Marian Keyes into success
Everything Marian Keyes did in her most formative years was dominated by the bottle. Now a book is the pivot of her life - her own bestseller.
After succumbing to the seductive power of alcohol for so long, a destructive addition which led to a suicide attempt, Marian has emerged as a leading author, wooed by publishers, booksellers, and an American film company.
The speed of her turnabout is an inspiration to anyone who has felt the lure of alcohol or teetered on the brink of addiction.
When Marian, 32, emerged "dry" from six gruelling weeks at a treatment centre, she needed a distraction from the unfamiliar sensation of sobriety and mailed some short stories, written during snatched sober moments, to a publisher.
She mentioned she had also written 15,000 words of a novel - a throwaway fib meant only to make her "look like a serious person".
The publisher replied by return - wanting to see the draft.
Marian shrieked, her fingers flashed over the keyboard and soon she had churned out 12,000 words simply to hide her embarrassment, grateful for a distraction when the dark desire for drink had threatened to overwhelm her.
Watermelon, her quirky romantic novel, has since outranked Maeve Binchy, Danielle Steel, Barbara Taylor Bradford, Tom Clancy and Patricia Cornwall in the Irish Bestseller list.
The original print-run was 2,000 copies - to date it has sold 30,000. In Britain, top outlet WH Smith was so impressed that Watermelon was selected for its high profile Fresh Talent Promotion. Fifty thousand copies will be published there this week and an American film company has just asked for an option on the rights.
The novel - a wedge of a book and ideal for the airport market - is lightly autobiographical, as you might expect, if only for the fact that the central character is very much a survivor.
Marian was just 14 when she first tasted alcohol at a school dance. This wasn't a shot taken in pleasure: it was a quarter bottle of vodka swallowed for the rebellious thrill of illicit drunkenness.
Her girlfriends, all several years older, had egged her on and how they cheered. The music of the weekly disco at the boy's school throbbed in the background. A flushed Marian felt she had reached the heady heights of sophistication.
The effect of that first swig was a sense of liberation, the seduction of shedding deep-seated inhibitions.
"The alcohol make me feel euphoric, it freed me from the shackles of being me."
She has always been a secretive child, and hid what soon became a weekly drunken binge from her parents.
"They were very proper parents and would have been horrified if they had known; they would have moralised and they would have been right," she says, with the clarity of sober hindsight. But she didn't view her indulgence as a wicked thing:
"I felt like I had been given a wonderful gift."
If was soon clear that Marian couldn't handle her alcohol intake:"I had discovered a need in me which always seemed to demand constant satisfaction."
At 18, she went to UCD to study law. It formed an incidental backdrop to the round of parties and drinking. She drank rather than studied, as much and as often as she could afford. She graduated, intending to enrol for solicitor's exams. But the pattern of her life was by now hopelessly under the influence.
Marian moved to London and a decrepit squat on the 21st floor of a tower block. Her drinking had reached similar lows.
"I would wake up in the mornings hating myself for letting myself down, with my mind filled with clear pictures of my life, tinged with melancholy. Yet I felt powerless to change things."
Her dependency dragged on her self-esteem. She shuttled between the wrong kind of men, the sort who only served to reinforce the negative impressions she had of herself.
"I was always hoping someone would fix me, because I couldn't fix myself from within, but this was just building destruction."
Her 30th birthday loomed large. For years she had been crossing over to the island of alcoholism; it was then she discovered there was no bridge back. She still felt she could stop any time she chose; she felt that smart. Such denials were also part of the classic pattern into which her drinking had fallen.
She would awake, shaking, sweating and consumed by the thought of the bottles of white wine chilling in the fridge - the only method she knew of dulling depression. Even though she knew her life was out of control, she couldn't accept she was an alcoholic."That would have meant accepting that I had to stop drinking and that was out of the question."
On the morning of Monday, January 17th 1994, Marian came round alone in bed, after a weekend spent comatose. Empty wine bottles were stuffed under her bed, in her laundry bag and inside her wardrobe.
Her mind was filled with "a screaming horror of distorted terrifying blackness."
She scooped up all the tablets she could find and systematically swallowed 19 anti-depressants, a sheet of sleeping tablets, a handful of paracetamol and a swill of vodka.
"I couldn't stop drinking, I couldn't bear to be drinking. It was a hell and I was trapped in it," she explains."Yet part of my brain was saying 'I can't believe you are doing this'."
She managed to phone a friend and drawled something to her. When the ambulance arrived, Marian was sliding into a dazed trance.
"I was glad to be rescued," she says firmly. " I just wanted to give responsibility for myself to someone else."
Her father Ted, a retired accountant booked her into a treatment centre in Dublin.
"Early on I realised I could be saved and, in the calm environment, I began to accept I was an alcoholic. It transformed my life."
When she left, her life began again from scratch.
"I learnt to talk to people socially without being paralysed by fear and to deal with rows without needing to be numbed."
She returned to London and began to spend an increasing amount of time with a friend, Tony, who gave her the open acceptance she needed. They were engaged within three months, married on December 29th last year and now live in flat in North London.
"In the way he loves me, he helps me, but I can't believe I've found someone who is right for me. I thought I would never have an equal, loving relationship with a man that I like, respect, fancy and love."