On the write path
One of the most heart-warming success stories of recent times must be that of Marian Keyes, a Dublin based woman based in London for the last 12 years who has conquered alcoholism and depression and gone on to write two best-sellers, the second of which, Lucy Sullivan is Getting Married, is published appropriately enough this Friday, February 14, St. Valentine's Day.
Petite, demure and soft-voiced, Marian Keyes does not look or sound like a hell-raiser, even a reformed one. But when she went to University College, Dublin, to study law at the age of 18, her studies took very much a back seat as she majored in parties, bar extensions and generally wild times.
After graduating and finding work with the Eastern Health Board, Marian found motivation difficult, "because I felt that nothing mattered very much and, in the end, nothing really mattered at all. And all the while, I drank as often and as much as I could afford."
After a year and a half of this, Marian moved to London into a nasty, squalid flat in a tower block, not quite the bright lights she had dreamed of. She eventually found work as a waitress then graduated to working in an accounts department. Meanwhile, her drinking had become progressively worse.
Mercifully, Marian was found and booked in to an addiction treatment centre by her father. After six weeks there, she went home to Dublin to recover for another six weeks.
It seems too much of a fairy tale to say that Marian's life was transformed but that is what happened. She attends AA meetings four days a week and she had always wanted to write and, one day in September 1993, recovering from a drinking binge, she read an award-winning story in a magazine. Spurred on to write something better, she picked up a pen and started writing short stories.
When she returned to London after her treatment, she decided to get published. She submitted them to Poolbeg in Dublin with a covering letter referring to a novel she was writing. They wrote back asking to see it so Marian decided she had better get writing. The result was Watermelon, which topped the Irish Best-seller list and was selected for WH Smith's Fresh Talent Promotion 1996. Her second novel, Lucy Sullivan is Getting Married, shot to No.1 in the Irish charts and she has signed deals with British and German publishers worth £650,000. Marian, by the way, got married herself in December 1995!
To become an alcoholic could be said to demonstrate some weakness of character, but to overcome it must require amazing strength.
When it came to writing her first novel, she was determined not to fill it with a sordid, morbid story of alcoholic hell. Instead, she came up with the blackly comic tale of a woman abandoned by her husband on the day she gives birth to their child (an experience she happily had never endured), who ends up back in the smoothing bosom of her Irish family.
One thing she's found terribly difficult is the public exposure.
To sobriety and success as a writer, Marian was soon to add the love of her life.
After the success of Watermelon, Marian's self-confidence took a knock when her editor sent back her first four chapters of her follow up.
Now able to write full-time, Marian is moving back to live in Ireland, but being an Irish writer in London has been good to her.
"I was surprised to wake up in the mornings and find that I was dying for a drink. And even more surprised to find that I would actually have a drink in the mornings. But then I stopped being surprised and it became normal. I would spend day after day being drunk. Every time I came to, I would simply reach for another drink and get plastered again. I loved it so much, so fiercely, it got worse. I had almost no friends left. I would rather drink than do anything else or be with anyone else. I started having very strong feelings that I shouldn't go on living the hell that was my live. I was waking up with the most savage depressions, the screaming horrors. I fantasised about dying. I took an overdose."
"To be honest, I probably thought at the time it was a creative thing. You know when you're a bit locked you think something's a great idea and you write it down, but then in the morning ...If I had continued drinking I would never have had the time to write a novel."
"I don't know. I've always had heavy-drinking friends and I'm the only alcoholic I know. There are millions of theories - genetic or circumstantial. I suppose I could never handle it and I hoped no-one else could handle it either. We always used to have post-mortems but somewhere along the line I went too far and never found the way back. I'd love to know why but I'll never know and anyway knowing isn't going to change it."
"I was very emotionally immature. I didn't want to grow up. All around me people were getting married, buying flats, having kids. I just wanted to party. I didn't want to stop. I couldn't face the responsibility of having to be an adult."
"The last two years have been a process of growing up. I've come through an awful lot. I thought I'd never be able to live without alcohol. I thought my life was over and I'd never laugh again. I thought all the joy had gone out of my life and it's just been the opposite. I thought I'd be jealous surrounded by people getting drunk. The only thing is beyond a certain stage it gets boring. It makes me not want to drink when I see how it make people behave."
"I was familiar with the humiliation ad rejection but also the fun and the laughter. The feelings in it are universal feelings. I think they're a really normal family in that they are really abnormal. Everyone has a veneer of well-behavedness that they present to the outside world but behind closed doors it's quite different. The number of people who've come up to me and said, that my family, how did you know?"
"It's one thing to say I'm an alcoholic and I'm not ashamed of it and I hope my story will help other people but it was hard to go into my day job after there had been things in the press here. I felt very raw and exposed because I'm private, I'm not a natural media personality. There were a couple of days when I didn't want to get out of bed and face the world. I suppose I thought it would be glamorous and it's not, it's been hard work, but I'm grateful for the exposure and the chance to tell the story of my recovery."
"He was an old friend who had always been nice to me but I preferred meanies but when I left the treatment centre with embryonic feelings of self-respect he was still nice and I was able not to reject his kindness."
"I was thinking Watermelon was just a fluke. Anything you write is too precious and criticism is so personal. Lucy Sullivan ... is about a second-generation Irish woman who suffers from depression. She has her tarot cards read and is told she'll be married within the year, but she doesn't even have a man."
"It gives me a different perspective. I've been here for so long. I'm an outsider and I think outsiders write better because they have more of a distance. In another way it puts limits because there are things I might write which an Irish audience would immediately recognise but which wouldn't work here. I find that frustrating."