Bestselling novelist Marian Keyes has said she has reached "the invisible age" for women but added that she is "too tired to really care".
The 60-year-old writer, who has sold 35 million books in 36 different languages, has just published her sixteenth novel My Favourite Mistake and she appeared on Friday night's Late Late Show.
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Speaking to host Patrick Kielty, she said, "I think that unless you’re incredibly beautiful, most women go through `the invisible age’. I’m kind of glad to be invisible but then when you go through it and when it actually happened for real, I wasn’t delighted at all.
"I go to this gym when I’m in London and I go on the treadmill to feel calm but there’s all these young fellas bro-ing-out and yelling at each other and lifting these really, really heavy weights and the noise out of them! It sounds like they’re at themselves and then they drop the weights and the racket out of them then!
"And now and then for the craic I yell at them - `would ya mind keeping the noise down?!’ and then they say, `who’s that orc on the treadmill?’ So yeah, I’m invisible, it’s grand."
However, she said women don’t have to reach a certain age before they are judged.
"It’s there from the word go. I’m serious," she said. "The minute a woman becomes sexually attractive and therefore viable, there is a very narrow, rigid template that women are supposed to fit into to be the right type of woman.
"That was the message that was given to me from the word go - you have to be about nine foot tall and four stone and not entirely stupid but quite stupid really, not embarrassingly stupid.
"You need to be able to drive a car and cook things and that and you can be flirty but never in a way that makes another man think they’re in with a chance . . . there are all these things and it changes as you get nearer to that age."
She also openly discussed her use to cosmetic procedures.
"I have Botox and I have fillers and I’m completely open about it," Keyes said. "When I went out without it, people would think `Jesus, she’s let herself go! You’d think them people would be getting the stuff in their faces!’ and then you get the stuff in your face and they go `she’s had the stuff in her face!’
"`Honestly, the vanity I swear to god’! You’re damned if you do and you’re damned if you don’t and you’re damned if you talk about it. That’s the great thing about getting old - I’m too tired to try."
Keyes recently signed 8000 copies of My Favourite Mistake and asked if she ever got bored of global success, she said, "Are you joking me? If nobody wanted to signed copy, I wouldn’t have a living.
"I’m really lucky to be doing this and I’m really aware of it and I might whinge about having to put my hand in a bowl of ice every evening but it’s worth it. I am really lucky."
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