I know it does sound a bit like a vegetarian writing a press release for the meat board. But it's not quite as it seems. It's not so much a health book as a cheer-up book and since I am a maniacally optimistic person then my credentials should be fairly reasonable for that.
It all began two years ago this month when the artist Wendy Shea came home from one hospital with a new hip and I came home from another hospital with another new hip. At that time we each brought a great number of get-well cards with us. Just like old Christmas cards, it's a problem knowing what to do with them.
I looked at all mine again and saw the funny messages on some and the pressed flowers on others and the expensive art cards and I thought it's insane to keep all these in a suitcase so that I can take them out when I'm really old and prove to myself that I was loved in 1997. And lovely as they were they're not the kind of thing you can recycle, crossing out "Dear Maeve" from whoever and putting in your own message. This way insanity lies.
So with great regret I let them go but I kept thinking that there must be some way of harnessing such generosity for a good cause. I noted with darkening brow that the greetings card industry, which has plenty of money already, gets more and more as soon as anyone goes to hospital.
So why couldn't there be a little book not much dearer than a card, I thought? Something you could send to people in hospital and they could send on to someone else when they had read it, or keep it on their shelf in case they forgot to cheer up one day and needed to be forcibly cheered. And the royalties could go to a charity.
A brilliant idea, and since there wasn't such a book, Wendy Shea and I have produced one in aid of the Arthritis Foundation. It's not just about arthritis; it's about everything.
It's a funny thing writing a book in aid of charity. You can be quite shameless in telling everyone how great it is and dragging them into bookshops to buy it because they know the money isn't going to buy you a yacht or a diamond brooch.
Nothing is quite as easy as it sounds. Why don't I ask someone to embroider that for me on a sampler and I could put it on the wall of my study.
I think everything is basically very easy and that I'll have it finished in a couple of weeks, so it always comes as a huge shock when there are problems, as of course there always are. It was easy to know what any cheer-up book that I might write would not be.
It would not be a preparation for the next world. Nor would it be bedpan humour. And not alternative cures and remedies. And certainly nothing in the area of Pull Yourself Together and Stop Bellyaching.
This little manual had to be suitable for all sorts of people - some who were seriously ill and did not want their position trivialised, some who were going to be perfectly fine, and for some who didn't really know which category they were in. We wanted to let people know that it was appropriate for any kind of ailment and they wouldn't have made a terrible error of taste and given some horrific offence by having sent it to a friend who was poorly.
And of course once I began to write the book the real problem became clear. It was not what to put in, it was what to leave out. The list of contents alone was about eight pages long.
This book was going to be the size of the Yellow Pages; it was going to defeat totally its purpose of cutting a swathe through the get-well card industry. It would fit in no envelope for convenient posting. Any patient who would be strong enough to have it on the bed would be strong enough to leave hospital.
And then, with a blinding flash, I remembered that when you're in hospital or at home in bed with flu you don't actually want to read long detailed things; you want to read short things and then fall asleep and wake and read another short thing. And you want funny drawings to make you laugh.
So I left out most of it. We lost things like the story of a great nurse known as Dracula who could always find a vein.
And we lost the great argument about whether it is reassuring or over-familiar to be addressed by your first name in hospital. But there's lots of good advice left, like: how to alienate all your visitors and ensure you remain entirely unvisited; how to annoy the person in the next bed; how not to be ashamed of your wobbly bits and keep covering them up.
There are imaginative tasteful gifts to give people - it's full of heroic inspiring tales of weak-willed people who managed when it was utterly necessary to give up food, drink and smokes. These weak-willed people are all me actually, but that just makes it more personal and honest.
The book was edited for us by Mary Maher of this newspaper and we used to have sessions where we would fall about at Wendy's drawings, though why I should adore pictures of myself looking enormous and insane I have no idea. Innate good humour verging on the illness of elation, I imagine.
And that's what kept us all going. That and the great news that this book - though written for an Irish publisher, Poolbeg - has also been taken up by publishers in England, America, Canada, Australia, Sweden, Germany and Holland. And the royalties will go to the relevant arthritis charity in each of those countries as well.
This was not intended to be the definitive book on every ache and pain ever endured; it was certainly not a leadership manual from two women who considered themselves model patients.
But I really do think that there might be something in it which would entertain or inform, and certainly pictures that will delight. I'd love to think it might be on people's hospital bedside cabinets next week, and with it I send my personal, best wishes, my thanks for the contribution to the charity and one of my few certainties in life - a reassurance that nothing on earth is as bad as it might seem at 4 a.m.
Aches & Pains by Maeve Binchy and Wendy Shea (Poolbeg, £4.99)