Marian Keyes interview: ‘I really don’t like the myth that women don’t want intercourse’

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Marian Keyes and I are having a cup of tea. We’re sharing a squishy couch at an elegant London lodge, a spot the place the whole lot is fairly – even the teacups. “God, it’s all so beautiful,” the Irish writer says, agog. It is. I wouldn’t thoughts stealing one in every of the teacups… however I gained’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 if she’s being held down and tickled. “God!”

I don’t truly imagine Keyes is a thief – however I do imagine she’s beneficiant. In a profession spanning three many years and 16 novels – in addition to quick tales, novellas and non-fiction – the Limerick-born author has given readers hours of enjoyment, writing chunky, chatty books that you may sink proper into. Warm, humorous and smart, they’re additionally roadmaps for the way to overcome life’s inevitable arduous instances, bustling with worlds wherein lightness dances gently with the darkish.

In Watermelon, her 1995 debut and the first in her long-running Walsh sisters sequence, Claire Walsh’s husband leaves her for an additional girl simply as she’s given delivery to their first baby. The Mystery of Mercy Close (2012), written amid Keyes’s crippling depression, was a narrative partly about psychological well being, whereas Rachel’s Holiday (1998) was a few girl going to rehab to confront her habit points – one thing Keyes did herself in 1995, for alcoholism. This Charming Man (2008) tackled themes of home violence, 2009’s The Brightest Star in the Sky had a storyline about sexual assault, and 2017’s The Break handled abortion.

Lest this make them sound bleak, know that that is Keyes’s reward: she broaches daring, political topics, all whereas making her readers chuckle. Her books aren’t as cosy as they’re generally offered, however boy, they promote – 35 million copies and counting, the truth is. Her newest, My Favourite Mistake, picks up the story of Anna Walsh, first launched to readers in Watermelon however given her personal novel in 2006, Anybody Out There? That was a ebook about grief and rebuilding, as Anna fought to salvage her hotshot New York PR life whereas struggling to just accept the loss of life of her husband.

The follow-up, printed this week, sees Anna return to Ireland feeling burnt out by her shiny however brutal job in magnificence PR. It’s a novel that strikes me as a problem to our censorious age; if there’s a message, it’s that we should forgive each other for previous errors and be much less brutal in direction of our misplaced, scatty youthful selves. But Keyes initially had a distinct plan – she had been about to do one thing distinctly off-brand. “I’d been all set to write a book about horrible people,” she confides. “And then I decided – look, what do I want to read?”

At her residence in Dun Laoghaire, Dublin, Keyes had been feeling like she had “nothing left in terms of resilience or endurance”. Russia had simply invaded Ukraine, the pandemic had ravaged all of our lives. So, she determined: time to write down a love story. “I liked the idea of a love story for people in midlife. You know, I’m not even midlife anymore, I’m 60 now. But I still feel very alive. My emotions are still very [close] to the surface. I can handle things better, but I’m still hurtable. I can still surprise myself. So I thought, why shouldn’t they have a bit of fun?”

When we meet, there’s no fanfare or fuss – Keyes’s husband Tony Baines (or “Himself” to her social media followers) quietly drops her off and picks her up. “Let’s sit on the sofa together,” she suggests, taking off her boots and settling in. In a vivid pink high, her hair jet black, she is placing – particularly her eyes, which widen as she talks. Her lilting Irish voice is quieter than you’d anticipate; she’s garrulous, however with a fragile, bird-like vitality. Things she likes are emphatically described as “gorgeous”. Cautious of being presumptuous – “Again, I am not speaking for everybody,” she says, greater than as soon as – she reveals the eager consciousness for human foibles that makes her novels so wealthy. “I don’t want to do your milk,” she tells me, “because you might have your own special way.”

The writing of My Favourite Mistake started in February 2022. Fast, I feel, for a 600-plus-page novel, contemplating Keyes’s joyously acquired Rachel Walsh sequel, Again, Rachel, had solely simply been printed. “Oh my God, it’s so slow! I take forever,” Keyes frets. Anna is conscious that her sense of existential malaise is an issue as a result of, as she tells readers, “Unfortunately I was paid to be manically enthusiastic.” A breakup is looming, and so is burnout. She is aware of one thing should change, however feels responsible about it: “I wasn’t a nurse working in ER, I wasn’t a shelf-stacker on a zero-hours contract, I had the best job, with unlimited access to liquid exfoliators.”

When she returns to Ireland, she finds herself doing PR for an area wellness retreat, mediating a group dispute, and having bizarre conferences with good-looking Joey, a face from the previous who has a infamous historical past with women. “I wanted to write about a man who was toxic, who was a f***boy, and who had changed. I have changed so much. I think everyone should be given a chance to redeem themselves,” says Keyes.

Back when she wrote Watermelon, Keyes was spurred on by the truth that she by no means noticed women like her depicted in books. There’s one thing quietly radical about the approach she has continued to write down about women’s actual lives as they age. Anna, going by way of the menopause, virtually has to go to the black marketplace for HRT patches (“It made a difference for me,” Keyes says), and women in the novel speak brazenly about Botox, which Keyes does too.

“If I wasn’t doing the Botox, they’d go, ‘Oh God, she’s let herself go. Oh Lord save us.’ The minute you don’t, people say, ‘A little bit of Botox wouldn’t do you any harm…’” Although Keyes chooses to be open about it – folks have been saying how nicely she seemed and she or he didn’t want to be deceptive – she hopes in the future to not care in any respect. “I’m really living for the day when I don’t get my roots done. When I stop getting the Botox. And I just think, ‘This is me now.’ When I’ve managed to extricate myself a bit more from that patriarchal template that all women are given from the day they were born.”

One scene made me punch the air: Anna, again on HRT and again in contact together with her wishes, thinks a few man she fancies and offers herself a second of self-pleasure. “I really don’t like the myth that women don’t want sex,” Keyes says, frankly. “Even writing about the self-pleasure, it just felt like… no big deal. Vibrators aren’t even comic anymore. Not speaking for everybody, but there are plenty of us who aren’t mortified…” She stops to appropriate herself. “Well, I suppose mildly… I suppose I don’t want me mother reading this, you know…”

Hang on – has her mom learn it? “She has,” Keyes replies, like a schoolgirl caught out. In truth, “Old Vummun”, as Keyes calls her on social media, beloved the ebook. “I was just so grateful – she really withholds praise, it’s been a lifelong thing.” So yeah, intercourse scenes – no large deal. “Until I come to voice the audiobook, then it’s ‘Oh for God’s sake, why did I…’ But yeah, women in their forties and older, having sex. It happens.”

These days, Keyes is well known as a lot for being herself as for her books. She has a BBC podcast with the Irish comic Tara Flynn, Now You’re Asking, wherein they sensibly reply listeners’ issues. Her hundreds of social media followers love her ebook suggestions and endearingly unfiltered annual tweets about Strictly Come Dancing. In 2022, Alan Yentob even made one in every of his Imagine documentaries about her. A brand new Keyes novel is a significant publishing occasion. But for a few years, she was belittled and patronised, her books marketed as “chick lit” and given pink, sparkly covers.

It was a jarring expertise for readers; one in every of my first encounters with Keyes’s work, as a younger girl making an attempt to work out what my tastes needs to be, was formative. Why did this muscular ebook about critical matters have a glittery cowl? And why was there an unstated sense that I shouldn’t convey it up in a uni seminar?

The misrepresentation and underestimation of Keyes’s work was an ungainly, embarrassing blemish on the literary world for years, till a latest sea change in opinion started to see her recognised as an essential author. The approach her work was packaged and handled definitely affected my relationship together with her books – did it have an effect on hers? “I feel privileged to have had a long enough career that perceptions did change,” she says. “It was frustrating in the beginning, because I felt what I was doing had worth. I wanted to entertain people and tell stories and make people laugh, but I wanted to show that women are more than prosecco and high heels and hot men.”

One critic labelled Rachel’s Holiday “forgettable froth” (a reminder: this was a ebook about habit and restoration). “I knew that wasn’t right. But it made me very lacking in confidence.” She now not cares whether or not or not males learn her books, however she used to take subject with them dismissing her as a author with out studying her work. “There was a man who once described my books as saccharine. Saccharine is the last thing they were back then! They were quite raunchy, a lot of swearing. If you’re going to insult me,” she jokes, “could you please get the adjective right! Vulgar, I’d take. Crude. Uncouth!”

She will admit, “It has been gorgeous to have – I don’t know – become respectable,” the shadow of air-quotes floating round that final phrase. Overall, although, Keyes stays very humble about all that stuff. She had made her peace with not being taken severely. There have been women on the market with greater issues than their bestselling books being packaged incorrectly. Her publishers by no means stopped her from writing what she wished to write down. She felt fortunate. She was grateful. “I keep using the word lucky. I’m lucky and grateful that this was what I was given.”

But she had extra energy than she thought. At the 2018 Hay Festival, she condemned the sexist imbalance of the Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction, which had been awarded to solely three feminine writers in 18 years. “Say what you like about me, but my books are funny. What more can I do to qualify?” she stated at the time.

“That caused a right stir,” she says now, decreasing her voice. “I hadn’t intended to. Then the next year, Nina Stibbe won. Nina says she wouldn’t have won if I hadn’t complained – she would totally have won. But I think it gave them a bit of a fright. Or just made them think, ‘Let’s do better.’” (Keyes was lastly shortlisted for the prize in 2022, for Again, Rachel. It went to Percival Everett.)

It’s true that “popular” issues usually don’t win prizes – as we all know, Barbie made hundreds of thousands and couldn’t get a Best Picture nomination. Surprisingly, Keyes has by no means even been longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, regardless of being one in every of our main feminine authors and even having been a member of the judges’ panel (when it was the Orange Prize) in 2007. But in 2022, Keyes was named Author of the Year at the British Book Awards, a title whose earlier holders have included Hilary Mantel, Bernardine Evaristo, Richard Osman and Kate Atkinson.

That mattered. “It felt like everything. It felt… I don’t have the words to describe that feeling of… I could exhale.” She speaks of it with a way of marvel, nonetheless, her sentences dashing up and slowing down. “It’s kind of like, my work here is done, you know? That it’s okay. What I did, all along, it was good enough. There was warmth in the room for me. It was gorgeous,” she smiles. “It was the pinnacle, really, of my career. I’ll never feel that I have nothing to prove; I’m not that kind of person. But it did feel like, ‘You can stop being anxious about it. You’ve done your best. Continue to do your best. That’s all you have to do.’”

The stats for Keyes’s profession are spectacular – she’s been printed in 36 languages, spent greater than 150 weeks on the Sunday Times bestseller listing, and, in line with her web site, the mixed weight of her books quantities to 905 Percy Pigs. But her life modified rapidly: Watermelon, her mid-Nineties debut, was printed in the similar 12 months that she left a therapy centre for alcoholism, and the similar 12 months that she married her husband.

She remembers going to purchase a settee with Baines after they have been shifting in collectively, one thing she was capable of pay for outright with a royalty cheque. “On the way home in the car, I had to roll down the window. Because I thought I was going to puke. I had never spent so much money before. I’d never had anything like that. I had always been so skint. And I was so afraid that I was overreaching – that I had squandered all of this.”

Perhaps this vigilance round taking issues without any consideration comes from the truth that Keyes’s previous struggles are all the time in her rear-view mirror. After recovering from alcoholism and discovering herself with a profitable profession as an writer, in 2009 she had a interval of melancholy so excessive that she may now not eat, sleep or converse, and was admitted to a psychiatric hospital. “It was an illness and it ran its course,” she stated on Desert Island Discs in 2017.

Her novels are profoundly in contact with disappointment and vulnerability, feelings she will nonetheless entry simply. Although she’s at one with the truth that, even when life is nice, issues are all the time in flux ultimately, she struggles to not take in the disappointment of others, making it arduous for her to look at the information. “Whatever is going on, for me – maybe it’s a post-pandemic thing… the sorrow will destroy me. I’m always going to be porous, thin-skinned, over-emotional, and I’m constantly trying to manage that. That makes me sound precious, but this is who I am – I take on other people’s sorrow. I can be very joyous – but I just wish I could protect everyone. It’s a killer of a thing to have.”

“I think it just never stops, does it?” she ponders. Her “reservoir of sorrow and shame”, one thing she will nonetheless join with, is one she used to drink with a view to numb. Today we’ve got the language to grasp that melancholy and alcoholism are diseases – however Keyes skilled them at a time when the social stigma was better. Gen-Zers – like her “emotionally literate” 23-year-old niece – are altering that. “I just wish I had known that you can say, ‘I’m feeling anxious, overwhelmed, burnt out.’ We need these conversations. I love Gen Z. I just love their defiance.”

Gen Z could quickly be loving her, too: Keyes’s 2020 novel Grown Ups, an formidable household saga, is being made right into a Netflix present by SeeSaw, the firm behind Heartstopper and Slow Horses. Like the latest smash One Day, it may open her work to a complete new technology. “The funny thing is, apparently I’m an executive producer. I have no idea what that is,” Keyes jokes. She gained’t have plenty of enter, however would love the actors to be Irish, for nobody to say “shall” or “naughty” (Irish folks don’t say that), and for Sharon Horgan to play the lead function of Jessie.

This 12 months, Keyes turned 60 and marked 30 years of sobriety. All this stuff conquered, all these books offered, the literary world’s respect gained, Netflix at her door… what’s she proudest of, I’m wondering? The reply comes with out hesitation. “Getting sober. I mean, nothing good would have happened. And I just want to say this,” she says, with some urgency, “for anyone who thinks they will never be able to stop. I was that person. It was the love of my life. It was the centre of my life. I was willing to die for it. I was prepared to go wherever it took me. It didn’t turn out like that.”

Speaking with no jokes, no frills, she needs folks to know that assistance is there, telling me that “dead is the best option for me” if the consuming had continued. “The thought of still being alive [and drinking] is just too horrible to contemplate.”

The tea has run out, however we chat for a bit of bit longer, about the mild and the darkish of life. A world with out Keyes – that’s too horrible to ponder. Storyteller, survivor, literary titan. I’d steal a teacup for her. Wouldn’t you?

‘My Favourite Mistake’ is out now, printed by Penguin Michael Joseph. Marian Keyes can be showing at this 12 months’s Hay Festival, in dialog with Kirsty Lang on 26 May, and for a stay recording of her podcast ‘Now You’re Asking’ with Tara Flynn on 25 May