I'd like to thank all the booksellers and people in the media who've supported this book so strongly. Most of all, I'm deeply grateful to my readers, many of whom have been reading me for the past 25 years. Turning a book into a bestseller is very much a group effort.
This is the longest her readers have ever had to wait. For more than 20 years, the arrival of a new Marian Keyes novel has been a cause for celebration by fans of funny, clever, meaningful fiction. From the very beginning, her books were a carefully crafted combination of wit, darkness and real, complex emotion.
For Irish women who have been reading her from the beginning, she arrived on the publishing scene as a page-turning breath of fresh air. Here was a writer holding up a mirror to our twentysomething lives, doing it with heart, great humour, irreverence and superb storytelling. Her writing made us laugh at ourselves, and at life. In fact her depiction of friendships, love and family life — the Walsh family, comprising Mammy Walsh and five very different daughters who have each starred in a Keyes novel — resonated with women of all nationalities.
She should tend to lift people up, not lower them down. Writers do not merely reflect and interpret life, they inform and shape life. She went to London and did a series of jobs including waitressing. She was 30 when her alcohol abuse led to a suicide attempt and an intervention by friends and family which resulted in a three-month spell recovering in the Rutland Centre in Dublin. She had begun writing short stories just before her stint in rehab. In a hugely popular BBC Radio 4 Desert Island Discs segment last March, she told presenter Kirsty Young how at the point when her life had spiralled out of control because of alcohol, she had begun writing.
Will you live for this? In rehab Keyes read some novels that had been published by Poolbeg, and when she got out she sent them some short stories and said she had started on a novel. Keyes, newly sober and full of hope about life, set about writing Watermelon.
Keyes has often said she found her voice with her first book — her tone is always chatty and conspiratorial, like a life-enhancing chat with your funniest, most truthful friend — but discovered what she wanted to write about with her second.
I was told very early on that many authors make a career out of writing the same book over and over again. I wanted to honour women by telling their stories. There are, by the way, several very enjoyable sex scenes in The Break. Keyes writes sex brilliantly with a realism and erotic giddiness not found in a lot of popular fiction. I know somebody who had that sort of relationship and it was all sex and it was dizzying and glorious for her.
I read something recently that said there is no shame in finding out what works for you. This is a novel about marriage but it is, as all of Keyes books are, also a novel about family. There are surrogate children and step-children and ex-wives. A chaotic tribe of mischief and misfits and troublemakers. When I was growing up Ireland was so mono ethnic. I love the diversity and the different personalities.
We go on holidays together and I find them enormously entertaining. In The Break , there is a bossy eldest sister called Maura.
These experiences include drug abuse, alcoholism, domestic violence, divorce, and mental illness. Author Keyes is regarded as one of the pioneers of the chick-lit genre. Almost all the stories developed by her revolve around the life of a strong female lead, who goes on to overcome a number of obstacles in her life and finally achieves the lasting happiness.
It consists of a total of 6 books published between the years and It was published by the Arrow publication in the year At the beginning of the book, author Keyes has described a rather inauspicious romance in which the husband of the heroine leaves her for a lady living in the flat downstairs on the day of the birth of their first child.
The heroine is named Claire Walsh and the other woman is called as Denise. During this course, she seems to have gone through the stages of loneliness, loss, humiliation, and hopelessness. After living a lonely life for some time, Claire begins to feel better and starts living happily due to her affection towards her child. Her life becomes so much better that when James Webster proposes his love for her, she could not turn him down.
In return, James gets more than he had thought of. This transformation brings a lot of happiness in the life of Claire, due to which she forgets all the sorrows of her past life.
James provides Claire with all the happiness that her first husband, Adam, deprived her of. This book was released in the year by the William Morrow paperbacks. In the initial plot of the book, it is shown that the first experience of life is not too good for Rachel. Therefore, she decides to move to Manhattan, which proves to be the perfect place for an active and young Irish girl for overdoing things in her life. But, things do not turn up as she had expected, which lands her in an emergency.
Consequently, she goes on to lose her job as well as her boyfriend whom she adored her a lot. Initially, Rachel seems to be hopeful thinking that she will be a joyful time with spa treatments.
Instead, what she experiences is a number of group therapy sessions. You will be traumatised" — only to be talked down by her therapist.
It's not the first time writing has saved her. 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. She sent them to the Irish publisher Poolbeg, adding — falsely — that she had also started work on a novel, which they asked to see.
I had no idea what I was going to write. The start of Watermelon is very dramatic, I go straight into the action. 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. 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 she rewrites and rewrites until she's happy. When you're a mass-market writer, people think that you can just decide 'this happens, this happens, this happens', whereas with literary writers it's coming from their soul and their core.
But with me it does come from my soul and my core, and my soul and my core often go awol, and then I've nothing to write. Today, she has 11 novels to her name, and sales of millions around the world.
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