About Marian
Autobiography - Updated 01/2006
She was born in the West of Ireland in 1963.
I was a month overdue and I often wonder what my life would have been like if I'd been born on time and been a dynamic, sunny Leo, instead of a perfectionist Virgo; it was a hard lesson to learn and since then I’ve always been very punctual.
She was brought up in Dublin, and then she spent her twenties in London.
When I left school I went to college, got a law degree, then put it to good use by going to London and getting a job as a waitress. Eventually I upped and got respectable and got a job in an accounts office, where I worked (I use the term oh-so-loosely) for a long, long, long time. I thought I'd be there forever, that I'd end up as a grumpy old woman with forty cats and that small boys would throw stones at me. What I certainly had no notion of doing was becoming a writer.
During her twenties her life-long low self esteem gradually mutated into a drinking problem
By the time I was thirty it had all come to a terrible head and, after a suicide attempt, I was lucky enough to get into rehab. (Mind you I didn’t feel lucky at the time! I thought my life was over.) However, I’ve been one of the fortunate ones and I’ve stayed sober and – more importantly – happy about it, ever since.
She started writing in 1993 and her first book Watermelon was published in Ireland in 1995
I began writing short stories four months before I finally stopped drinking, and after I came out of rehab I decided to send them off to a publisher. So that they'd take me seriously, I enclosed a letter saying I'd written part of a novel. Which I hadn't. I had no intention of so doing, either - I was much more into the instant gratification of short stories. But they wrote back and said, send the novel, and for once in my self-destructive life I didn't shoot myself in the foot. I wrote four chapters of my first novel Watermelon in a week, and was offered a three-book contract on the strength of it.
Since then she has become a publishing phenomenon. Over ten million copies of her seven novels have been sold worldwide.
In November 1996 I was finally able to give up my day job and become - allegedly anyway - a full time writer. Except that almost from the moment all my time was free to write with, I began to try and distract myself and do anything but write. I'm up and down the stairs, checking to see if the mail has come. (Even after it already has.) I pray for the phone to ring, I make appointments for root-canal treatment and toy with the notion of scrubbing the kitchen floor. Anything other than switch on the computer. Of course, once I start it's not so bad, I always find.
Her books are an unusual blend of comedy and darkness and cover subjects like depression, addiction and illness
Rachel’s Holiday is about someone coming to terms with addiction, and Lucy Sullivan is Getting Married is a comedy set in London about a girl living a carefree single life who realises she has issues to deal with. Okay, so a book about someone with depression doesn't exactly sound like a laugh a minute, but in my experience the best comedy is rooted in darkness. All seven of my books are different but share a common theme of people who are In The Bad Place, and who achieve some form of redemption. I've been In The Bad Place myself many's the time, which wasn't very pleasant while it was happening but has since come in very handy for writing about it.
She’s often compared to Helen Fielding
We both started writing around the same time – my second book (Lucy Sullivan) came out just as Bridget Jones’ Diary first hit the bookstores – and we’re both comic writers who cover ‘ordinary’ women’s issues.
Marian now lives in Dublin again
Nine years ago I moved back to live in Ireland. So that I wouldn't miss London too much I imported an Englishman (well, actually I married him.). I was worried that I'd hate the small-town feel of Dublin, but what I hadn't realised was that while I'd been away it had become Groovyville. It's now nearly impossible to buy "a grand cup of tea" because all that's available is skinny double mocha lattes.
Her last book, The Other Side of the Story , was set in the world of publishing.
Funnily enough, even though The Other Side is set in publishing, not a lot of my life is in it. For example I have NOTHING in common with Jojo, except a desire to be like her when I grow up, so I had to totally research her background, mind-set etc. Likewise with Gemma, I knew nothing about Event Management and had to research that too. The only real-life incidents I brough to the book were things like Lily’s disastrous signing, when no-one turned up to see her. I too have known the pain of sitting in a bookshop with the tumbleweed blowing past me!
Her newest book is Anybody Out There?
It’s partly set in a cosmetics PR firm in New York. I write a monthly beauty column for an Irish magazine, and became fascinated by this world. So much effort put into something that’s so trivial, and yet important to so many people.
Her books are published worldwide and have been translated into thirty-two
different languages, such as Hebrew and Japanese.
And that's about it!
To sum up, I used to be addicted to shoes, handbags and chocolate in all its wonderful forms. I’ve given up the chocolate, and I’m learning to cook proper food. All quite normal, really.