Glass ceiling blues
Marian Keyes is not long back from the American publicity tour for her collection of journalism, Under the Duvet. During the tour she spent a day giving interviews in a recreation of John Lennon and Yoko Ono's infamous bed-in: "I had to sit there like an eejit in my nightie, but it was great fun."
Now she is doing her first interview for her new novel, The Other Side of the Story (Michael Joseph, 1st July, h/b, £16.99, 0718144678), a book described by her editor Louise Moore as "yet another breakthrough for Marian", more complex and ambitious than her previous work. And in another 10 days she is off to do a book tour in Australia and New Zealand. Such is the busy life of an author at the top of her field.
Yet it wasn't always like this for Keyes, who still remembers her early days as a lowly début novelist, published by Irish publisher Poolbeg, and miserable experiences of traipsing around London booksellers discovering how few were prepared to stock her book. Both the highs and the lows of the author's life feature in The Other Side of the Story, which features two young female novelists, Lily and Gemma, with vastly different experiences of the publishing world, and an ambitious and talented London agent, Jojo, who takes on them both.
Book trade insiders will find plenty to amuse them in Keyes' neatly drawn portrait of the industry. Jojo conducts nerve-wracking book auctions with audacity, handles tantrums from authors who have swiftly changed from grateful clients to demanding divas, and begins a relationship with her boss one night after a long and boozy book awards ceremony. Not an entirely unfamiliar scenario.
Chic and petite in a lime-green cardigan, Keyes is effusively enthusiastic about the book business. "I love publishing, I think if I wasn't a writer I'd love to be an editor or work in marketing. Despite the fact that most publishing houses are owned by big global enterprises, I think there is still idealism in publishing and I'm fascinated by the way that it is such an inexact science--plucky little books that got no hype and had a tiny print run can still fight their way to the top the way Alexander McCall Smith's books have done."
She chose publishing as a background setting to the theme she wanted to write about, she says--that of the glass ceiling for women in the workplace. "I have two friends who are lawyers, who have experienced the glass ceiling in the past two years. I was uncomfortable writing about the law, because I thought it would be too close to home for them, and then I was searching around and thought, 'Why not publishing?' It's an industry that's very accommodating of women, and I didn't want it to be a hectoring book, I wanted to give Jojo a fighting chance."
Keyes talked to agents in the UK and in New York to get inside info on the agent's lot for the character of Jojo. "I would hate to be an agent! Oh my God, my nerves couldn't stand it. Waiting for the phone to ring during an auction, it would be like waiting for a boyfriend to ring, I'd crack. And I'm too honest. If I thought a book wasn't so great, I'd have to say it, you know. I couldn't do that whole bravado, puffed-up, 'This is fabulous' stuff, I'd be mortified. You have to have nerves of steel and a brass neck."
Her two young début authors Lily and Gemma--linked, incidentally, by the fact that one has "stolen" the other's former boyfriend--have starkly different fates that bear small relation to their writing prowess.
Talented Lily has a word-of-mouth success with a heart-warming little
book, Mimi's Remedies, for which she receives a tiny advance. Gemma meanwhile
writes an indifferent novel that no publisher is interested in: but when
an editor suddenly finds an unexpected hole in her publishing schedule,
she plugs it with Gemma's book and pays a wildly inflated price for it.
"The way Gemma gets published is sheer dumb luck," says Keyes. "At
first no one will touch her book with a bargepole, then suddenly it's
'Right then, you're in and here's sixty grand.' I've been published for about
nine years now and I know a lot of people who have been published and some of
their stories would break your heart--the tiny print runs, being so humiliated
when your book isn't in the shops.
"And I know somebody whose first book was bought for huge amounts of money, and it pretty much bombed. It was horrible watching the retreat of the publishers as they realised they'd bought a pig in a poke, and their ways of damage limitation. The pain of that, for the author's family and friends. It's just a very interesting lesson, that there are no guarantees."
The gender politics in the novel are a development for Keyes. She says that in the past 18 months, "my feminist side has awakened for the first time. It's weird. I've grown up quite happy to call myself a post-feminist, but thinking that feminism was a dirty word. Men told me that if you were a feminist you were a hairy-legged harridan who couldn't get a boyfriend. But the experiences of my lawyer friends really opened my eyes. My generation was told the world was ours, that the feminists had done it all for us and we'd be fine--we thought we were in control of our destiny, but we weren't."
This does not mean she is renouncing "chick lit", though. "I know a lot of scorn has been poured on the genre and that not everybody writing in it is good, but I feel it has been a very valuable movement because it has helped make sense for this generation of women about the confusing world we live in. Chick lit is meant to be a pejorative term, but it's just another male tool of oppression, it's 'Oh, you silly little women with your silly little books.' If you don't accept it as pejorative--and I don't--it's not pejorative."