her success story had a far larger cast: from her family, Nell McCafferty, and the Irish writer Mary Lavin, who befriended her as a student, to her beloved Brooklyn partner John and a myriad friends. Or Irish Timeseditor Conor Brady, who hired her as a columnist, or her Irish publisher, Edwin Higel, who gambled on an unheard-of (in Ireland, anyhow) reprint of 40,000 copies just weeks after the book was published.
We met up last December for our Christmas coffee in an Oxfam café, where we talked about the coming US primaries. In March she rang with news of her diagnosed cancer, saying how she'd gone out the night before in Clare to look up in unknowing wonder at the stars. And in her stunning radio interview with Marian Finucane last April, she spoke again of how many nights she'd walked down that lane, looked up at the universe, "and given it a wink", courageous to the last.
Are You Somebody?ends on a Christmas Day, but the holiday season first surfaces early in the memoir, where Nuala tells of playing the Archangel Gabriel in a Christmas pageant and, by waving one of her wings at a friend in the audience, ruining it for the nun, who "broke the chair to hit me with a leg of it". The very same passage suddenly flashed back on me as I prepared to cycle home on the August 1996 afternoon we finally signed off on the manuscript.
"You know your book cover?" I asked Nuala, who sat, exhausted, on her front step. "The little angel's wings? And you know your Christmas pageant?" At which the penny dropped, and Nuala positively beamed: "Maybe there is a God!" A proposition which, as she told Marian Finucane in that final interview, is a different matter altogether to that of an afterlife. But there's no doubt whatsoever we were all truly blessed to know her.