Keyes to the future
In the book, Lucy Sullivan is Getting Married; the heroine is told by a fortune teller that she will get married within the next year. So Lucy spends the following 12 months looking for Mr Right, falling for unreliable men and crying on the shoulder of her best friend, Daniel, the biggest flirt in the world. It's only when Lucy's family life falls apart and she realises that her father's an alcoholic that she can see her soulmate is much closer to home. Lucy is a romantic at heart, and so is Marian Keyes who wrote this hilarious yet sad novel. And Lucy's story is not that far removed from Marian's own.
You may have seen the author on national television a few months ago launching Lucy Sullivan is Getting Married and talking candidly about her alcoholism. It was while she was in a drying-out clinic that she realised she loved Tony - with whom she'd been friends for years. This was a turning point in her life. After that, with Tony's support, she started to recover... and to write.
But it's not easy writing when you have a day job. Most struggling novelists only dream of spending the whole of their working life writing. So too, is it the ambition of most Irish people working 'across the water' in England to come home some day and live in Ireland.
For Marian Keyes, (33) however, both dreams are now close to reality.
Marian's first novel, Watermelon - published in 1995 - was written in two hour shifts before going to work and edited at night. It was published by Poolbeg Press in Ireland and Reed in England, and received great critical acclaim, selling an impressive 100,000 copies. Her second novel Lucy Sullivan is Getting Married - published last summer - shot straight on to the Irish bestsellers list.
Having clinched a lucrative five-book deal with Reed, Marian has resigned from her job in the accounts department at an architectural college where she'd been working for nine years, to write full-time.
Overall 1996 was a good year for Marian Keyes. It was the year her books started to practically jump off the bookshelves, and also the year she married Tony.
The princely sum of £400,000 has been bandied about as the figure Marian received as her advance from Reed, but she declines to verify it. Either way, it's certainly enough to be able to return home to live in Dublin this year. Marian and Tony are property-hunting at the moment:
Tony works in computers, so the boom in the Irish market at present bodes well for his job-hunting chances.
Limerick-born Marian studied law at UCD and went on to get an accountancy qualification before joining the emigration trail to London in the mid-80s.
The new generation of Irish authors have hit the British publishing scene with a bang, and their work is being snapped up by publishers looking for something new and sexy. Let's face it, Irish is sexy in Nineties England. If you're a comedian, writer or actor - being Irish is an asset. And Marian is not the only twenty/thirtysomething Irish author to have snapped up a lucrative publishing deal across the water; others include Antonia Logue, Lara Harte and Anne Haverty.
Apart from working on her third novel - to be called Rachel's Holiday - Marian is currently busying herself with pre-publicity work. Lucy Sullivan is Getting Married will shortly be published in England. The initial print run will be 200,000 copies and there will be plenty of book signings and publicity tours tied in with it. Marian doesn't quite know what to expect:
The tag of the next Maeve Bincy is one she's been given and shies away from.
Marian's biggest fear when her agent was auctioning her books to an English publishing house was that there would be some attempts made to anglicise her writing.
The prospect of churning out books year in, year out isn't one which Marian finds particularly daunting:
"It's brilliant, I find I've got so much more energy for my writing now I don't have to spend all day in the office, and I'm getting so much more done."
"I think we'll rent at first and buy sometime towards the end of the year. Tony has never lived in Ireland so it will all be very different for us both."
"I've never done any of the book signing stuff before so I don't really know what to expect from it... I suppose it will be fun."
"I'm flattered by it but I would have thought that Patricia Scanlan is far more deserving of it than me because she has become so well established. Besides, I don't think my writing is anything like Maeve Bincy's, although I admire her a great deal as an author."
"I was quite worried about that but it really hasn't happened at all. The publishers seem to like the fact that my books are written with an Irish accent. They like the freshness of my writing and are very encouraging towards me."
"I don't have millions of books planned but I do hope when I get around to writing each one that it will come to me. I write very unscientifically; I have a fairly random approach where I don't plot much out beforehand - once I start writing, it usually just starts to flow. I'm just hoping that that approach continues to work for me. I love writing. It's the most pleasurable thing I've ever done."