Novel way to beat the bottle
"It's unreal! It's the most fabulous feeling in the whole universe! It blows me over, it really, really does." Young Irish author Marion Keyes is describing with characteristic enthusiasm how she feels when she sees her too frothy, romantic, darkly funny novels up there on the shelves in the bookshops - first, 1995 Watermelon and, this month, Lucy Sullivan Is Getting Married, currently riding high at number three in the Sunday Times bestseller list.
But she could just as easily be describing her elation at the quite extraordinary transformation in her own life which has seen her travel from miserable alcoholic to hot property chased by eight British publishers. For some 16 years, Marian frankly admitted when she was in Nottingham last week, she had a drink problem.
"I was a binge drinker. I could go for long periods without drinking, but towards the end, when I started, I couldn't start." At the age of 30 and still clinging onto her accountancy job in London, she reached a crisis and took an overdose.
It was then that her father arranged for her to go into an addiction treatment centre in Dublin.
Marion emerged six weeks later with the problem under control and began writing, something she had unsuccessfully attempted mere months before in the drinking days.
The rest sounds like a fairy tale. Marian sent some short stories to a Dublin publisher, adding she had also written 15,000 words of a novel. The stories were rejected, but the publisher wanted to see the novel. Unfortunately, there was no novel - she had made it up to make herself sound more serious. Undeterred, she quickly wrote 12,000 words - the first four chapters of Watermelon - and the publisher and loved it... Two Irish and one of British bestseller - plus at £425,000 publishing deal from Reed International - later, 33 year-old Marian sounds as fresh, honesty and invigorating as readers find her novels. She expresses amazement at how writers like F. Scott Fitzgerald managed to produce brilliant stories by struggling with a drink problem. There may be a link between the artistic temperament and alcohol, Marian believes - but in her case, drinking swamped the creative impulses. Once off the booze... "I wanted to write books that I wanted to read. I was sick of reading clichés and sick of reading about excessive sentimentality. I wanted to read about real people with real lives." Her own life, she swears, is still fairly normal - at least for the time being (but just wait until the next novel, or if, as has been hinted, Watermelon is turned into a film).
"I'm not famous yet! It doesn't feel any different. I didn't give up the day job until November. I'm delighted, you know, when I see someone reading one of the books and I always go up and introduce myself. They always think I'm a mad woman."