"I couldn't stop drinking so I tried to kill myself"
The old Marian Keyes would start the day with a drink. Breakfast in her London flat was a glass of wine before she went to work. She usually managed to get through work but in the evenings she would try to drink herself into oblivion.
This, she says, is a difficult thing to do. The more you drink, the more the rest of the world is obscured and the more you seem to be left alone with only yourself and this is generally what you are drinking to get away from. Sometimes Marian didn't make it into work the next day, she just drank and drank and daydreamed...
Marian woke up groggy one morning, took all the tablets she could find, washed them down with one large final drink and hoped it would be the end.
It wasn't. A concerned friend found her, rushed her to hospital and then packed her on the plane home to Ireland to her family.
Petite, dark-haired and looking more like a student than a fast-selling writer, Marian Keyes, author of Watermelon, (Poolbeg Press £4.99) sits upright and attentive, bright eyes sparkling in the comfortable surroundings of Dublin's Gresham Hotel.
The spell in the Rutland Centre where Marian was treated on her return to Dublin in January 1994 had a very positive effect.
Marian is 100 per cent sure that she was destined to be a writer and she feels that it was necessary for her to go through the hardships she endured to become so.
The ploy worked in that Kate Cruise O'Brien of Poolbeg Press asked to see the emerging novel - so she had to write it, fast! The end result was 150,000 words.
Now the 32-year-old author writes from eight until ten in the morning, then goes to work as an accountant.
Watermelon is about a young woman whose husband leaves her for another woman on the day that their daughter is born. It is a contemporary tale, quirky and hilariously funny.
Marian herself has just married. Her partner, Tony, tall, slightly-greying and handsome, relaxes in a chair opposite her.
he smiles amiably.
"I was dying to get married. It's great. I always thought I'd be left on the shelf and just the idea of walking up the aisle in a very expensive, beautiful white dress just totally appeals to the little girl in me!" she says.
"My life was a disaster! I was so unhappy. I drank a lot. I didn't do anything other than drink. I had no life. I felt I was the centre of the universe but worth nothing."
"Everyone was saying, 'Look Marian, you've got to do something about this,' but that made no difference. I just went on drinking but more secretly. It wasn't until January 1994 that I thought, 'I'm never going to be able to stop,' so I tried to kill myself."
"I don't really know how long I was an alcoholic. I became one gradually. I always had a problem with it. But it is so hard to pinpoint when the line was crossed."
"It changed my life completely. I got to the Rutland and initially I thought, 'I shouldn't be here,' because I wasn't like the other people there, they were all people with problems and I was fine! Luckily I saw sense and realised I was in exactly the right place. But is was a short sharp shock kind of thing, you know?"
"Initially I found it very hard when I got out and went back to London. But I have so many interests now. I have no problem going to pubs. I don't spend all my life in them, but if there's an event or if I'm meeting someone there, that's fine. I do find it difficult very late at night when people pass a certain stage and start talking nonsense. I just think 'Right, I'll go home now.' And if one more person tells me they love me and I'm their best friend I'll clock them!"
"I don't regret my past," she says.
"My past is my most precious possession and I must never forget it."
"I began writing short stories just two years ago out of the blue," says Marian in her slightly girlish voice with an indefinable country accent.
"I read a prize-winning story in a magazine and some voice in my head said, 'You could write one easily as good as that.' It was a quirky little story that sparked something in me and I sat down and wrote a quirky story myself - about an angel. That was December 1993, but then the following May, after I had spent some time in the Rutland treatment centre, I decided to do something serious about my writing."
"The thought of writing a novel, 60,000 words, horrified me! I sent off my short stories to publishing companies and in my covering letter I said that I had written 15,000 words of a novel. I hadn't but I was hoping that I'd be taken more seriously as a writer if I said I had!"
"It developed a life of its own, the characters led me. I never knew what was going to happen."
("I don't love it, it's a job...") and edits her work in the evening.
"He's easy going", she says. "I'm the feisty one - or you could say bossy!"