Hooked on characters
The pink paperback with a pair of green mules on the front called Rachel's Holiday did not look promising.
It was top of the bestseller list in Ireland and after two weeks of publication in England, knocked Mary Wesley out of third place on the Sunday Times paperback fiction list.
Never having read a book by Marian Keyes before, I settled down to skim-read what I presumed was February's answer to a bit of beach-time trash.
As it turned out I was laughing by the first paragraph and, if it isn't an inappropriate word to use of a novel about drug addiction, hooked by the end of the first page.
Rachel's Holiday is one of the funniest books I have read about one of the grimmest subjects. Think of Trainspotting going The Full Monty and you get the idea.
It is a character-driven novel about 27-year-old Rachel's two-month stay in a rehabilitation clinic, surrounded by plump, middle-aged men in brown jumpers, and includes some teeth-clenchingly authentic sex scenes.
I oscillated between tears of laughter and tears of recognition as I read the 626 pages - twice.
Each character was vivid. Every sentence was right. There was not a lazy word from cover to cover.
So who is this hilarious and brilliantly perceptive, full-time novelist of 18 months, who has shot to best-sellerdom, with three books under her belt?
Marian Keyes, walks through the Hyatt Hotel in Birmingham, looking as Irish as a pint of Guinness and as serene as its frothy head.
She has classic Celtic appearance, beautiful small, pixie features, pale skin, clear blue eyes and long, raven-black hair. Aged 34, she was born in Ireland and lives in County Dublin and speaks in the musical lilt without which her looks would be incomplete.
Surprisingly, for one who has written such as entertaining novel, her conversation is not peppered with hilarious anecdotes. She speaks gently and sincerely, combining openness with a knowing containment and a wisdom beyond her years.
"I've realised," she says quietly, "That I'm as good as anyone else," which might explain the relaxed and flexible way she converses.
The answer is that Marian is an alcoholic and has herself spent six weeks in a rehabilitation clinic coming to terms with her own addiction.
She says: "I am an alcoholic", in the present tense because after years of abuse her body is now so sensitised to alcohol that were she to have just one drink it would create a chemical need for more. She will be an alcoholic for the rest of her life.
"Because you had to have higher grades to study law and I got the grades," said Marian.
But had she not got it in her to say:
"I hadn't a clue," said Marian. "I should never have gone to college. I was a child. I was too immature."
"There's no hard reason or trauma of anything in my past that can explain the gaping whole in my psyche," said Marian
So Marian went to London, got her degree in law and got a job as a waitress.
Then she went to work in an accounts office and gradually became an alcoholic.
For a long time her drinking was social, though she subconsciously surrounded herself with heavy drinkers so her own drinking would not stand out.
Slowly her drinking spread from being something she did at the weekends to something she did every night, with the terrible depression of a hangover in the mornings, which only turned her to the bottle even more.
On Monday, January 17, 1994, she decided to take her own life, but just about managed to ring a friend and ended up in a rehabilitation clinic two days later.
The best way to understand what it was like inside is to read the novel.
The biggest theme in the novel, and in the recovery of addicts, is denial and how, with the help of the therapists and each other, they learn to recognise:
The community that develops between the addicts, each at different stages of recovery, is an integral part of the therapy.
When Marian left the rehabilitation clinic six weeks later she had the self-confidence to send some short stories off to publishers.
When Watermelon came out in the UK in February 1996 it was picked for the W H Smith Fresh Talent Promotion and got as far as No 11 in the Sunday Times list.
In September, after Marian had written Lucy Sullivan is Getting Married, her Irish publishers liberated the UK rights and eight UK publishers were bidding for them.
Lucy Sullivan came out in February 1997 and was in the Sunday Times top ten for two months. Rachel's Holiday went straight in at number four.
Her mother used to light a candle for her while she was in the clinic, and now she lights a candle for her every Saturday in gratitude.
Last year Marian moved back to Ireland with her husband Tony, whom she married two years ago and is all set to make babies as soon as she has finished her next book. The plan is for Tony, a freelance editor, to do most of the childcare while Marian writes.
Though Marian never imagined that she would become a best-selling novelist, she can see now that it does suit her.
She says her life now is mellow.
It takes Marian about 15 months to write a novel. Unlike many novelists, she does not plan them. She starts with her characters and proceeds by instinct.
All in all, Marian's life seems pretty blissful now and who can begrudge anyone a bit of bliss when they've been through what Marian has been through?
Her husband Tony comes downstairs to say hello. Like Marian, he works from home.
"I had a very ordinary, middle-class upbringing," said Marian. "Apart from the feelings of screaming despair and impending doom that regularly assailed me, I was as nondescript as could be.
"When I left school I went to college to study law. I was always good at English at school, but I completely denied that part of me."
"Never mind the grades, I want to do what I want to do?"
"I think it was something I was born with.
"I think some people are more fragile than others, more susceptible to being damaged. I've got two brothers and two sisters and they're each perfectly fine.
"There are people who are born with poor eyesight, and people who are more susceptible to damage. I have always been melancholy and I was always worried. While some people are just sort of sunny, I was this little ball of terror."
"It was one of the myriad manifestations of my low self-esteem, had I but known it," she said. "At the time I just thought I was being a rebel."
"It's not a text book on recovery, but it's an accurate account of one form of therapy," says Marian.
"I am an alcoholic," or "I am a drug addict."
"It was very interesting, living with people that you would not normally be living with. I learned to have compassion for the people that were there. It was important for me to feel sympathy for them as it was for them to feel sympathy for me.
"In the book you see Rachel being completely self-obsessed when she goes in and moves on towards compassion."
"So that they'd take me seriously, I enclosed a letter saying I'd written a novel, which I hadn't," she said.
"They wrote back and said, send the novel, and for once in my self-destructive life I didn't shoot myself in the foot.
"I knocked off our chapters of my first novel Watermelon in a week, and was offered a three-book contract on the strength of it."
"I'd done so much work on myself during my six weeks in the rehabilitation clinic with the group therapy. I had changed. My mood had swung from pessimism and self-destruction to being able to see the possibilities.
"The offer came at a time when I was open to possibilities. I had learned that I wasn't the evil person I always thought I was. The bag of self-hatred had become too heavy and I was able to throw it off.
"I think timing is significant. Things came together at that time in a way they couldn't have done before."
"It works for me," she says carefully.
"I certainly changed. It suits me because I'm very analytical and I like explanation. It's helped me to understand my melancholy. It doesn't make it go away but an awful lot of the time I can detach myself from it.
"Some people say therapy doesn't work for them. That's fine. That's their prerogative."
"My agent suggested it might be time I gave up the day job," said Marian.
"People say they must be proud of me, but when they say that, my parents say, 'we were always proud of her'," a loving family, as she says.
"I always felt that I had a far deeper vision of things," she says.
"I was always very perceptive. I saw things that other people didn't."
"I used to feel excluded," she said. "I used to feel on the outside and I think that is a wonderful asset as a writer because you have to have a sense of distance to get a perspective.
"In a bizarre way through my writing I now feel included. It comes from a position of involvement, it's like building a bridge between me and the world."
"I used to think writers had very glamorous lives," she says. "It is for two weeks in a year when I'm promoting a book.
"The rest of the time, I write very early in the morning. Then I stop at about 3 pm.
"Then I go out in the afternoon, go shopping or go and see someone.
"Then I come home. In the evening sometimes I go to friends or they come round to my house, and that's it. It's not night clubs. It's a life of chatting. It's mellow. I'm very contented."
"I've always been very conscientious," she says.
"I used to feel offended when I read books that insulted my intelligence, when they had a character saying something and I thought: 'He wouldn't say it like that.'
"I thought that if ever I did write a book I'd do it properly. I won't take my readers to be eejits. It's a question of integrity for me."
"It was a very healing thing," she said.
"I was to a certain extent healed before but writing helped because it helped me to see things from a different perspective.
"It helps to clarify things, brings things into focus. It was a growing experience for me."
"We work in different rooms and then have lunch together," she says. "It's lovely."