All keyed up
Marian Keyes is an accountant who wrote a book called Watermelon a few years ago and sent it to an Irish publisher. It became a best seller in Ireland and begot tow books called Lucy Sullivan is Getting Married and Rachel's Holiday. Now her books are on sale internationally and Rachel's Holiday has just been optioned by Disney for a film. She has been translated into eight different languages for the European market, 'Americanised' for the US marker, and will shortly be published in Israel. Her fourth book, Last Chance Saloon, comes out next month, and she has just started work on the fifth, based on a women she saw in a Dublin supermarket one morning. And after living all over Ireland during childhood, hightailing it to London after college, she moved back to Ireland with her husband in recent year. So where then, does Marian Keyes consider 'home'?
"Nowhere is home," she says quite bluntly. "I feel I don't belong anywhere. I do feel Irish, but I can't break it down any further to one particular place. I was delighted when I eventually moved to London because I felt nobody belonged there."
Born in Limerick, she had lived in Cork, Galway and Dundalk by the age of 12. Then the family moved finally to Dublin, where Marian now lives with her English husband Tony - the man mainly responsible for their move back to this country.
Galway had been her precious home, for two years, which were for Marian "this wonderful feeling of living in a holiday resort. It was fantastic living on the Atlantic, as soon as Dad would come home from work we would all go down to Salthill." Her father worked with the health board, hence the moves to various health boards around the country, and the Keyes family lived two years in Fairland Parks in Newcastle, Galway.
But Clare is the place she describes as her "spiritual home," the place the Keyes family spent their summer holidays. Marian's month is from Inagh, just outside Ennistymon, and the whole family would decamp to the grandparents' tiny three bedroomed whitewashed cottage every year, to sleep three to a bed - "some at the top, some at the bottom" - and have a fantastic time, without running water and electricity. Things, Marian explains, which never seemed to be a problem.
It is probably fitting then that the forthcoming book, Last Chance Saloon, is set between Clare and London, the first book to move away from a Dublin base. It tells the story of three Clare people, a man and two women who have been friends since their teens, and now are in their 30s and living in London. Though set abroad, there are flashbacks to their earlier lives in the West of Ireland, and having one of the Clare families visit the capital, allowed Marian depict the oddities of London through fresh eyes.
As with her previous books, the tone is upbeat and humorous but she does not shirk away from more serious issues. Rachel's Holiday dealt with alcoholism and recovery, Last Chance Saloon takes on homosexuality and the culture of AIDS. Her key male character is gay, and when he falls sick, his friends are faced with confronting their own inescapable mortality. It's about challenging stereotypes and people's expectations, she explains. But don't worry, Marian's not gone all serious - "It's still funny" she assures me.
Watermelon has sold 45,000 copes to date in Ireland, Lucy Sullivan 66,000 (with a television series of the book starting in autumn), and Rachel's Holiday 75,000 with the possibility of a Hollywood film version in the future. The pressure to continue the upward sales trend must be keenly felt with the approach of the publication date for the new book. Already Eason bookshops have selected it 'Book of the Month' for September.
Last Chance Saloon was finished at Christmas. Then Marian did an odd thing. She took some time off and went travelling with her husband, the first time she had allowed herself to take a break between books. They visited Thailand, Vietnam and America (which was combined with a small amount of work, as Rachel's Holiday makes its entrance in Hollywood).
It may provide the setting for a future book, though she is currently involved in a non-Hollywood plot.
She is very close to her family, and spends a lot of time with her mother and sister in particular - "they're a howl." Friends and family are very important to her, and one of her favourite ways of relaxing is meeting up with people to have "the craic and a chat."
Salsa dancing has been a recent discovery, and provided the revelation that Irish men can do it with style! "I'm used to seeing Irish men doing the 12-points-of-Guinness-shuffle, but these guys were amazing." She is also learning to drive - "I'm always wondering if I will ever feel grown up, and I think driving just might do it, - and planning her summer holidays as her next break from writing. But how does a best-selling author follow up a glamorous East/West tour? By going to Lahinch in Co. Clare in fact."
"Most of my life is very ordinary." Marian comments as we prepared to leave, and she heads off to the next driving lesson. "I don't wake up in the morning and think, I'm a best-selling author. I wake up with the same anxieties and worries as everyone else."
"I hated Dublin, I was intimidated by the size. I remember driving into it the first time, even now my stomach is churning at the memory of it. I don't know if I ever settled down, I certainly never felt I belonged there."
"The house was incredibly remote, and off the main road, but there still seemed to be people calling all the time. People passing on their way to the bog would call in, others came visit in the evening to sit around the fire. I remember falling asleep to the sound of murmuring chat."
"I spent three days in LA when the book was first optioned, and I didn't like it... but I was intrigued by it. So this time we spent a month there and I loved it. It's stone mad! It's such a one industry town, even the quality newspapers are full of the movie business. Nobody eats, they're all thin and obsessed with their bodies - it's the most extreme place I've ever been."
"I'm at that strange place now with the new book where I don't know who the characters will become, and I'm saying to myself, will they ever come to life at all, because they have to be real for me. One of the characters is a glamorous type, and she's based on a girl I saw early one Saturday morning in the supermarket. In her basket she had seven cans of strawberry Slimfast, seven potatoes, and seven individually wrapped chocolates from the pic 'n' mix. This was her week's shopping! I just wondered what it would be like to live with that type of control."