Good food, good craic as bestselling author Marian Keyes gets real

Like most famous people, bestselling author Marian Keyes seems much smaller in the flesh, with a mane of jet-black hair and a flawless porcelain complexion testifying to Ireland’s lack of sun.

She is in Australia on a book tour; the 61-year-old has written 24 books that have sold almost 40 million copies and been translated into 36 languages. Five of the books have been turned into a BBC TV series called The Walsh Sisters, which will be broadcast on the Stan streaming platform later this year.

Marian Keyes turned 60 and blocked out a year to pause her writing and go back to university to study design. “The older I get, the more I realise that you can start again at any stage.” Credit: Thomas Wielecki

Keyes has also voiced the audio versions of her last three books, recently winning the British Book Awards Audio Fiction of the Year for My Favourite Mistake. Along with comedian and actress Tara Flynn, she co-hosts a very funny podcast called Now You’re Asking, which answers audience questions – from the meaning of love to the “living hell” that is a tasting menu.

I used one episode of Now You’re Asking to train my voice-recognition software to transcribe Keyes’ lilting brogue and it performed well, spelling out all the slang words for sex and male appendages with a Joycean flourish.

We met up for lunch at Sails at Lavender Bay, chosen for its harbourside location and panoramic views of the Sydney Opera House and Sydney Harbour Bridge. But the weather isn’t playing along – it’s been raining for days and the sky is the colour of granite.

When Keyes arrives, I apologise for the weather, but she says she’s seen plenty of blue skies and this is a nice change. Sails is fairly full but they’ve given us a quiet table in the back with a view of Luna Park. We order quickly so the photographer has something to shoot – Keyes is primarily a vegetarian and I feel like something light, so we both order the zucchini with whipped goats curd, squash, preserved lemon and pistachio for entrees, followed by a dish of roasted beetroot with walnuts. I also order a dish of snapper crudo. Keyes doesn’t drink alcohol; I give the extensive wine list a glance and then order sparkling water for two. Sails later comps us a mocktail each.

Pink snapper crudo with charred grapefruit, wasabi cream and jalapeno. Credit: Thomas Wielecki

The Irish author’s hugely enjoyable books operate on two levels. On the surface they are light and fun, full of women and girls who love clothes and designer handbags and getting it on with handsome men in tight pants. But there’s darkness underneath the surface, where her characters – male and female – experience depression, grief, domestic violence, abuse and loss; narrated with her trademark combination of empathy and candour.

The writing feels real because it is. In her early 30s, Keyes entered a rehabilitation clinic after a suicide attempt, brought on by years of problem drinking. She said she’s not embarrassed about being an alcoholic.

“I never saw any reason to hide it. I kind of thought, well, I was a 30-year-old woman and I was educated and I was middle class and all of those things,” she says. “So if it could happen to me, it was probably happening to an awful lot of other people and if it’s not been spoken about, nobody can get help.”

Roasted beetroot with walnuts and a side of snake beans.Credit: Thomas Wielecki

After Keyes came out of rehab, she wrote her first novel, Watermelon. She has stayed sober and written books – all bestsellers – ever since. Life seemed good but, in 2009, completely out of the blue, the author experienced the onset of a debilitating four-year depression during which she barely got out of bed and suffered ongoing suicidal tendencies. It eventually lifted, which she attributes to time and the support of her loved ones. And hormone replacement therapy! Nothing is off the table at a Marian Keyes lunch.

I ask her if she thinks it is a great comfort to readers going through tough times to read about someone similarly afflicted and know they’re not alone. She agrees.

“Every single one of us on Earth, we think that bad things only happen to other people. It’s a survival technique – but sooner or later, the terrible thing happens to us,” she says.

Keyes’ latest book My Favourite Mistake.

“You know, the spotlight of doom is above our head. There’s such an endless list of awful ways for your life to be unbended. But most things are survivable; you can, you will be happy again. You can be happy again, in a different way. We can never go back to the person we were before the terrible thing. Back to your old self isn’t really possible in big trauma, I think, but you’re still there.”

One of the things Keyes discovered, after the darkness had lifted, was her capacity for resilience.

“We only really discover the resilience when it’s required, but we’re given it at terrible times or difficult times, I think. Whatever loss there is, that kind of muscle of resilience is still available to us, maybe in a different form. We are stronger than we know, but it doesn’t mean it’s going to be pleasant. Feeling resilient doesn’t mean that you’re feeling good. No, in the storm, it means you’re surviving.”

Keyes is prolific on social media; her Instagram feed is a riot and includes candid photos of her family: mother (“Old Vumman”), four siblings and several nieces and nephews. They are a close family. Keyes and her husband Tony Baines (“Himself”) have been married for 29 years. Earlier this year, she spoke about their inability to have children, saying she was at peace with it.

The bill for lunch at Sails at Lavender Bay.

“We’re fine now, you know, we’re grand,” she says. “I also felt like ... I’d been given so much by the universe, like I was given the ability to stop drinking alcoholically, and then I met this lovely man who was really, really nice to me, and then I got a job doing something that I was able to do when people were willing to kind of pay me for it. And I just think I thought, like nobody gets everything.

“But I feel like some kind of grace was afforded to me and my husband and we were just able to go, ‘Let’s focus on what we have rather than what we haven’t.’ You get what you get, and this is what I’ve got. And I’m absolutely grateful for my life.”

We’ve been talking so much that we’ve hardly touched the food, which is light and delicious. The sun is refusing to come out. But I’m so engrossed in our conversation, which ranges from mental illness to lip liner, I stop noticing.

Keyes reveals that she has become addicted to online personality quizzes – in particular, about the diagnosis du jour, ADHD. And after watching Andrew Scott in Ripley, she did several quizzes titled, “Am I a psychopath?” (The answer was no.)

“I am very much self-diagnosed as [someone with ADHD]. I’ve met a lovely woman who says she will diagnose it with a test. And I’m so scattered that I haven’t got it together to go and do it – the proof is already there. I don’t even need to do the test. If I’m too scatty to actually get it together to do it I should already be getting my green tick.”

I ask her about My Favourite Mistake, which features a 48-year-old woman called Anna Walsh. At the start of the story, she jettisons her relationship, her job and her entire life in New York to go back to Ireland, without a plan of action.

Keyes says “feeling resilient doesn’t mean that you’re feeling good. No, in the storm, it means you’re surviving.”Credit: Thomas Wielecki

We discuss the phenomenon of older women increasingly deciding to upend their lives to run away and experience life on their own terms. When Keyes turned 60, she didn’t run away but blocked out a year to pause her writing and go back to university to study design.

“The older I get, the more I realise that you can start again at any stage,” she says. “Last year, I took a year off and I went back to college, just to do something that I had always wanted to do. And I think with better health care and longer life expectancy, women are far more vocal about what they expect from their lives than they used to be.

“I do think burnout is very real. Anna doesn’t have children, but I often see it when the children are grown, the children have gone to university, that’s it, and women are deciding, this is my time and I’m going to do all the things that I wanted to do when I was told I had to be doing other things. And I love it.”

Lunch passes in a rush and Keyes’ minder arrives to whisk her away. I step outside, suffused with the contentment you feel after a meal of good food and great “craic”, in Irish terms. Turning to take in one of the world’s iconic views, I spot a patch of blue. Like a Keyes novel – the clouds part, and the light returns.

Marian Keyes is appearing at a Sydney Writers’ Festival event at the Sydney Town Hall at 8pm on Saturday.

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