First published by The Times on 8 February 2020
My arrival to interview Marian Keyes at her home in Co Dublin — a big, bright, turquoise-painted house that is being ruthlessly battered by Storm Brendan — feels like being hugged. After a turbulent flight from London and a meandering drive down coastal roads, I arrive to find Keyes dressed cosily in a tartan smock and slippers. I, meanwhile, am damp and travel-sick.
“It’s my honour that you came,” she says warmly, clasping my hands. It’s a surprising thing to hear from someone who is not an up-and-comer, but one of the most successful Irish writers of all time. Keyes has sold more than 39 million books; of course I came.
Will I be wanting some lunch? She’s bought some sandwiches, just in case I do. The interior of the house is cheery and colourful, and we walk through an atrium where she has been painting abstract canvases; her latest obsession, she says. In the living room, she fusses me on to the sofa. Is it really OK for me to eat lunch while I interview her? “Yes, because I’ll be doing all the talking, so it’s grand,” she says. “And I talk a lot, so don’t you worry.”
Perhaps Keyes’s apparent delight at this interview is partly because the attention she gets from newspaper culture desks is not quite proportionate to the number of bestsellers she has written (13). As I confirm while researching this piece, many people are sniffy of her style of fiction — although, as it turns out, most of them will admit they have never read it.
In the first decade or so of her career, which launched in 1995 with her debut Watermelon, Keyes’s work was categorised as “chick lit”. The worst of that genre, now rather passé, was peppered with clichés that have endured — clumsy singletons stumbling into romantic heroes with a glass of prosecco in their hand — but that’s not what Keyes writes. She tells tales of ordinary people, families and friends, unpicking all sorts of problems of the heart; her books are long, humorous and have the quality of a warm bath.
To call them escapism wouldn’t give the full picture either, because the dilemmas she deals with are some of life’s toughest. A character in her new novel, Grown Ups, is trying to conceal bulimia from her husband and colleagues; 2017’s The Break had a subplot about abortion and the difficulties of accessing one in Ireland.
Keyes writes emotional drama with an easy, understated tone, which is perhaps why her characters feel so relatable to so many readers. There’s a palpable and appealing desire to make a connection, in the books and the woman herself. When I finish my sandwich, she gets up to fetch chocolate biscuits. “We got them in especially for you!” she says. “Oh, any excuse.”
Grown Ups explores a sprawling family with the usual tensions and secrets, held together by the character of Jessie, a manic overachiever who is adamant that her in-laws must get together for weekends and special occasions.
“I’m Jessie,” Keyes confesses immediately. “I’m the eldest of five of us and I’m the person standing at the bottom of the stairs shouting, ‘Come on! We’ll be late!’ I love organising things where we’re all away together, but I do accept that I’m a control freak and that it may not suit everyone.”
Three of her siblings live near by in Dublin, while her sister Caitriona is in New York. “My conversations with her are incredibly micro, you know. We never say, ‘So how have things been?’ It’s all about, ‘Well, did you get those shoes?’ and it goes straight into the specifics.”
Keyes’s father, who had Alzheimer’s, died in 2018, but her mother, a devout Catholic, is alive and has struggled with some of her storylines: sex outside marriage, for example, and the abortion plot.
“Lots of aspiring writers ask me, ‘How do you write a book without offending people you love?’ And you have to make a decision to be honest,” Keyes says. “I mean, it’s painful, but I want to write a book that is true to my moral core and that is true to my characters. Writing the abortion storyline, I found that really frightening because I was brought up as a Catholic. It went into my bones and the fear was real. It took so much courage for me to be able to say, ‘I’m going to address this taboo issue in my book in the hope that it might change people’s minds.’ And do you know, it was a wonderful, freeing thing to do. But my mother was upset, you know.”
In general, they avoid the topic of her work. “I know she would prefer if I had become a solicitor as I was meant to all those years ago [Keyes studied law and accountancy]. She has values that are really dear to her, and I’m her eldest child and I rejected all those values, and I flaunted that rejection by writing books. We want to have a relationship and it’s one of those decisions where we’re both having to be mature and careful.”
Is Keyes an atheist, then? She pauses and answers carefully. “I mean, I am vehemently opposed to all organised religion. I just see it as a way to control people, especially women. I haven’t yet come across an organised religion that is not profoundly misogynistic. The whole atheist thing, though... That’s kind of different.” She still prays occasionally. “Or I have a chat with my dad. I mean, I do still ask the universe every day to help me to not drink alcohol — and I don’t know what that makes me.”
Keyes gave up booze at 30 — she’s 56 — when a family intervention forced her into rehab. She may not drink, but her addictive tendencies continue, she says. She points to the easel I saw earlier. “When I was drinking alcoholically, I used to have to rotate the off-licences I went to because I was known to so many of them. When I started painting, and it was only in August, I bought so much paint that I had to go to different shops because they were, like, ‘You’re back again?’ Of course, they were delighted because it was more business, but I felt mortified.”
Alongside its storyline on bulimia, which Keyes defines as a form of addiction, the new book reflects her political perspective; two of her characters are consumed with issues such as the treatment of asylum seekers in Ireland and the sky-high prices of property in Dublin.
“I am really aware of the imbalance between the rich and the poor,” she says. “We have a homelessness crisis here, but we also have a housing crisis where people with jobs can’t even afford to rent. I very much object to legislation that protects landlords; I very much object to Airbnb and I know that’s not popular. I was always a leftie and I do not think that the market takes care of itself. I would far rather pay higher tax and have a health service that in some way functioned.”
From 2009 to 2014 Keyes had a crippling bout of depression; she has spoken of begging her mother to let her take her own life. Her favourite of her books is The Mystery of Mercy Close, which she wrote during that time and which featured a depressed heroine.
“I had huge gaps of months where I wasn’t able to write anything. It was so important to me to keep trying with it because every time I managed a sentence or a paragraph, it reminded me that the person I used to be was still available at times. It’s not for everyone, that book, because the picture that I gave is just too dark, but for some people it has helped them and that helped me, you know.”
People often write to her about their depression. “I can say, ‘I felt exactly like that and now I am better.’ I can offer hope, that’s what it is. I can say, quite honestly, that for years I thought I would never feel normal again, never mind happy — and I do feel as normal as it gets for me. And I do feel joyous, maybe more joyous than I used to.”
As we wrap up the interview, I look grimly at the raging weather outside and she reaches out to soothe me. “Don’t mind it, it’s OK!” she says. “It’s only Ireland.”
Grown Ups by Marian Keyes is out now (Michael Joseph, £20).