‘I was just in the shower thinking about Marian Keyes’

If, like me, your attention span is short enough that you can’t even take a shower without filling your ears with voices or song then I highly recommend a waterproof speaker. I got one from Harvey Norman for about twenty quid (Harvey didn’t pay me to say that) and it really is a step up from putting your phone in a mug and struggling to hear it over the splash of the water and your own thoughts about how the world is divided into people who do wash their legs in the shower and people who don’t.

This morning, like so many others, I wanted some familiarity, so I fired up an old favourite: Marian Keyes on Desert Island Discs. I thought about how much I loved her song choices (Downtown, Cranes in the Sky, Tears Dry on Their Own) and how much her words about commercial fiction by women have influenced how I feel about being a woman writing commercial fiction. I feel valid, I feel important, and I feel armed to push back on the idea that being popular or commercial or writing for women is less worthy.

“I’m a woman,” Marian says as I dutifully pour out a blob of shampoo the “size of a fifty-pence piece” on to my palm, even though I haven’t seen a fifty-pence piece in about 12 years, but the magazines have been brainwashing me since I was a preteen. “I’m a woman,” she says, “If we like something, by telling us it’s rubbish, it makes us feel silly for liking it in the first place.”

Childhood favourites

My first Marian Keyes books probably coincided with the last time I read unselfconsciously for years. Watermelon, Lucy Sullivan is Getting Married and Rachel's Holiday came out in the mid- to late-1990s and would have rubbed shoulders with all the Helen Forresters, Judy Blumes, Sue Townsends and Lucy Maud Montgomerys on my shelves. Obviously, there was a well-thumbed copy of Flowers in the Attic, a few Maeve Binchys robbed from my mother and Irish childhood favourites such as The Secret of the Ruby Ring, Under the Hawthorn Tree, Amelia, Across the Barricades and Daisy Chain War. Almost everything I read was by women and I didn't know it yet, but Marian was right: liking things by women and for women was considered the lower-brow option.

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She's documented her periods of ill health with severe depression and made living with mental illness an easier thing to talk about in the context of being able to work and function, or not

Luckily though, Marian has also been right in calling it out as bullshit. She’s repeated over and over again in interviews that she’s proud of the books she’s written and she’s glad they’ve found the audiences who needed them most. She’s been told that if she stopped writing “funny” books then maybe she’d be taken a bit more seriously – but surely the two are not mutually exclusive? She’s survived the “chick-lit” gatekeeping and – surprise, surprise – didn’t find a corresponding “dick-lit” section on her way with navy blue covers and all-caps fonts for men. Now, as she prepares to release a sequel – Again, Rachel – to her beloved and acclaimed 1997 novel Rachel’s Holiday, she’s a colossus of publishing and an inspirational force across the board.

Rachel’s Holiday, a comic and heartbreaking tale of a Dublin woman’s addiction and rehabilitation, is a classic of Irish literature. It’s a masterclass in its use of the titular Rachel as an unreliable narrator. It deals with themes of addiction and relationships and mental health in ways some literary tomes could only dream of. It’s the book I’ve reread the most times. It’s a book that prompts people to contact Keyes to tell her it helped them to get clean and sober.

Fantasised

It's a book that my Aisling co-writer, Sarah Breen, and I always had in our shared apartments in our 20s. When we signed our first book deal and panicked about writing in first or third person we turned to Rachel's Holiday for guidance. When we finished our first Aisling book, in 2017, we fantasised about somehow getting it into Marian's hands and within a few weeks our hero was on social media talking about how much she loved our creation and beseeching everyone to read it. In the years since, I've seen her display similar generosity to other authors amid extremely relatable admissions of despising everything she herself is currently writing. She's documented her periods of ill health with severe depression and made living with mental illness an easier thing to talk about in the context of being able to work and function, or not.

Earlier, as I was giving my legs a cursory scrub and listening to Desert Island Discs, I was thinking about what an impact Marian Keyes has had on my life and on my career as a writer. I wondered if I could I find any snippets of Sarah and I fantasising about getting on her radar. Sitting in my towel on my bed for the customary 40 minutes, I typed Marian’s name into my WhatsApp search bar and scrolled way, way back to the earliest mentions.

On May 28th, 2017, Sarah Breen typed: “Was just in the shower there thinking about Marian Keyes…”