U
Budding writers are always given one piece of advice by wiser more experienced authors: write about what you know. In Rachel's Holiday, the third and strongest novel to date from Marian Keyes, the author very much takes this advice to heart.
Marian's story of her decline into and subsequent victory over alcoholism is well documented. For Rachel Walsh (the heroine of her latest book) the addiction is to drugs - what Rachel insists are recreational drugs. And of course, she's in big-time denial. We first meet her when she's just had her stomach pumped out in New York and - much to her chagrin - her sensible sister Margaret (nick-named Polyanna by Rachel's less than angelic and immensely likeable little sis Helen) and hubbie, Paul (who she charmingly describes as being as tight as a nun's g..., well, you know) arrive to ship her home to the bosom of her parents who have booked her into Cloisters, Ireland's answer to the Betty Ford Clinic.
The sojourn in Cloisters is hysterical with the John-Cleese double, Dr. Billings and group therapy sessions with the other inmates - who vary from a weasely man who looks like he steals women's underwear from washing lines to the rabid alcoholic priest who made his housekeeper pregnant. Keyes is at her funniest in Rachel's Holiday. Sometimes it's a black, self-deprecating kind of humour and often it's just of the good old-fashioned, laugh-out-loud variety. Luke Costello, the main love interest is a man with whom you instantly fall in love. We first meet him when he's hanging out in a trendy New York Irish bar with his mates, all of whom are Irish and all of whom sport the highly unfashionable long-hair-and-denims look. What draws Rachel and her flatmate Brigit's attention to them is the fact that they share one pair of leather pants between all of them - a kind of timeshare trouser arrangement - which cracks the girls completely. There is a new depth to Marian Keyes's writing in Rachel's Holiday that makes it an enormously enjoyable read and plants her firmly and deservedly in the position of Ireland's third bestselling author to date, hot on the heels of Maeve Binchy and Roddy Doyle.