Marian Keyes speaks to her drive to write female characters in midlife
The Irish writer spoke about her latest novel, My Favourite Mistake, on The Next Chapter
Marian Keyes has been writing so-called "happy" endings in fiction for a captive audience for 30 years. But what happens when it turns out that a character who lived "happily ever after" has more to say?
Keyes' earlier novels captured the essence of what it meant to be a young woman entering into adulthood in the early 2000s, but as her readership has grown up, so have the dilemmas at the forefront of Keyes' writing.
In My Favourite Mistake, Keyes' returns to the world of the Walsh sisters at midlife. Anna Walsh is a high-powered woman in the beauty industry with a great apartment and an accommodating husband, and yet, she still feels like something is missing.
In a sudden turn of events, Anna moves back to a small town in Ireland to help her friends with a business venture. But news travels fast, and Anna is faced with a myriad of challenges, from disgruntled locals to old flames reemerging.
Keyes is a seminal Irish writer well known for her novels following the Walsh Family, Watermelon and Again, Rachel.
The Next Chapter's Antonio Michael Downing spoke to Keyes about writing fiction as comfort.
My Favourite Mistake is your 16th novel. Do you consider this as a standalone book or as a sequel?
All of the Walsh books are standalones in that each sister gets a starring role per book and the other sisters are definitely there in the background. But each of the Walsh books is about some sort of journey. Anna had one journey in an earlier book, which was nearly 20 years ago — this is a very, very different one.
It's about arriving at middle age and realizing lots of things and I speak for myself because this came up a lot for me during lockdown.
Anna, at the start of the book, did a thing that a lot of people did post-pandemic: they found out that they no longer had stamina to go back to those incredibly demanding careers that they had pre-pandemic. That they just no longer had that grit, that fibre, or that almost abnormal drive and so she gave up her very, very terrifying job. [In] her relationship, she discovered that when they were together 24/7, they did not gel in that way. Some people fell in love during the pandemic, but other relationships fell apart simply because the circumstances changed.
So Anna has kind of done what a lot of people did, she blank-canvased everything. She'd been living in New York and she walked away from this thrilling job — well, everybody else thought it was thrilling. She lived with constant anxiety which I saw so much of. So now she has nothing, she has no job and she doesn't really have anything to define herself.
I am now the mouthy, fearless older woman.- Marian Keyes
[Perimenopause] is a very interesting time for a lot of women. There are some people who are lucky enough to sail through it, but for an awful lot of women, and I include myself in it, it's like going through adolescence in reverse, like it is almost like being taken over by some sort of terrifying beast that made made me angry and made me sweat a lot and made me anxious and made me also kind of brutally honest at times.
I used to shock myself because women are so socialized to be kind of nice and good and obliging and suddenly the nice hormone has just kind of been taken away. It's just the tide has gone out on the niceness. And I'm just there saying things that I associate with women older than me who have no fear.
Suddenly, I say, "Oh, I see! I am now the mouthy, fearless older woman." That's been kind of a trip.
You have this wonderful relationship with your readers. I was reading your blog and you share so much with them. Would it feel like betraying a friend if you suddenly had Anna do something that she would never do in one of your books?
One of the things is that my endings are always "happy." I will never abandon my character to an uncertain future. My point is really that all of us, at many stages of our lives, everything comes together just for a short while, like everything's good. Everything is okay for a while and obviously that's going to change, everything changes because we're in constant flux or in constant motion.
But I like to end my books at the moment where everything is okay. That does not set an amber, it doesn't mean that it will always be like that because it won't. I really want people to feel better about the world, about human beings and about themselves when they finish my book rather than uncertain or anxious or in a very dark place.
I've written a book about community. I've written a book about starting again in my life.- Marian Keyes
I took a deliberate step with My Favourite Mistake to provide comfort. I wanted to say, "It's okay, we've all made mistakes. We can learn to provide our own absolution." I've written a book about community.
I've written a book about starting again in my life. I've written a book about family and female friendship, which is such a badly reported part — it's the relationship that never really gets examined. I find there's so much mythology around it and there's a huge amount of shame when female friendships break up, as they inevitably do.
But there's this mythology that they are not supposed to and if they do, there is something wrong with you, the book looks at that also.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
