Sarky, sassy, bestselling, Marian Keyes, novelist
With Marian Keyes, it's difficult to know where life begins and fiction ends; she is the stuff of her books, her books are the stuff of her experience. Less than four years ago she was having her stomach pumped after a botched, half-hearted suicide attempt, a miserable solitary drinker who had alienated herself from a lively group of Irish twentysomethings living in West London.
Today she is a publishing phenomenon. In less that four years she has penned three best-sellers: Watermelon, Lucy Sullivan is Getting Married and Rachel's Holiday. It's what critics sniffily refer to as popular fiction but it's also perceptive, quick and very funny.
She is also super-efficient and, it seems, fully in control of her career. One phone call to her publishes and 20 minutes later Keyes herself is on the phone. Did I receive my copy of Rachel's Holiday? No? No matter, she'll organise another one pronto. I offer to find one: not at all, she'll see to it.
An hour later the book is sitting on my desk, and she is on the other end of the phone again. Did I receive it? When would I like to meet? Will I have had lunch? Never mind, she'll get some buns in. Just in case.
For a brief delusional moment I get the impression that I am the one in demand here, not the other way around. But it is a brief moment indeed, because Marian Keyes has become rather fantastically successful and wealthy.
Rachel's Holiday has occupied the Irish number one slot for four weeks now and shows little sign of shifting. Her second novel, Lucy Sullivan is Getting Married, was even more successful than her debut, Watermelon, the top seller in Ireland for 10 weeks and third in the British bestselling lists, with sales of more than 200,000 copies in Ireland and Britain.
She is third biggest-selling Irish writer, snapping at the heels of Maeve Binchy and Roddy Doyle.
Shortly after Watermelon was published she negotiated a £425,000 three-book contract. She has a devoted husband of two years, who also happens to be six foot and damned attractive, and has just bought a large house in Dun Laoghaire. Honestly, it's enough to make you reach for the bottle yourself.
The interview takes place at her Stephen's Green flat. Less than a stone's throw from a dozen watering holds, it's a curious choice for someone who has vowed never to touch the dreaded stuff again. It is, by city standards, hugely spacious, although as Keyes points out it is decorated in hotel fashion - everything matching the rose-pink walls and grey furniture units. Tony, her husband, busies himself making coffee and buttering scones before discreetly making his exit.
She looks much younger than her 34 years, and her make-up free skin shows none of the telltale signs of heavy drinking. Green, heavily fringed eyes fairly leap out of a tiny porcelain face framed by a shocking abundance of heavy black hair. Part postcard Irish colleen, part wood nymph, a breathy little-girl voice adds to the illusion of childlike vulnerability.
The wispy voice still carries a strong country accent which neither a decade in London nor 15 years in Dublin have erased, an observation which pleases her.
"Oh, thank God," she says "I can't stand people who come home after a week in London and start ordering 'alf a laragh, mate'."
But she is tougher than she looks and a lot more grown-up. She admits to a personality which when combined with drink was manipulative, self-obsessed and downright unpleasant. As the conversation progresses it becomes clear that, despite the routine disclaimer at the beginning of the book about 'all characters being fictitious' etc, she and Rachel Walsh, the book's narrator and anti-heroine have plenty in common.
Rachel's Holiday is a 700-page account of addiction and rehabilitation. At times it is laugh-out-loud funny, peppered with the sarky, sassy and occasionally very black humour of a bright young Irish woman who is whooping it up in New York one day, and locked up in a Wicklow rehabilitation centre the next. Rachel's poison is cocaine, although she is a dab hand at downing booze and any other narcotics she can lay her hands on.
If it all sounds a bit Oprah, it's not. It was, Keyes says, incredibly difficult to write.
Although amusing, her anti-heroine is a rather selfish, unrepentant little cow, I venture.
"Yeah, that was me," she replies.
Was her drinking really that bad or has it been trumped up to boost sales? We were in the same faculty in college and the same year; I knew Keyes slightly then - she always struck me as friendly but rather anxious, not some gin-swilling lush. Certainly she didn't figure prominently among the legions of Belfield barflies and carousers.
Her college years were, she says, her happiest; a close circle of friends combined with a lack of legal ambition meant this self-confessed pathological worrier had little to fret about other than scraping through exams.
Her drinking in those days was constrained by lack of cash. True enough, cadging drinks from other students is a notoriously difficult pastime. But when she moved to London after graduating a combination of money and freedom sent her into overdrive.
She was one of the middle-class Irish, not the emigrants of Shane MacGowan lore. Not for her or her friends the clubs and pubs of Holloway Road or Hell's kitchen - strictly Greenwich Village or Islington, Soho or SoHo.
There is little of the evangelist about her - and although she does lapse into therapy-speak occasionally, she had none of the zeal of the convert. But she has got the former addict's compulsion to confess, to tell all about how awful her previous existence was.
Somewhere along the way, years of partying and social drinking subtly metamorphosed into a downward spiral of drink and anti-depressants, a diminishing circle of friends and a career and self-esteem well and truly down the pan.
This realisation quickly led to alienation.
And it was subtle.
Although her tolerance got less she still managed a couple of bottles of wine a night on top of daytime drinking. Isolation led to depression and soon anti-depressants had entered the fray.
So she took a mixture of paracetamol and sleeping tablets.
Predictably, it was her parents who received the poisoned chalice. An unrepentant Keyes breezed into a Dublin rehabilitation centre for six weeks and kicked the drinking and, eventually, denial.
After she emerged things weren't easy. With sobriety came guilt and an 'excruciating' growing-up process. She felt compelled to go back to London to make her peace with her friends there, and to return to her job as an accounts clerk.
She also re-acquainted herself with the man who was to become her husband. Sobriety gave her long periods of time to fill, so in late 1993 she started reading. And writing.
Although the credit for inventing the thirtysomething singleton has gone to Helen Fielding, author of Bridget Jones' Diary, Keyes' Watermelon was probably the first novel to explore the type of woman the media has become obsessed with. And indeed the book-buying public.
In the past year Keyes, Fielding, Arabella Weir, Jane Green, Laura Ziogman, Jane Owen and Freya North have all delivered thirtysomething angst-ridden tomes.
You can tell by the titles: Does my Bum Look Big in This? Straight Talking? Camden Girls, Out of my Head. All scribble furiously about their cellulite, drinking problems, inability to kick the fags, good mates and crap boyfriends. Throw in a set of cringe-inducing parents and a selection of siblings from hell and there you have it - a million pound recipe for success.
These women have effortlessly usurped the doyennes of popular fiction - from Joanna Trollope to Jilly Cooper - because the world they inhibit is not populated by tall, dark and handsome men, perfect women and exotic locations. They live in cities, the men are (usually) saddo creeps, the women (usually) over-weight, single and neurotic. It's a curious mixture of post-feminism and hedonism and it has caught on like wildfire.
The situations single thirty-somethings find themselves in are now referred to as 'very Bridget Jones.'
Keyes agrees that her writing is in the right place at the right time. Being Irish abroad has, as she points out in the opening chapter of her book, no longer just a certain cachet; it's positively groovy.
Aha. But Marian Keyes may be cheating a bit. She is not in fact a thirtysomething, boozy single woman with the sexual habits of an alley cat. She is happily married, teetotal and wants children.
But she still has the mental scars to prove her earlier existence. Keyes neither sensationalises nor downplays her drinking. It was simply a part of her life which has inspired all her writing to date. She is still happy to go to pubs with friends.
Tony, her husband, is an avid fan of the black stuff; she describes him as 'an Irishman trapped in an Englishman's body.'
Although she is hugely successful, her writing to date ploughs a single furrow - that influenced by her former lifestyle and rehabilitation. So where next for Keyes? And what will become of the legions of thirtysomething single women of her novels?
Will the next decade spawn a rash of novels about emotionally stunted fortysomething single women with drink problems? Where will they go when the party ends and the pool of female emotional support has dried up?
For a moment, the effervescent Keyes is silenced.
Of course, not all of them will become alcoholics, but the prospect of remaining single by choice is not one she has contemplated.
She is working on her fourth novel - a tale of two women from Clare and their homosexual friend. For the first time she will be writing about "other people's lives," as she puts it.
She has done well writing about her own. But for this amusing perceptive and gutsy writer, it's time to move onwards and upwards. Again.
"I knew this one might be controversial. It's heavier, people are still afraid of addiction. I was kind of going into uncharted waters. I knew I could lose readers with this book, but I had to write it. I didn't care. But it was so painful, rehashing certain aspects that I'd rather forget."
"I was very locked into self-obsession and was very immature. My emotional development stopped when I started using alcohol. Like Rachel when I was going into the bin I was as blithely self-obsessed as I had always been and it took a while to unlearn it. My denial was enormous."
"My drinking had always been a bit of a problem but by my late 20's it was wildly, wildly out of control," she starts.
" I always wanted more than everyone else. I always drank faster and I was always going for that sensation of oblivion."
"I knew it but I didn't want to see it. So I was still in London in my late 20's, while everyone I had drunk and partied with started growing up, drinking less, buying flats. And it freaked the living be-jazus out of me."
"Because I was the odd one out I thought they had become boring old feckers. But then friends started going on at me to drink less so I started drinking on my own and seeing less of them, because I wanted to protect my drinking above all else."
"I started drinking in the day because I'd be feeling wretched and hungover, and then at weekends I started drinking in the morning and continuing all day and night. People became disgusted with me, but I pushed them away as well because only in complete isolation could I drink the way I really wanted to drink."
"One Monday morning almost four years ago I woke up and I was in the absolute screaming horrors. I was 30 by then and my depression had got worse and worse. I had kind of tried to stop but I couldn't. I had been having suicidal thoughts because I felt that there was no point to life without drinking."
"Something did break that day, but I rang someone after I had done it. By this terrible action of attempting to kill myself I handed responsibility for my life over to someone else."
"I started off there sneering at these alcos, these marginalized people, because I was only there to please my parents. It was fairly stomach-churning to find out I was one of them."
"Not everyone forgave me. I had pushed some people too far, but I did make up with a lot of people."
"I felt there was nothing out there for me to read, there was nothing being published that I could identify with. There were no women that I felt I knew in popular fiction. I was tired of badly-written, unintelligent books that insulted the reader. So I thought, 'I'm going to write mass market but it's not going to be stupid and it's going to be about real people who lead messy lives and make mistakes. Not some Aga saga shite.' With Watermelon it was like a key had been unlocked in my head. It was like the book had already been written. The stuff was pouring out and I had no idea where it was coming from."
"I enjoy being with friends in a pub when they're in good form and merry. I laugh on the occasional night when Tony comes home buckled and collapses snoring into bed beside me. Mind you, I wouldn't if he did it every night," she adds darkly.
"Do you know, I hadn't really though about that. What the future would hold if..."