Marian Keyes divides her life in two: from the age of 30 she left “bad boys” and booze behind to become Ireland’s funniest writer with more than 30 million sales.
The National Gallery of Ireland recently unveiled a portrait of Marian Keyes, one of the most successful authors in the history of the republic. Seated in an extravagant floral dress against a backdrop of sumptuous golds, she looks like a regal elf as conjured by Gustav Klimt – with a subtle twitch of irony playing around the mouth. The artist, Margaret Corcoran, has captured Ireland’s funniest writer just as she is about to tell us a joke.
“I was braced for something quite Francis Bacon-y because I have an asymmetric face,” Keyes tells me. “But it was so wonderful – and it’s not about me, it’s about the art.”
Keyes, 60, is every bit as shimmering in person as her portrait. She turns up to brunch in layers of bright blue, with hot-pink nails and a green handbag. But she is ever so humble, showering me with compliments. It’s easy to see how everyone is disarmed by her warmth, but make no mistake: Keyes is a powerhouse.
Over the past three decades, she has become a publishing phenomenon, having sold 30 million books worldwide. More recently, she has co-presented a popular BBC Radio 4 comedy-meets-agony aunt podcast, Now You’re Asking, with Tara Flynn and landed a Netflix deal that will give her much-loved novel Grown Ups an eight-part TV treatment. And there is her more unofficial role as a spokeswoman for mental health, having talked so vividly about her depression, anxiety and alcohol addiction.
But I don’t want to enter into a cycle of what Keyes calls “fawning”, a habit she falls into whenever she is feeling nervous. “I’ve always been ashamed about that part of me,” she confessed in a recent Instagram video. “I’ve always thought it made me cowardly and insincere ... but those responses are a survival mechanism.”
She has nothing to worry about. In my case, the fawning is genuine. Her latest novel, My Favourite Mistake, is the eighth in her series featuring the big, noisy Walsh family. In this one, we follow Anna (one of five now-menopausal sisters) as she leaves a stressful executive job in New York for small-town Ireland. Back home she encounters her old flame, Joey Armstrong, and a lot of old misunderstandings and mistakes.
It’s incredibly accomplished – not just a hilarious, fizzy romantic comedy but also a piece of social commentary. I was struck by how she sees her characters’ struggles – whether financial hardship, burnout at work, body dysmorphia or loneliness – as endemic of what she refers to as “late-stage capitalism”. Keyes believes we are living through a time where “everything is about instant gratification. Lots of money is applauded, but taking rest for ourselves isn’t. Anna is at the stage where she is making the decision to swim against the tide and trying to explain that to her sisters and her parents.”
Her protagonist’s voice is crystal cut with observations about gentrification, sexism, hollow corporate diversity initiatives and an economic system that tells women they are nothing without expensive serums and Peloton machines. In one amusing scene, we hear Anna’s inner demon try to persuade her that only a “weak, lazy loser” would walk away from a high-paid job in beauty PR. “We rest when we’re dead, right! You there, Anna Walsh, yes you, you dedicated grafter, you can buy anything you want right now! How about an air fryer? You never cook and you don’t know what an air fryer actually does, but that’s not important.”
Keyes says she was partly inspired by seeing several friends quit senior jobs after the pandemic, as well as by her beloved younger sister Caitriona, an oncology nurse in New York, who decided to return home more regularly after lockdown.
But for all the astute social observations, the book was born out of a need to hide away from the world. Two years ago, when we were emerging from the pandemic and Russia invaded Ukraine, Keyes said she felt she “had nothing left inside, no stamina for the sharp and pointy bits of the world”.
She abandoned a book, “a 40-year opus” about people who had been friends since their 20s, because it involved characters who had got rich by unethical means. She didn’t want to write about “a world that I recognise where democracy is manipulated, where entitled people prosper”. For the past two years, she has hardly read or watched the news. “I know that’s incredibly irresponsible. It was never meant to go on this long but I’m still at it and I need that. I know broad brushstrokes of what’s happening and that’s all I can cope with.”
She also finds modern communication exhausting. She has returned to X for the publication of her book but has mostly moved her operations to Instagram. “I don’t have the energy to reply to every single WhatsApp. The world won’t end. But then I do worry I’ll have no friends and I’ll turn into Howard Hughes and I’ll just be this isolated weirdo with people saying, ‘She doesn’t even read her WhatsApps. Can you believe it?’”
With these internal debates raging, it’s perhaps no surprise that Keyes decided to write a “midlife forgive-yourself book”. It’s a love story set in a small community in which the middle-aged characters face up to their earlier bad behaviour. “That had also come up for me in the pandemic. I was thinking a lot about the decisions I’d made or the ways I’d behaved that I thought were the right ones at the time.”
‘Anger is kind of wonderful’
Keyes, who was born into a large family in Limerick (she’s the eldest of five siblings), says her life has been divided into two halves. In the first 30 years, she was “completely clueless about myself ... It was all about the bad boys ... all about the fake passion of dysfunctional relationships”. From a young age, she found the world “frightening” and human beings “baffling”, so she studied people. “I wanted to know the rules. I wanted to know how to behave like other people.”
After studying law at University College Dublin, she took an administrative job and moved to London, where she felt she was failing in all her aspirations. Her alcoholism and clinical depression spiralled and, when she was 30, she attempted suicide, ending up in rehab for three months.
That’s when the second half of her life began. Shortly after rehab, she got together with her husband, Tony Baines (a former IT system designer who since 1998 has worked, in his words, as her “dogsbody, finance person, IT person, videographer, driver”). She was impressed by how he loved books by female writers and Irish music and is “nice ... and I deserved nice so I thought, we’ll give it a go”. Eighteen months later, she had her first book published.
Her books, she acknowledges, are all about the gap between the way we present ourselves and who we really are. “For some people, the gap is non-existent – they are so well and healthy in themselves. For another person, that space is an abyss. But that space is always moving. We only understand a tiny, tiny amount of any person when we meet them and the thing is, I always want to know what’s really going on. I’m looking for identification. I love for a person to admit something and for me to think, oh thank God, it’s not just me.”
Many of those admissions are in this novel. The struggle with menopause and the frustrations of trying to get a GP to prescribe HRT (Keyes is a big advocate: “I love it”), the ugly feelings of jealousy and anger, and the anguish of falling out with a friend. “There is huge shame about female friendships that break down,” she says. “There is a myth around female friendships that you become friends and it just stays without challenges. When it doesn’t work, and I’ve been there, I have felt there is something wrong with me.”
We don’t get beyond our youthful pain or mistakes, even in our 60s, she says. There are days when she feels “as ancient and wise as Mt Everest” and others when she just wants to browse Etsy for “Hello Kitty doorknobs”.
She talks a lot about the need to do things that bring her joy, such as hiking, buying tasselled cushions and – more niche – framing Swedish tapestry (“I could just weep at the gorgeousness of it all”). However, she also emphasises the need to speak her mind. The cuts to the arts and library services appal her, as does the “unspeakably bad housing crisis in Ireland”, and she returns frequently to “the gap between the rich and the poor becoming unimaginably enormous”. She thinks we need higher taxes for the wealthy and has had enough of the politics of individualism. Of Sally Rooney, she says: “I’m so proud of a young Irish feminist Marxist woman getting people queuing outside bookshops!”
On the subject of Irish writers, she raves about Paul Murray, Louise Kennedy, Louise O’Neill, Elaine Feeney and Megan Nolan, and has plenty of theories as to why they have enjoyed so much recent success, especially the women. The influence of the Catholic Church has waned and social media has allowed writers to be less parochial and more connected to their British and American counterparts.
More generally, she believes Irish writers have moved on from “questions of who we are” to wider economic inequalities. “A lot of these great young writers came of age at the time of the economic crash in 2009 and it woke them up to how events in the wider world affect individuals. Now they expect to be listened to on a bigger stage. We were told to sit down and be quiet.”
No chance of that now. Keyes leans over and whispers conspiratorially: “Anger is kind of wonderful. It’s very, very empowering.” Better than becoming bitter, I suggest. “Yes, if it’s used properly and we don’t go out and kill people, anger gets things done. Bitterness doesn’t change things – there’s no entry point for a conversation – whereas anger can open up the channels of communication.”
Look again at that portrait. There’s a fire raging behind that smile.
- My Favourite Mistake by Marian Keyes (Penguin)
Written by: Johanna Thomas-Corr
© The Times of London