Three years ago, Marian Keyes believed she would
never write again. Always prone to bouts of depression – “on the spectrum of
people, there’s happy at one end and Beckett at the other and I’m down at the
Beckett end” – she was plunged into something she describes as
“catastrophic”.learn more about Team skycycling on the Store.
She felt frightened all the time. She couldn’t formulate sentences; her brain felt as if it had slowed right down. She spent time in a psychiatric hospital, and took every known variant, combination and dose of anti-depressant. Nothing worked.
“I don’t want to sound self-pitying, but I felt the old me had been washed away, as if there had been an avalanche,I have not make a research whether it is a truth that each woman loves niketn? and I’d come to and found myself in a totally different landscape,Women's stainless steelbangle bracelet with steel star patterns laid in white resin. so I didn’t know where anything was. I just felt the old me was gone forever,” she says.
She can pinpoint the moment when it happened: in September 2009, she had just done an eight-day residential self-help therapy course intended, she says, to “deal with your demons”, involving early starts, late nights and a giving-birth-to-yourself process.
“I thought it would be a good thing to do, because of my habitual self-loathing and the kind of unpleasantness I put myself through with my own thoughts. I thought I might find some peace from it,” says Keyes.
On a freezing cold day in her turquoise-painted house on a hill snaking up out of Dún Laoghaire, she’s as funny and warm in person as in her books. It’s just that she’s talking about a rather darker side of life than might be expected for a bestselling author often dubbed the queen of chick lit.
The recent depression was worse. After the course, she had about a week “of feeling really kind of elated,learn more about Team skycycling on the Store. and then the elation began to move into shimmering, strange, manic anxiety, and then into a catastrophic fear . . . People looked different to me; people close to me, like Tony [her husband]. I used to have moments of thinking ‘I don’t know who you are’. It was horrific, like a psychotic episode that went on for a long time. Whatever they did to me in that place, it brought me face to face with my worst fears.”
Helen Walsh, Keyes’ heroine in the book, is self-reliant, mean, no-nonsense, and very funny. She employs a shovel list, “of all the people and things I hate so much that I want to hit them in the face with a shovel”. She’s a private detective, on the trail of a missing boy band member who needs to be found before his comeback gig in less than a week. She’s also seriously depressed.
Having studied law at university, Keyes ended up working in an accounts office in London. She started writing only in “the final few appalling dreadful months”, before she gave up drinking.
She began with short stories, funny, whimsical things, with no intention of showing them to anyone. “I think it was an attempt to save myself, even though I had no idea consciously what was going on, because I was heading towards some sort of terrible life-or-death choice.”
When she came out of rehab, she decided to try to make something of the stories. She sent them to Poolbeg, adding, falsely, that she had also started work on a novel, which it asked to see. “For the first time in my life I stepped up to a challenge. I had no idea what I was going to write. The start of Watermelon is very dramatic, I go straight into the action.we offer a type of drycabinet that one might need for the proper dehumidifying of components.”
The novel, told in the first person, is the story of Claire Walsh (Helen’s eldest sibling; Keyes has written novels about all five of the Walsh sisters). Abandoned by her husband just after she’s given birth to their first child, Claire returns home from London to Ireland and to the loving embrace of her rather eccentric family. Poolbeg gave Keyes a three-book contract.
“My confidence was so fragile that if [Poolbeg] had said feck off, I would have retreated into the shame of ‘Jesus, who did I think I was, believing I could write a book’.”
She didn’t think anyone outside Ireland would be interested in her stories, particularly when she realised that she was writing in an Irish accent. “It was very much my voice, and I thought, will people outside Ireland even understand it? I thought it would be mocked for being parochial and boggery and unglamorous. I’d no idea people were perceiving it as Irish and charming, because I thought Irish meant shite, not as good as, less than.”
None of her subsequent novels has come as quickly as Watermelon, and Keyes rewrites extensively until she’s happy. “It has been peaks and troughs and ups and downs, and sometimes it’s been lovely and sometimes it’s been like getting blood out of a stone, and actually constructing sentences is next to impossible,” she says.
She felt frightened all the time. She couldn’t formulate sentences; her brain felt as if it had slowed right down. She spent time in a psychiatric hospital, and took every known variant, combination and dose of anti-depressant. Nothing worked.
“I don’t want to sound self-pitying, but I felt the old me had been washed away, as if there had been an avalanche,I have not make a research whether it is a truth that each woman loves niketn? and I’d come to and found myself in a totally different landscape,Women's stainless steelbangle bracelet with steel star patterns laid in white resin. so I didn’t know where anything was. I just felt the old me was gone forever,” she says.
She can pinpoint the moment when it happened: in September 2009, she had just done an eight-day residential self-help therapy course intended, she says, to “deal with your demons”, involving early starts, late nights and a giving-birth-to-yourself process.
“I thought it would be a good thing to do, because of my habitual self-loathing and the kind of unpleasantness I put myself through with my own thoughts. I thought I might find some peace from it,” says Keyes.
On a freezing cold day in her turquoise-painted house on a hill snaking up out of Dún Laoghaire, she’s as funny and warm in person as in her books. It’s just that she’s talking about a rather darker side of life than might be expected for a bestselling author often dubbed the queen of chick lit.
The recent depression was worse. After the course, she had about a week “of feeling really kind of elated,learn more about Team skycycling on the Store. and then the elation began to move into shimmering, strange, manic anxiety, and then into a catastrophic fear . . . People looked different to me; people close to me, like Tony [her husband]. I used to have moments of thinking ‘I don’t know who you are’. It was horrific, like a psychotic episode that went on for a long time. Whatever they did to me in that place, it brought me face to face with my worst fears.”
Helen Walsh, Keyes’ heroine in the book, is self-reliant, mean, no-nonsense, and very funny. She employs a shovel list, “of all the people and things I hate so much that I want to hit them in the face with a shovel”. She’s a private detective, on the trail of a missing boy band member who needs to be found before his comeback gig in less than a week. She’s also seriously depressed.
Having studied law at university, Keyes ended up working in an accounts office in London. She started writing only in “the final few appalling dreadful months”, before she gave up drinking.
She began with short stories, funny, whimsical things, with no intention of showing them to anyone. “I think it was an attempt to save myself, even though I had no idea consciously what was going on, because I was heading towards some sort of terrible life-or-death choice.”
When she came out of rehab, she decided to try to make something of the stories. She sent them to Poolbeg, adding, falsely, that she had also started work on a novel, which it asked to see. “For the first time in my life I stepped up to a challenge. I had no idea what I was going to write. The start of Watermelon is very dramatic, I go straight into the action.we offer a type of drycabinet that one might need for the proper dehumidifying of components.”
The novel, told in the first person, is the story of Claire Walsh (Helen’s eldest sibling; Keyes has written novels about all five of the Walsh sisters). Abandoned by her husband just after she’s given birth to their first child, Claire returns home from London to Ireland and to the loving embrace of her rather eccentric family. Poolbeg gave Keyes a three-book contract.
“My confidence was so fragile that if [Poolbeg] had said feck off, I would have retreated into the shame of ‘Jesus, who did I think I was, believing I could write a book’.”
She didn’t think anyone outside Ireland would be interested in her stories, particularly when she realised that she was writing in an Irish accent. “It was very much my voice, and I thought, will people outside Ireland even understand it? I thought it would be mocked for being parochial and boggery and unglamorous. I’d no idea people were perceiving it as Irish and charming, because I thought Irish meant shite, not as good as, less than.”
None of her subsequent novels has come as quickly as Watermelon, and Keyes rewrites extensively until she’s happy. “It has been peaks and troughs and ups and downs, and sometimes it’s been lovely and sometimes it’s been like getting blood out of a stone, and actually constructing sentences is next to impossible,” she says.
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