Keyes to success
Marian Keyes looks like a refugee from a Bord Failte ad. With eyes the colour of Connemara marble, long dark hair and a sprinkling of freckles she could be straight off a Taiwan assembly line for Irish "callins."
But this is no comely maiden, although Keyes has faced more than a few personal cross-roads.
Her low-key manner makes it difficult to imagine this soft-voiced woman as the author of the extremely funny and occasionally raunchy Rachel's Holiday - that is until you're exposed to a flash of her wicked humour.
For example, on working in a London accounts office for 11 years, she says: "I thought I would stay in that accounts office and end up some old bag lady who small boys threw stones at and living in a bedsit with 40 cats and a one bar heater."
Eat your heart out Bridget Jones and the cats can rest easy because following the success of Watermelon and Lucy Sullivan is Getting Married Keyes is now a fully-fledged writer.
She is one of the few Irish writers today chronicling tales of modern urban living and in particular the "Ryanair Generation" - those who vacated Ireland for New York and London before the Celtic Tiger issued its first "miaow".
She left Dublin for London in 1986 at the age of 22 and says: "Ireland at the time was a theocracy and in the doldrums. London in comparison, seemed full of opportunity.
She partied for all she was worth, this girl who felt unable to even talk on social occasions, her tongue tied by a belief in her own inarticulateness. Alcohol became a warm fuzzy blanket to hide behind, making you feel safe and bold at the same time.
Candles may have burned in the windows of the Aras but this was one exile determined to enjoy the lights of the big city - even as they blinded her. Friends fell away, the party was over and soon Keyes was drinking all by herself.
Like many recovering alcoholics who have undergone treatment Keyes is upfront about her addiction - to the point of being analytical about it. Her voice is calm as she details her own personal Black Monday - a morning in September 1993 when she tried to kill herself by overdosing:
She calls her suicide attempt a "shriek of desperation" rather than a genuine attempt to kill herself and, like many alcoholics, she was in love with her own tragedy, besotted by self-pity.
Keyes, like her heroine in Rachel's Holiday, was brought back to Ireland and placed in a treatment centre by her family - "The Bin" as she calls it in the novel. Both women - real and imaginary - could not believe they had a problem:
After a further three months at home, Keyes decided to go back to London - a nervewracking prospect under the circumstances:
In the months before she bottomed out, Keyes began to write:
At that stage, writing was an attempt to hang on to sanity and some semblance of identity. She had never really thought about writing before, although she had once applied for a journalism course.
She recalls: "I got as far as the interview stage. I love playing with words and I was so disappointed when I didn't get that, that I just shut down that part of me. I was devastated and my self-esteem was so low I thought if they said I wasn't good enough than I wasn't."
As she sits recalling the rejection there is a feeling of anger; not at the course organisers but at herself for believing their estimation of her abilities.
Any self-belief Marian Keyes now holds has been hard earned and it will take more than rejection to knock it.
Once sober, she sent off her short stories to Irish publishers Poolbeg telling them she was also working on a novel. They wrote back to say they couldn't publish the stories, but liked her work and asked if she could send the novel.
Lucy Sullivan is Getting Married followed and it too became a best seller. Rachel's Holiday is set to mirror its predecessors' success which have both sole 150,000 copies each in Britain and 50,000 in Ireland.
She talks with enthusiasm about the characters in the new book and you feel you're gossiping about acquaintances when she says: "Both Luke and Rachel are very dominant characters. I'm delighted with the way he turned out. He was originally only meant to play small part but I thought this guy was fabulous - good and sexy."
Our laughing has attracted the attention of fellow coffee-drinkers, although this being Ireland, it's discreet - just a few knowing smiles. There's a certain laugh women share when they're talking about sex.
Keyes rails against reviewers who dismiss women's fiction as "romantic tosh" saying: "Many of these books are perceptive and observant."
While sex is an important element in Rachel's Holiday, it does not supersede the other vital strands of the story - shrewd insights into family life,
anthropological-style descriptions of the ex-Pat New York scene and the agonising realisations of a woman whose world has collapsed.
Keyes partially attributes her own observational skills as a writer to the fact she moved around so much as a child:
At the age of 34, Keyes has decided to make her home with Tony in Dublin. He is a freelance editor and, according to his wife, describes himself as "the only person he knows who doesn't have a book in him."
London, the city that once had such allure, now seems tired compared to - in Keyes's eyes - a newly rejuvenated, open Dublin.
She says of London: "It was only when I moved into my 30's and calmed down that I felt I didn't want to be there. It's too fast and too dirty and when I'm walking along I'm not going as fast as the people behind me and they're tutting. Once I was that busy person giving out."
At the moment she is contracted to write a further five books for Poolbeg. The next one is provisionally called Last Chance Saloon and is the story of a gay man and his two women friends, all from Clare, who make their life in London.
Keyes holds the foreign rights to her books and Watermelon is due for release in the States. The author who admits to being anxiety ridden before every new book comes out, is taking its US publication in her stride, though she does concede to a certain nervousness: "If I stood in a shop and saw four people buying the book I would be ecstatic, but to be told there's thousands of copies out there, I just can't adjust to that."
Today the party girl leads a quiet life and rates being near her family, conversations and browsing in bookshops as some of her greatest pleasures.
Even now she's still casting a beady eye on her success:
"To spend your 20's in a city like London is tremendous fun, it's a very vibrant buzzy city. At the thoughts of coming home to Dublin I used to feel terribly claustrophobic, like I couldn't breathe, because Dublin felt so small-town-hicksville."
Today, as she sips her coffee, Keyes says: "My alcoholism was a gradual thing. I was ripe for it. I have a lovely family but for some reason I had crippling low self-esteem and that seems to be the case in a lot of addictions.
"I had surrounded myself in London with people who wanted to party. But as our late 20s approached they began to slow down - I went into overdrive. That's when the cracks first started to appear."
"Alcohol became a wonderful ally. For a long time it got me through situations where I felt awkward and shy. In the end it was my only friend."
"In the end it was horrible. I could no longer live this awful life because I was savagely depressed and I had annihilated my life anyway. I had made attempts to give it up but it was no good."
"Even after overdosing I still refused to believe I was an alcoholic. I thought once I went to the treatment centre then it would get people off my case because they would see how hard I had tried.
"I spent six weeks in the treatment centre and it was the best thing that ever happened to me, it was tough and it was confrontational. I needed something absolutely brutal to shatter this wall of denial."
"I didn't want to but I thought I had to because I would flinch every time I thought of London. I had a lot of loose ends. Braver and less painful in the end to apologise to people, bite the bullet and make a life."
She had promised so many times to give up drinking that even friends were wary of this newly cleaned up Marian Keyes. One of the people she renewed an acquaintance with was Tony, a friend of her flatmate. Today, on the second anniversary of their wedding, she says: "I started seeing Tony as a friend, very slowly our relationship changed and we fell in love. Although he said he had been in love with me for ages...
"He's such a good bloke, I used to choose men in the final years of my drinking who treated me with the loathing I felt I deserved. But he's kind and gentle, and naturally optimistic. It's a luxury, a joy to trust someone else."
"One day I was at home reading a short story in a magazine. It had won a prize and I thought 'I could do that'. So I sat down and wrote one in an afternoon."
Keyes laughs as she explains: "I had no novel but I thought 'sure I'll give it a lash, Jack'. Before I would have just tossed the letter in the bin and said 'that's that.'
"I wrote the first four chapters of Watermelon and the words just seemed to pour out of me. The next two, obviously enough, have been slower to write."
In between giggles, she confesses: "I'm surprised at how erotic it turned out to be. In the previous two books I was coy, but the books are character driven and these are both strong, lusty characters.
"The sex scenes are a lot to do with role playing and that dominant and passive dynamic can be very erotic."
"I was born in Limerick, moved to Dublin when I was 11 and we moved around a lot to Cork, Cavan and Galway. I don't feel like I belong anywhere and in a way that's a wonderful position to be in as a writer, to feel displaced and on the outside because it gives you a different take on things."
"This is a real dream come true, it's almost embarrassing. The books are doing very well at the moment, but who knows what's going to happen? I don't want to buy into the success, I have to know who I am without shoring myself up by saying 'I'm a writer'."