When the pen proves mightier than the bottle
Three years ago exactly, the chill February of 1994, Marian Keyes was alone in her shared flat in Maidia Vale with a litre of vodka, a bunch of anti-depressants and a bottle of sleeping pills. Her boyfriend had left her a few months before as "he just couldn't take the drinking any more." Her flatmate Suzanne was out. Keyes sat down on her bedroom floor and surveyed her life.
"It was the tacky Eighties, people were throwing it around like snuff at a wake," she says.
She had moved to London from Dublin eight years before and worked as a waitress earning "loads" of money in a place called the Video Café.
Keyes then went on to a job as an accounts clerk. She was now 29 and, if she were honest with herself, the only thing that had progressed in the past decade was her drinking. Most of her good-time pals had been moved on. In her words:
"Been promoted, got married, had children."
She had mocked them, told them what wimps they were
- "How boring, old and dull."
But now suddenly she was the one who didn't look so clever. She was the one left behind.
Keyes doesn't remember taking the pills. Her next recollection is of coming drowsily round, seeing herself lying there half-conscious and thinking:
"This isn't how it was meant to be. I was meant to be living a happy life."
She managed to phone a friend, who called for an ambulance. Three days later Keyes was in a rehabilitation clinic just outside Dublin, where she stayed for six weeks and "I haven't had a drink since."
It was the experience that transformed her life. Back in London, Keyes returned to her old accounts job.
"I was lucky I had a kind woman boss who kept it open for me."
And suddenly, she found, there was so much more time.
In the evenings she started to write, short stories and then Watermelon, her first novel. It was published in Ireland by Poolbeg two years ago and shot straight to the top of the best-seller list, selling 100,000 copies. Her second book, Lucy Sullivan is Getting Married, was auctioned amid fierce competition last year in the UK. Reed publishers offered a £425,000 deal for three books.
"Riches beyond my wildest dreams," she exclaims. As she says, it's the "sort of good-luck story you only read about happening to other people." But then, she adds: "Alcoholism is what happens to other people." The novelist is like every alcoholic she has ever met.
"I thought I was unhappy and that is why I was drinking. I never made the equation that it was the drink that was making me miserable."
Every experience, good or bad, happy or sad, was the excuse for a drink. Alcohol was her closest ally and her love.
"For eight years it really was the most important relationship of my life. I would do anything to defend it and anyone who got in the way became my enemy."
The last few weeks of the drinking were like the end of a love affair.
"I was so angry it had let me down, couldn't make me happy any more."
Like every alcoholic, Keyes set rules -
"I won't drink before lunch. I'll only drink wine."
And, like every alcoholic, she promptly broke them. She started hiding bottles. "It made it harder for others to keep count," Keyes explains. The most pernicious aspect of the drinking, she says, is that it gradually annihilates every part of your life, erodes your self-esteem, till in the end you lack the power to help yourself. Others aren't much better. There is a complicity among the family and friends of alcoholics. No one wants to see it. It is this subject that Keyes tackles, albeit obliquely, in Lucy Sullivan.
The book is basically a young women's romp. Guilty sex and more sex in west London. But behind it is the story of Lucy, the daughter of an alcoholic, who has never faced this fact. All her life she has blinkered herself. Every man she meets she thinks: "He'll fix me."
The only problem is she's always picking men more broken than herself.
You can only fix yourself, Keyes reflects. This is what she has learned. This and the fact that no one is to blame - "not even yourself." She didn't have an unhappy childhood and her parents, far from being drinkers, scarcely touched a drop. She was loved and looked after and all she can conclude, she says, is that there is no logic in it.
"Some people have terrible childhoods and work out all right. And for some childhood is happy, but with blips, and they can't accept the blips."
Keyes is a brave woman and gets braver every day. A year ago she married Tony, who is "gorgeous and sexy and never dull." And he is a great support. At first she turned him down because "I wanted to do this on my own to be seen to do it alone." But this, she realised, was just a different form of fear as "all addiction is a form of fear, even insisting on going it alone."
In her next book Keyes plans to tackle more directly the issue of addiction. "Cocaine addiction, not drink. But it is the same syndrome," she maintains. There is nothing evangelical about the way she describes ho happy her life is now. "I remember what it was like to have that fire raging inside you. If someone had tried to tell me I'd be happier not drinking I would have laughed in their face."
But then, she says, it is the primary feature of addiction that you only hear what you want to hear.