Gill Books to publish Theodora FitzGibbon's A Taste Of Love this April

‘Theodora FitzGibbon was the most extraordinary woman. If you read her autobiography you realise how many lives she led. And in fact how many people she was all rolled into one. She was a beauty, she was a deb, she knew all the crowned heads of Europe. She met and married extraordinary people along the way. She was a great cook. She went to a finishing school to learn amazingly useful things such as how to walk backwards away from royalty and how to eat a biscuit without making crumbs!’ - Maeve Binchy

Many people will be familiar with Theodora FitzGibbon as a food writer and Irish Times columnist but readers of her autobiography, A Taste of Love, published Friday, 3 April 2015, will discover that she blazed a trail in every aspect of her life, not just the culinary world.

Theodora was a truly original character who bucked against tradition to follow her passions for love, art and adventure around the world. She witnessed many of the great movements and key events of the twentieth-century at first hand. She lived in Paris among the surrealist artists of the 1930s before dramatically fleeing the city on a bicycle as Hitler invaded. Back in London as the Blitz took hold she caroused with Lucien Freud, Francis Bacon and Dylan Thomas, the pub scene being the only place to find entertainment and companionship in a frightening era, brilliantly recalled here. After the war America boomed and she followed a new love to New York and Bermuda, then Capri and Rome; all havens for the great writers and artists of the time, whom she surrounded herself with.

Despite a womanising, often absent father, a philandering husband, the chaotic pursuit of the next pay cheque and ‘starving in some of the most beautiful places in the world’, Theodora refused to let anything or anyone quell her appetite for adventure.

The life recalled in A Taste of Love, originally published in two volumes in the 1980s and long out of print until now, is bohemian, glamourous and peripatetic. Reneging on a life of conventionality meant financial security and a roof over her head were never guaranteed, but Theodora’s commitment to living a creative life meant these were small sacrifices as she sought inspiration and excitement, gathering a cast of incongruous friends and lovers along the way. Readers will be inspired to grab life by the reins and life it to the full as she did!

Rose Doyle, journalist, author, former colleague of Theodora FitzGibbon at The Irish Times and author of the introduction to A Taste of Love, is available for interview about Theodora and the book.

For further information please contact Teresa Daly, Communications Manager, 01 500 9521, 086 838 3559, tdaly@gill.ie.