With the pluck of the Irish
She is as Irish as Riverdance, all tumbling black hair, blue eyes, and milk-white skin. She is 34 years old and looks as if life had never touched her. It is easy to make assumptions about her latest novel, too - the big, fat paperback Lucy Sullivan is Getting Married, which has already sold 40,000 copies in Ireland and is now in every book shop window in the UK. It looks like any other romance; she seems to be just another fluffy writer targeting beaches from Benidorm to Bermuda.
There has been little fluffiness in Marian Keyes's life, however. The earnest, child-like face belies a 15-year downward spiral into the deepest and most degrading pools of alcoholism. Now, having been sober for three years, Keyes bravely explores her experiences in her books - the first Watermelon, was a best seller, too - and her honesty may help unravel the mystery of why one person has the propensity to be dominated by alcohol while the next can remain in control.
Now that Keyes wants to come on heavy with anti-alcohol messages. She simply feels it is a 1990's thing to want to examine addiction in all its forms. She has rightly judged, people are fascinated by it: there but for the grace of God, after all, many of us could too easily go. So there is no messianic quality about her books or her persona.
Indeed, Lucy Sullivan and her creator both bubble like springs of clear water. It is just while the crystalline quality of Lucy's burbling spring is muddied by an alcoholic father, the flawed role-model for her disastrous relationships, Keyes savagely stirred the bottom of her own source of life. Her puzzle, now she has received what she calls "the beautiful gift of sobriety", is to know shy she messed up.
Born in September 1963, her childhood was normal, good, with a working father and a stay-home mother, but Keyes says:
"I feel I was born with the potential to be an alcoholic. I feel like I came out of life's box broken, damaged. Nothing in my childhood happened to make me so insecure, hard on myself."
She wonders if perhaps the arrival of an adopted brother when she was three could have sowed the seeds of self-doubt which were to damage her life so much. She says:
"Until then I had thought I was at the centre of the universe and the world revolved around me. I didn't understand this was not a rejection. I just felt, what was going on here? Why are they getting another one - what's the matter with me?"
She turned from a sunny, out-going child into an introvert who was crippled with shyness. She did well academically, but socially she was the little girl in the threesome terrified the other two would go off and leave her. She went into relationships believing people would walk all over her, and they did.
"I built failure into relationships all my life," she says.
She could convince the men who fancied her they didn't want to be with her.
"I had the personality type to embrace alcohol, because I felt alcohol made me feel the way I thought everybody else felt. When I poured a drink into myself, I felt it evened me up, it made me the same as everybody else," she says.
Having started to drink at 14, she nonetheless got a 2.2 honours degree in law at University College Dublin. Instead of pursuing a career in law, she went off to London to be a waitress. It broke her parents' hearts, but she thought she wasn't good enough for anything else. She admits to being a perfectionist.
"It is a hard way to live, to be constantly checking your performance against this almost unattainable level of perfection."
She got a job in accounting, was in and out of relationships, and went on drinking. Her lifestyle separated her from her peers. Outwardly she may have denigrated their conventionality, but as she hurtled towards 30 and was still living the life of a teenager, she inwardly craved their promotion, their marriages, their children, and their need to buy wallpaper.
"It was killing me and I felt terribly lonely and a terrible failure," she says.
"There are plenty of people who can live a free-spirited life, but I wasn't one of them."
The year that she was 30, her drinking went out of control. She remembers making the decision on St. Patrick's Day, 1993, to stay in to drink alone, because she was tired of having to hide the fact she drank too much, too fast, and craved more. She ended up hiding the bottles in her sock drawer.
She knows she was a maudlin, weepy, self-indulgent and boring drunk, rather than a vivacious one. She lost time at work, alienated her flatmates, and inevitably, ended up taking an overdose of anti-depressants, sleeping pills, and booze when it dawned on her she couldn't stop.
In the middle of her suicide bid, she suddenly thought:
"I wasn't brought up to be living this kind of life, I am worth more than this."
She made the phone call which set treatment for her alcoholism in motion. Her father got her into an addiction centre in Ireland, and she describes the six weeks there as "a tremendously powerful, painful, exhilarating, bizarre time."
She adds:
"I had to confront how it had affected other people. I found it excruciating because I had never lived through anything painful without alcohol to get me through it."
She found it tremendously liberating to admit she was an alcoholic. Having admitted booze had beaten her, she was able to throw off the obsession.
All the same, she confesses:
"It was like the end of a love affair. There was grief in letting it go."
She thought her life was over, but, in fact, it was just beginning. She married Tony, which for her was the first relationship based on friendship rather than door-slamming emptiness. She had already started writing short stories. Now she sent them to a publisher, was asked to write a novel, and Watermelon was suddenly selling like hotcakes. The knowledge that people cared and that she had a talent for writing has been deeply empowering.
Of her first novel she says:
"It poured out, and I do feel it was already written in some locked room in my head, and all I had to do was turn the key."
It was a joyous experience for her, and she feels it was the right age and the right time for her to start writing, because she had lived enough to put something back out.
Lucy Sullivan caused her much more angst. She worried that she was a one-book wonder, "a fluke". Now halfway through her third book, she feels more comfortable in herself, the violent swings from ecstasy to agony settling to a writing rhythm she is easy with.
"I didn't know I was good at anything," she says.
"I know now it's not going to write itself," she says.
Still a self-doubter of Olympian stature, she cannot dismiss the success of the two first books and that has been therapeutic for her self-esteem.