She may have zipped past a landmark birthday but there's no stopping the irresistible Marian Keyes. With a new novel, a new TV series and a new home, she is looking forward to the next 60 years. She talks to Donal O’Donoghue about ageing, her favourite mistake and Keanu Reeves cupcakes.
"I was such an oddball," says Marian Keyes of her teenage years and I laugh. But the best-selling author, as warmly funny in person as she is in print, is serious.
"No, really, I was," she adds. "I found other people baffling, especially in the early years of life. The family moved a lot in the beginning, and I didn’t really land until I was 12 years old, in a place where we didn’t move from again. I had two good friends, and we were oddballs together. But it didn’t last. There was a friendship break-up at around 16 and it devastated me.
"So, I never felt like I really belonged anywhere. But on the positive side, that feeling like I don’t belong is one of the reasons I love writing. I always had to watch other people to see how they do it, how they manage to live in what looked like a healthy, happy way."
It has served her well. 15 novels after her 1995 debut, Watermelon, another bestseller is here. My Favourite Mistake takes us back amongst the irresistible Walsh family, with Anna swapping the Big Apple for big problems back home in Ireland.
"I had huge plans for a major opus set over 40 years and chronicling the lives of seven friends who first met in the Eighties," says Keyes of what might have been. "One of the characters was a British politician who profited enormously from Brexit. But when it came to writing it, I didn’t have it in me to spend two years with awful people. And I missed the Walshs! I wanted to write a love story, one of those where people wanted to connect but it was not the right time for one or both. I also wanted it to be about people in mid-life with a bit more wisdom and having accumulated things they had done that they were ashamed of."
Marian is in her new home, in "the valley of the brown cardboard boxes", when we speak via Zoom (not a cardboard box to be seen). She recently moved with her husband, Tony, from their lilac terraced house in Dún Laoghaire, where they lived for 26 years, to a modernist build closer to the Dublin hills.
"Our old home is going to a lovely young family so I’m delighted that there will be children growing up in that house," says Marian, who back when she and Tony first bought the place, had plans to raise their own family there.
But after four years of trying for children, they decided that it was not to be, counting their blessings that they had each other. But Marian’s many nephews and nieces visited regularly, enchanted no doubt by the house’s Wes Anderson palette of pastel hues and its wondrous furnishings.
"I felt like it was a house that was always meant for children," says Marian. "So, the house has gone to a good home."
The Walsh family shorthand lists one sibling, Margaret, as 'good with money' and 'very practical'. What was the Keyes family shorthand for the young Marian? "I was a mini dad, a little dictator," she says. "And I still am to a degree. Like I’d be the person standing at the bottom of the stairs with the clipboard, yelling at the rest of the siblings that we are running late."
I can’t imagine that being bossed about by Marian Keyes is any great hardship; despite her global success, she says she still shoulders imposter syndrome. "Oh God yes, Donal," she says. "I wonder if the next book will be any good, but maybe that’s no bad thing."
As for her own favourite mistake, that was going into rehab for alcoholism (she’s 30 years sober). "If I hadn’t, God only knows what might have happened. I doubt if I might be alive. Rehab was the best thing that ever happened to me."
While Marian has negotiated her own dark days of alcoholism and depression, she is a ray of light. Many years back, after visiting her Aladdin’s Cave of a home, I left with a spring in my step, buoyed by an encounter that lifted the cloud of sad news received earlier that day. Keyes’ novels, with their wicked wit and lived wisdom, channel her personality: how life might be tough but we’re all in it together, beating against the current.
"I am proud of what I do," she says of her writing, once dismissed as 'chick lit’ and wrapped in pink covers (now long gone). "I always have to add the caveat that ‘Of course I’m not going to win the Booker’ because people are quick to tell me so. But what I do makes people feel happy and that’s harder to do than many might realise. I now don’t need the validation from the ‘grown-ups’ that I thought I needed. I write books that I would like to read, and there’s something powerful in that."
She is an avid reader, usually with two or three on the go at the same time. "I love books that have no fear," she says, while her own titles have tackled themes such as addiction (Rachel’s Holiday), domestic violence (Anybody Out There) and depression (The Mystery of Mercy Close).
In My Favourite Mistake, Anna is struggling with menopause. "Some people breeze through it, but an awful lot of people don’t," says Marian. "It’s like adolescence in reverse: this huge withdrawal of hormones that leaves a woman feeling so confused that they don’t recognise themselves. (My Favourite Mistake) is not a novel about menopause but it is about a woman in mid-life who is going through it, and how some doctors don’t want to prescribe HRT. Now I need to say that I’m not advocating for HRT, I couldn’t care what people do, as long as they find a way that makes them comfortable, un-anxious and able to function."
As Keyes says, "there’s no harm in a little bit of fury now and again."
Like Anna Walsh, she has learned the power of being herself but unlike her fictional heroine, a cathartic cry is harder to come by. "I’m on anti-depressants and while I feel a lot of sorrow, I’m not able to cry really," she says. "I’m very affected by what is going on in the world. I’m not able to watch hard news any more. I have not got it in me to cope with the sorrow. Nevertheless, it is still unavoidable and being online means that I know. I used to think it was incredibly irresponsible not to know of everything that was going on in the world and not to nail my colours to the mast and be vocal about injustice. But I can’t do that now, so I’m staying out of public discourse because I don’t have the personal resources or resilience."
In My Favourite Mistake we read of judgy 22-year-olds who think ageing is a choice and Botox an abomination. "I was once super judgy too and well into my 40s," says Marian. "I’d think ‘Why would anyone inject botulism into their forehead?’ But we can never know how we will feel about something until we are in it. When I began to get jowls to rival those jowly dogs, it changed my mind. And I can’t keep secrets.
"When people asked, ‘What foundation or night cream do you use?’ I said, ‘Well, I have Botox’ because I didn’t want to mislead people. But you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t. I struggled with my weight all my life and was judged, as in ‘Christ you’ve let yourself go!’. You’re meant to not age or be fat but if you do anything to counteract that, you are vain and delusional. So, I get Botox but I’m looking forward to the day when I don’t, and I am just me."
Last September, Marian Keyes celebrated her 60th birthday with her family. There was a fabulous birthday cake designed à la The Grand Budapest Hotel from the Wes Anderson film of the same name and cupcakes topped with the face of Keanu Reeves.
Was it also a time of reflection, perhaps akin to Anna Walsh, who grieves for her past selves? "I grieve but not the way Anna does," says Keyes. "I grieve because I drank through my late teens and all through my 20s. There are times I really wish that I could have uncorrupted memories of that time, but I don’t, and I won’t, and that’s how it is. It’s odd being 60, a kind of cut-off age or at least it used to be for women because that was when we had to retire."
But times have changed and isn’t 60 the new 50? Absolutely says Marian. "I still feel very excited by life and there are so many things that I still want to do. I’m in no way ready to be put out to pasture. Maybe when I’m 120."
Onwards she goes: Netflix recently announced an adaptation of her bestseller Grown Ups due on screen in 2026. "I’m an executive producer but I don’t really know what that means," says Marian of the series which will be filmed in Ireland.
"The one thing I’d really hope for (she’s not writing the screenplay) is that the dialogue is in the Irish idiom. You know those small things Irish people would never say, like ‘shall’ and how we use ‘bold’ rather than ‘naughty’?"
Naturally, she’s delighted with the TV show, but for her it’s always about the book. "I have a couple of ideas floating but who knows?" she says of her next novel. "I read a great quote from Ronan Hession recently, who said he must wait for the tide of creativity to go all the way out before it comes back in fully, and with enough depth, for him to write a book with viability. That’s so wise and true. So, I’m going to fiddle around with curtains and carpets for a while and see what comes up."
My Favourite Mistake by Marian Keyes is published by Michael Joseph.
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