Marian Keyes: ‘I really don’t like the myth that women don’t want sex’
Marian Keyes and I are having a cup of tea. We’re sharing a squishy sofa at a chic London hotel, a place where everything is pretty – even the teacups. “God, it’s all so beautiful,” the Irish author says, agog. It is. I wouldn’t mind stealing one of the teacups... but I won’t. “No, I will!” Keyes insists, not even joking. “I’ll steal them for you. You see, I have poor impulse control. And I like to be liked. And I probably would do it. If you dared me.” OK, OK: Marian, I dare you. “Please don’t, no, please don’t,” she squirms, as though she’s being held down and tickled. “God!”
I don’t actually believe Keyes is a thief – but I do believe she’s generous. In a career spanning three decades and 16 novels – as well as short stories, novellas and non-fiction – the Limerick-born writer has given readers hours of pleasure, writing chunky, chatty books that you can sink right into. Warm, funny and wise, they’re also roadmaps for how to overcome life’s inevitable hard times, bustling with worlds in which lightness dances gently with the dark.
In Watermelon, her 1995 debut and the first in her long-running Walsh sisters series, Claire Walsh’s husband leaves her for another woman just as she’s given birth to their first child. The Mystery of Mercy Close (2012), written amid Keyes’s crippling depression, was a story partly about mental health, while Rachel’s Holiday (1998) was about a woman going to rehab to confront her addiction issues – something Keyes did herself in 1995, for alcoholism. This Charming Man (2008) tackled themes of domestic violence, 2009’s The Brightest Star in the Sky had a storyline about sexual assault, and 2017’s The Break dealt with abortion.
Lest this make them sound bleak, know, picks up the story of Anna Walsh, first introduced to readers in but given her own novel in 2006, That was a book about grief and rebuilding, as Anna fought to salvage her hotshot New York PR life while struggling to accept the death of her husband.
