Rachel's Holiday: British Book Awards Author of the Year 2022 (Walsh Family)

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Marian Keyes has a feeling for character, an ear for dialogue and a proficiency for plotting that should make her the envy of most Booker listees. Her love and understanding of people and the foibles, follies and frailties that make them human are clear in the spaces between every line she writes. With each and every book, she proves that it's possible to be profound while being hilariously funny. Margaret,’ I said briskly, ‘there’s nothing wrong with me. I’m sorry you’ve had a wasted journey, but please go away and take your husband with you. This is all a big, huge, terrible mistake.’ It comes with a plethora of insights from all sorts of people who have read it, loved it, and read it again. Even Mum, although she wouldn’t admit to it. She liked to pretend that she liked everyone, in the hope that it might help her jump the queue into Heaven.

For once, I was entirely caught up on my work. My caseload was always heavy and my obsessive tendencies probably didn’t help—I usually researched my patients so thoroughly that I could have gone undercover and lived as them.” Saying goodbye to fun and freedom will be hard - and losing the man who might just be the love of her life will be even harder. My husband hasn’t left me,’ I protested in my defence. ‘That’s because you haven’t got one,’ said Paul. My most humungous apologies for the delay in posting this, the year of 2021 is having a lot of fun with me, in a health perspective, and causing no ends of trouble. My heartfelt thanks to the wonderful Chloe at FMCM Associates, who invited me to join in the 25th anniversary celebrations of the first publication, of the incredible ‘Rachel’s Holiday’, the second in the Walsh family novels by Marian Keyes.As in an Austen novel or Strictly Come Dancing (she’s a huge fan: this past season “was just beyond beautiful”), real-life contemporary events rarely enter her fictional worlds, but hints at her disillusionment with Irish politics have started creeping in: soaring house prices in Grown Ups, for example. “It’s an abomination.” Published at the beginning of 2020, Grown Ups is her most structurally ambitious novel. She was particularly pleased with “the restraint” with which she wrote the three male characters, “not just as the love rat or the love interest,” she says. “I think on a sentence-by-sentence level I’ve improved, because I hadn’t a clue when I started,” she continues. “But the essentials, telling stories about people’s lives, have remained pretty much the same.”

Margaret was only a year older than me but it felt more like forty. She was intent on ferrying me to Ireland to the bosom of my family. Where I would stay briefly before being admitted to some Betty Ford type place to sort me out ‘For good and for all’, as my father said when he rang me. I've seen no mention of a love interest, since the blurb mentions she was dumped by "a boyfriend she adores". How can that be? So, what happened was, instead of reading a nice light romance, I spent most of the book pissed off at Luke. He should be with her during the lowest time of her life. Even after discovering the horrors of her betrayal and her disloyalty, I was still determined to be pissed of at him. Yes, I find that I am disgustingly loyal to my main characters. So sue me.

Short stories to keep

Although many of her novels are known as comedies, they revolve around dark themes, often drawn from Keyes's own experiences, including domestic violence, drug abuse, mental illness, divorce and alcoholism. Keyes considers herself a feminist, and has chosen to reflect feminist issues in many of her books. [4] Marian Keyes is a phenomenon. The multi-million copy, internationally bestselling author of some of the most widely loved, genre-defying novels of the past thirty years – such as Rachel’s Holiday, Anybody Out There and Grown Ups – has millions of fans around the world. They are irresistibly drawn by her warmth and wit, fearless honesty, relatable characters and relationships, and sheer storytelling magic. Not only has Marian inspired and entertained countless readers, but also the next generation of writers too.

Rachel Walsh and Marian Keyes go together like sisters. Like friends. Of course they do – Marian wrote Rachel, invented her. But it's more than that. So much more. In Rachel, Marian invites us into a very intimate place, a place we suspect is deep inside Marian. Anyone who's come across Marian will know that if you join her there, you're in for belly laughs and gut punches in equal measure. Marian lets us understand Rachel and all her clamorous demons, most especially her powerful shame in this phenomenally transformative book. I love Marian's writing, because I remember it. I remember it because it's the truth. With big laughs. Marian Keyes is contemporary fiction. Damn her to hell.

Reviews

Rachel is the second Walsh sister to feature in a novel of her own, the first being the story of her sister, Claire, in 1997’s ‘Watermelon’. But then Brigit stumbled across a piece of paper that I’d been attempting to write on just before I fell asleep. It was just the usual maudlin, mawkish, self-indulgent poetry-type rubbish I often wrote when I was under the influence. Stuff that seemed really profound at the time, where I thought I’d discovered the secret of the universe, but that caused me to blush with shame when I read it in the cold light of day, the bits that I could read, that is. Keyes always writes a happy ending, “because you can’t depend on real life to do it for you”. After her father died of Alzheimer’s in 2018 she “mainlined” Mills & Boon novels. And she doesn’t think upbeat conclusions are “entirely unrealistic”; it’s just a question of timing. “In every life we have ups and downs, times of awfulness and hopelessness and then things sort of come together for a while. I always like to finish at the good bits.” I read Rachel's Holiday after I was hospitalizsed for anorexia and bulimia. There's a scene in which Rachel takes coke alone and my reaction was scornful – who does drugs by themselves, like a loser? And a tiny voice inside me whispered, you do this. You use food in the same furtive way. You're an addict, just like Rachel. That's the power of Marian Keyes. She will make you laugh and make you cry, but she will also reveal the truth of who you really are. Her work is laugh-out-loud funny, compulsively readable, and yet there is always that dark heart, pulsing at its core. I can think of few other writers who have the same innate understanding of human nature as she does, and even fewer who make it look so effortless. In short, she is one of our finest authors, and Rachel's Holiday is a modern classic. Twenty-five years ago, Rachels' Holiday was published and there are millions of us who were overjoyed when we learnt that Marian Keyes had penned the sequel. Whilst Rachel's Holiday was not the first book about the Walsh family; Watermelon takes that place and was published a couple of years prior to Rachel, there is no doubt that Rachel's Holiday was the book that really made us readers fall for the family.