Sunday Times
The subtle sisterhood
Following a consciousness-waking journey to Ethiopia, chick-lit queen Marian Keyes has a serious new message. And she’s not afraid to whisper it, discovers Brian Lavery
More than a decade after Marian Keyes quit her job in accounting to begin writing full-time, selling more than 15m books in the process, it seems the Irish chick-lit queen is changing her magic formula. The genre may be derided for its wholehearted embrace of the more trivial aspects of women’s lives, but Keyes now believes that her kind of popular fiction is the best way to communicate a new feminist message.
“I’ve become more politicised and less frightened,” she says. “I’ve always been left-of-centre, and very exercised on behalf of people who were oppressed and being done an injustice. It just never dawned on me that the biggest group of people who are dispossessed is women.
“I should have known, but my generation has been in denial because we were told — or I certainly was, at the age of 18 — that the war was won, the world is your oyster, you have nothing to worry about, it’ll all be lovely. And I swallowed it wholesale.”
The catalyst for her awakening was a trip to Ethiopia with the Irish aid agency Concern in 2002, where she saw women suffering more than anyone else. “That was the start of the flowering of a kind of consciousness that hadn’t been there before,” Keyes says.
On a personal level, the result has been dramatic. Her recent reading list includes work by feminist thinkers such as Susan Faludi, Germaine Greer and Ariel Levy. And on a professional level, that way of thinking has already made its way into Keyes’s work.
She described her approach to feminism last year in The F-Word, an essay in her collection Further Under the Duvet, and in her 2004 novel, The Other Side of the Story, about a literary agent who is blocked by the corporate glass ceiling. In her latest book, however, that message at first seems relegated to the back-burner.
“I am first and foremost an entertainer, and I think nothing can be sacrificed for that,” she says. “It could be counterproductive if I start getting a bit ranty, because people won’t read me then. So it has to be very subtly done. You’ve got to lure people in with the lighthearted story, and then, at the heart of it, have the very serious story.”
“You’ve got to go, ‘Shoes, shoes, shoes! Handbags, chocolate!’” she says, shouting, and then whispers: “Women’s rights.”
By putting the protagonist of her new book, Anybody Out There? in a New York public relations firm that specialises in cosmetics, Keyes tries to strike a balance between acknowledging the attraction of girly stuff and showing its dark side.
The book follows Anna Walsh, the younger daughter in a fictional Dublin family that Keyes has written about before, as she returns to her high-pressure career after suffering horrific injuries and the loss of her husband in an accident. Like Keyes’s earlier work, which tackled subjects such as addiction and depression, it is the story of a recovery.
But Keyes’s feminist stance seems at odds with how enthusiastically she delves into the detail of Anna’s job working for Candy Grrrl. Anna showers friends and family with free samples, her whispering campaign pitch for a new client becomes a big plot device, and ridiculous brand names, such as Multiple Orgasm lipstick, start to sound almost normal even when invoked by Anna’s mother.
“I’m very conflicted about it because I do also love the products,” Keyes says. “I know I’m programmed, and I wish that I didn’t love them, but I do. Like most women, I’m maddened with lust for the whole packaging, the look of it. So yeah, they probably will enjoy reading it, as I enjoyed writing about it. But I know that it’s wrong of me to love it that much.
“It doesn’t lead to permanent confidence, or any kind of growth as a person,” she says. “After I read The Beauty Myth (by Naomi Wolf), it was like, ‘No! Why did I read this? I didn’t want to know all this!’ But once you have the knowledge you can’t unknow it.”
So Keyes tries to be subtly subversive in her depiction of Anna’s cut-throat workplace, where women compete savagely with each other, bosses dole out cruel insults, and female employees’ primary job function is to look good. Staff at Candy Grrrl must embody the style of the brand they represent, even to the point of wearing pastel-coloured boiler suits and silly hats into the office.
As Keyes’s career has developed, she has taken to working harder, she says, and those office details came from her research on location in New York, where she interviewed employees of cosmetics companies – and found them like “robots”. “They were just so frightened of saying anything wrong,” she says.
“They just sang the company song and wouldn’t say anything bad. And that’s all I was interested in, because there are no good anecdotes in a perfect job.”
The research also took her into some of the more eccentric corners of Manhattan. To flesh out the detail of how Anna, psychologically distraught, tries to get in touch with the spirit of her dead husband, the author attended group meetings with amateur psychics. She went with an open-minded attitude, and was hopeful about what she would experience, but left quite cynical. “I went enough times for the hope finally to die,” she says. Most other fiction that Keyes had read about bereavements “talked about missing someone like the person had moved to New York. I think when a person dies it’s not so much that you’d miss them, more that the whole world is tilted.”
In many of those research situations the writer relied on a friend, Anne-Marie Scanlan, to help when interviewing subjects. Scanlan’s assistance proved crucial for Keyes’s next novel, which is about domestic violence and includes a character who works as a make-up artist for cross-dressing men.
“I’m too afraid of asking the things that I really want to know,” Keyes says. “When we were interviewing transvestites, I was dying to know loads: what kind of knickers they wear, and what they do with their bits and all. I just couldn’t ask it, I was just paralysed by politeness. Whereas Anne-Marie was straight in there.”
Even after 10 books, Keyes still writes on a laptop while tucked into bed, propped up by ergonomic pillows, as her husband works downstairs as her administrator and manager.
Another thing that hasn’t changed is the enormous size of her novels. At 592 pages in hardback, Anybody Out There? is her shortest, and Keyes is at a loss to explain the length.
“I suppose it’s the Irish thing, of why use one word when 20 will do?” she says. “Obviously I have an idea of a template for a book, that it’s got to be 150,000 words long, and that if it’s not, I’m short-changing my readers. I felt really embarrassed that this is only 135,000 words.”
She certainly does feel a sense of responsibility to her fans, who flock to her frequent appearances, such as during her recent three-week tour of Australia. Those public readings and television slots force her to create an exterior persona, which is often linked to the bubbly personality that people associate with her characters.
“The difference between the public Marian and the private Marian is that the public one does feel the need to be entertaining,” she says. “I feel like I can’t let people down, that people come and they expect me to be funny because my books are funny. That if I was in one of my black days, that I have to fake it.
“I can’t be a whinger. I am subject to extreme bleakness at times, and very much in touch with despair. I always feel on the brink of toppling into the pit. And when I do topple, I can’t show that side, because people don’t want that, and that’s fair enough.”
And if that cheery facade contributes to her being labelled as the exemplar of women’s popular fiction, so be it. In fact, Keyes is happy to defend the genre that she helped create with her first novel, Watermelon, back in 1995 — the year before Helen Fielding published Bridget Jones’s Diary.
“I am a chick-lit writer,” says Keyes. “I think it’s actually a very important genre, because it’s about the conflicts and confusions of our post-feminist world, where we’re told we’re equal, but we know we’re not. After the first wave, an awful lot of crappy people who missed the point and thought it was about romance and pinkness came along. I have no problem with romance and pinkness, so long as it’s balanced with something worthwhile.”