The award-winning Irish author Marian Keyes has sold millions of books in an internationally acclaimed career, but still behaves as if she has everything to prove. A few years back she was invited to be on the BBC arts programme Imagine. Her reaction? “You’ve rung me by mistake, it’s Roddy Doyle you want.”
“Well, it’s 30 years since my first book was published, and things have been suggested all the time, and nothing ever gets made, and it’s the hope that kills you,” she says. “So I just never bothered expecting it, because I felt there was no point.”
Not only does Keyes write popular fiction – albeit peppered with Shakespearean allusions and quotes from the King James Bible – but that fiction often comes with pink covers. “I have stayed the course and I have defended myself for a long time, especially with men. I mean, sexism was so rife. It was OK for men to mock books with pink covers.”
Keyes is charming, but there is anger just under the smiley surface. Take her first novel, Watermelon. It deals with a number of the most urgent of female issues (single parenting, the pay gap, body dysmorphia). Yet, when it was published in 1995, it was put into a pink dust jacket and filed under a new, fluffy genre, known for its pastel dust jackets and adorned with drawings of high heels and cocktail glasses. “Chick lit. It was degrading. It was meant to be degrading. What it did was ‘defang’ post-feminism,” says Keyes wearily.
View Green Video on the source websiteIndeed, it blunted the weapon she wielded. Which was? “Writing about the lives of women who were confused by a world where men still had all the power. None of that was picked up. Because of the pinkness of chick lit.” Did the pink fluffiness of the covers make her change her subject? Did it hell.
She explains she hasn’t helped with the scripting by Stefanie Preissner of The Walsh Sisters. “She didn’t ask me to, and I wouldn’t have wanted to. I like writing books. And forgive me, this sounds ungrateful, but when I finished the books, the books were done. And no matter what the series is like, the books are still the books that I wrote. Secondly, I knew Stefanie. I find her fascinating and admirable. So, I thought if anybody could do it, she could. I also felt that the producers had paid for the option. It was theirs for them to do with what they liked, and that’s the deal.”
A woman who has coped with addiction and has defined herself as an “ordinary alcoholic”, Keyes clearly has enormous strength, as well as a no-nonsense approach to the vagaries of the media.
Now they count in their millions, and have presumably made Keyes an extremely wealthy woman. Not that this was the plan. “My first book was published only in Ireland, set in Ireland about Irish people. I honestly thought nobody outside of Ireland would have any interest. I still can’t believe how lucky I am.”
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En route, she scooped the role of second-oldest sister, Maggie. “It came about when we were auditioning for the role of Claire, and the casting director said, ‘You are reading beautifully for Maggie, would you consider playing her?’ And I kind of thought, ‘Oh God, would I consider it?’ And then I got the role, and that kind of changed everything.”
Had she always been a Marian Keyes fan? “Well, I’m fully of the Harry Potter generation, but I remember my mum reading them when we were on holiday. I was about eight and I remember lying by the pool and it was one of those hotels where all the women are on sun loungers reading Rachel’s Holiday. And I remember thinking, ‘We are all reading Busy at Maths at school so maybe when you are an adult you all read the same books, too.’ And then when I was about 20, I read Rachel’s Holiday and I thought ‘Oh my God this is so relatable, I feel so seen.’”
“I watched a lot of reality television,” Stefanie explains. “I didn’t want to make this a period piece. So, I watched The Traitors and Love Is Blind. I went on TikTok and Instagram, and watched what’s interesting people. I’m not competing just with other shows on TV, I’m competing with influencers who have six million followers and have just put up a story about unboxing their Sephora haul.”
There is also a lot of oozing, snorting and smoking. That may have been the case 30 years ago but isn’t it a bit dated now? “In Ireland? No, it’s not dated at all.”
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