‘I’m never going to find a reason why I’m an alcoholic’ – Marian Keyes

The Walsh Sisters, inspired by Marian Keyes' bestselling novels, airs on BBC One on February 21. Photo / Getty Images

It doesn’t take long for Marian Keyes to start talking about her former life as an alcoholic. Blame the BBC’s blackly funny new TV drama The Walsh Sisters, partly based on her 1998 novel, Rachel’s Holiday, about a boozy twentysomething Irish woman forced into rehab by her family, and whose development process she has been eagerly watching from the sidelines.

“I’ve told the story of how I got sober before,” she tells me in her agent’s spanking clean offices in central London. “But to see it acted out on screen, to see a young woman lying unconscious on the floor: that’s been really shocking. To know that that might have been me.”

The Walsh Sisters, co-adapted by Stefanie Preissner, creator of the Irish comedy drama Can’t Cope, Won’t Cope, sucks you into the horror of addiction by stealth. Starring newcomer Caroline Menton as the youngest of the five Walsh sisters (Keyes, who grew up in Cork, is also one of five), it purposefully does not explain why this wilful, charismatic hedonist should binge drink and pill-pop so repeatedly and excessively that she becomes a regular fixture at the local A&E department.

Menton is wonderful, allowing her vivacious features to slowly take on the signature bruised, concave look of the addict as Rachel’s variously adoring and exasperated siblings march her off to a rehab centre – where the first thing she does is conceal a stash of pills behind a bathroom mirror.

“The banality for Rachel is that nothing is unearthed in the process of therapy that will explain it all away,” Keyes says in her soft, birdlike voice. “And that has been my experience, too. I’m never going to come up with a reason why I’m an alcoholic. And even if I did, it wouldn’t change anything. All I can say is that, God almighty, nobody chooses addiction. And it’s impossible to understand if you haven’t gone through it yourself.”

There’s no sign today of that trauma in the 62-year-old Keyes, who became sober three decades ago at the age of 30. Her gleaming skin is as pale and smooth as milk; her black hair is thick and lustrous. Although she is quick to point out that both have been achieved with a bit of help. “I dye my roots,” she says cheerfully. “And I use Botox. I would rather be open about it, because the least I can do for other women is to say that this” – and she points to her taut, clean cheek – “is not from night cream. It is not from double-cleansing. This is from injections in me face.”

The Walsh Sisters: Rachel (Caroline Menton), Claire (Danielle Galligan), Maggie (Stefanie Preissner), Helen (Máiréad Tyers) and Anna (Louisa Harland). Photo / BBC

It’s precisely because of this sort of easy candour that people love Marian Keyes. And boy, do they love her. Since her debut, Watermelon, was published in 1995, she has sold more than 35 million books, each combining her knack for parsing the less comfortable truths about ordinary lives with the same warming, effervescent humour that emanates from her in person.

Two of her books, Watermelon and Lucy Sullivan is Getting Married, have been adapted for TV before – although Lucy Sullivan, which aired on ITV in 1999, had a bumpy ride, both struggling to find audiences and criticised for its sexual content. More happily, an adaptation of her novel Grown Ups is currently in development with Netflix, starring Adrian Dunbar and Sinéad Cusack.

Keyes tends not to get involved with the development of her work. “Any time anything has been optioned, I’ve always taken the attitude that if you take the money, you cannot complain.”

For this version, however, knowing the enduring popularity of Rachel’s Holiday, she did let slip a word of caution to the production team before the casting of Luke, Rachel’s saintly, long-suffering boyfriend and regarded in the novel by her sisters as “a bit of a ride”. “I said to them: all I know is that there are a lot of worried women out there [about who might play him]. And so the actor has to be right.” Fortunately, Jay Duffy is lovely in the role – sweet and dashing but not so much a pushover that you wonder why Rachel is with him in the first place.

Rachel’s Holiday and its 2022 sequel Again, Rachel, in which a now sober and grown-up Rachel returns to run the same rehab centre that saved her decades previously, is one of many novels Keyes has written about the Walsh sisters. These, plus Keyes’s other work (she has written 19 novels in total), serve as a road map to the preoccupations, challenges, anxieties and hidden anguishes of modern women over the last three decades, from depression and bulimia to cancer and the challenges of juggling family and work.

Not that she ever intended to be a novelist. “Growing up, I had no vision for a future. All I wanted was to be happy, and I really thought there’s no chance of that. I studied law [at University College Dublin] and by the time I got published, I was part-qualified as an accountant. But when it came to ambition, I had nothing. It was just a blank space.”

She started writing while in the early stages of recovery, partly because she was growing sick of the late 1980s boom in airport novels featuring women in high heels stalking boardrooms and taking private jets. Newly sober and living in London, she found that none of it related to her life.

“I didn’t know what I was doing, but I knew I wanted to write about the disappointments of post-feminism,” she says. “Back then, we were told, ‘Well, you’re grand now, there’s no need for feminism. You’re equal now, you can have anything you want, you can have sex like a man, you’re paid the same, you’ll probably soon get promoted’. And yet none of those things were happening. I was living in a flat with two other women, and we were thinking, ‘Why is our life not like the way it’s meant to be?’ So I started writing about that because nobody else was, and I wanted to write about it in an accessible way, because I didn’t know any other way to tell a story.”

Inevitably, she soon became packaged as a comic-lite female writer, her novels given pink covers featuring giggly girls and bottles of Prosecco. It was the early years of chick lit and she found herself lumped alongside talented novelists such as Sophie Kinsella, who, thanks to their amusing honesty about the foibles of the female psyche and their heroines’ many comic misadventures in the bedroom, were never taken remotely seriously by the literary establishment.

“Actually, Sophie’s Shopaholic books were tapping into something really important, that relationship between self-medication and spending,” Keyes says. “But, you know, when a man writes a love story, it’s treated as remarkable. When a woman does, it’s dismissed as, ‘Oh, women and their feelings again’. Men have so much more power and money than women do, and they don’t want to give it away. So one way to undercut women is to make fun of their silly little books about relationships.”

She’s become braver in her choice of subject matter as she’s grown older, busting taboos and dragging issues historically surrounded by misplaced female shame, such as rape within marriage and menopause, out of the shadows and into the spotlight. In 2017, she caused a sensation in Ireland for featuring a storyline about abortion (abortion was only legalised in Ireland in 2019). Her current preoccupation is sex and the older woman.

“The book I’m writing at the moment is about a 60-year-old woman who has an affair. Because there is still this idea that women stop being sexual with their first baby. And that by the age of 40, it’s game over. And I’m not saying that women must have sex in their sixties. But if you feel like it, then why on earth shouldn’t they?”

She knows the fight isn’t over. She is often appalled by everyday misogyny. “I was reading the other day an article about Andrew [Mountbatten-Windsor], which talked about a girl who had allegedly been sent to him across the Atlantic by Jeffrey Epstein. But the hatred and contempt for women expressed in the comments below the line were shocking. It’s such a slap when you encounter in people that wilful denial of the facts in order to make their chosen reality more palatable.”

Throughout her life, Keyes has suffered on and off from severe depression. It was a recurring symptom of her alcoholism, and in 2009 it struck again. Keyes had been happily married to her husband, Tony Baines, for nearly 15 years, but she found herself so incapacitated that at one point she begged her mother to let her take her own life.

“It was utterly horrible. As long as I don’t drink, I know I will never be an alcoholic again. But this came from nowhere, and this scares me because I would really like for it to never come back.”

Most of the time, she keeps herself at arm’s length from the characters in her work, although Rachel Walsh is clearly based on herself. But the novel that came out of her depression, The Mystery of Mercy Close (2012), is virtually autobiographical. “Honest to God, writing that book kept me alive.”

She can’t see herself ever giving up writing. But she is also preoccupied with keeping herself in good nick. “My hands and my feet hurt. I’ve got something going on in my lower back. I’m only 62!” I suggest that she try Pilates. “Yes, I really should. Tony does Pilates. I run on a treadmill simply because it makes me feel joyous. But exercise is no longer about trying to slenderise the thighs. It’s about self-preservation.” And then she says – and this is classic Keyes: “The thing that really makes me worry as I get older is the need to eat properly. Because I just love carbs and sugar.”

The Walsh Sisters is on BBC One on Saturday February 21 at 9.15pm.

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