Beloved author Marian Keyes reveals why 'chick lit' exposes the "hollowness" of post-feminism

This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine.

The award-winning Irish author Marian Keyes has sold millions of books in an internationally acclaimed career, but still behaves as if she has everything to prove. A few years back she was invited to be on the BBC arts programme Imagine. Her reaction? “You’ve rung me by mistake, it’s Roddy Doyle you want.”

And despite the fact that two of her novels have now been adapted into a six-part series, The Walsh Sisters – a cracking, tragicomic saga of five sisters living it large in Dublin – she still doesn’t think she deserves it.

“Well, it’s 30 years since my first book was published, and things have been suggested all the time, and nothing ever gets made, and it’s the hope that kills you,” she says. “So I just never bothered expecting it, because I felt there was no point.”

When I ask why she’s so down on herself, she widens her green eyes and looks directly at me. “Because I write popular fiction. People were so keen to tell me that that my voice was worthless and my books were worthless…” she shrugs.

Not only does Keyes write popular fiction – albeit peppered with Shakespearean allusions and quotes from the King James Bible – but that fiction often comes with pink covers. “I have stayed the course and I have defended myself for a long time, especially with men. I mean, sexism was so rife. It was OK for men to mock books with pink covers.”

The eyes get even wider. “The patriarchy was so confident. One great way of hanging on to the power and the money is to mock the things that women love. A woman might read a book and love it. And a man will say, ‘You’re not reading that pink fluff, are you?’ And immediately a woman feels foolish and embarrassed.”

Keyes is charming, but there is anger just under the smiley surface. Take her first novel, Watermelon. It deals with a number of the most urgent of female issues (single parenting, the pay gap, body dysmorphia). Yet, when it was published in 1995, it was put into a pink dust jacket and filed under a new, fluffy genre, known for its pastel dust jackets and adorned with drawings of high heels and cocktail glasses. “Chick lit. It was degrading. It was meant to be degrading. What it did was ‘defang’ post-feminism,” says Keyes wearily.

“We were told, ‘The second wave of feminism has ended, you can be anything you want.’ But women knew that was absolutely not the case. Women could not expect to get paid the same as men, to get promoted with the same speed as men, to be welcomed back after maternity leave, to have sex with the same freedom that men do – and not get judged. And that is exactly what so-called ‘chick lit’ was about,” she says, with scorn. “It was about the hollowness of post feminism. Slap a title like chick lit on; instantly, it’s defanged.”

Indeed, it blunted the weapon she wielded. Which was? “Writing about the lives of women who were confused by a world where men still had all the power. None of that was picked up. Because of the pinkness of chick lit.” Did the pink fluffiness of the covers make her change her subject? Did it hell.

“I write about women. I’m 62 now, and as I age, the women I write about get older. My focus shifts. I wish younger women well, but I can’t really relate to their lives in the same way that I used to. Now, I love the thing you have in your late 50s, of being too exhausted to care about getting your legs waxed. Or just that feeling the world won’t end if your roots are on show.” She smiles beatifically at me.

She explains she hasn’t helped with the scripting by Stefanie Preissner of The Walsh Sisters. “She didn’t ask me to, and I wouldn’t have wanted to. I like writing books. And forgive me, this sounds ungrateful, but when I finished the books, the books were done. And no matter what the series is like, the books are still the books that I wrote. Secondly, I knew Stefanie. I find her fascinating and admirable. So, I thought if anybody could do it, she could. I also felt that the producers had paid for the option. It was theirs for them to do with what they liked, and that’s the deal.”

No worries then? “Well, it was a risk, but you can’t do it without risk. I moved house recently, I sold my house to somebody else, and what they do with it is up to them. They gave me the money. It’s now their house.”

A woman who has coped with addiction and has defined herself as an “ordinary alcoholic”, Keyes clearly has enormous strength, as well as a no-nonsense approach to the vagaries of the media.

“I have used humour in the books to deal with painful subjects, and that’s a personal survival mechanism, but it’s also immensely Irish. When people told me I was crap back then, I wondered if I was, if my books were… I always knew their worth, but it was exhausting to be told, constantly, that my books counted for nothing.”

Now they count in their millions, and have presumably made Keyes an extremely wealthy woman. Not that this was the plan. “My first book was published only in Ireland, set in Ireland about Irish people. I honestly thought nobody outside of Ireland would have any interest. I still can’t believe how lucky I am.”

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The Walsh Sisters airs at 9:15pm on BBC One and iPlayer on Saturday 21 February.

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