The Walsh family series is a collection of novels written by Marian Keyes. It is a family of five sisters: Claire, Rachel, Maggie, Anna and Helen. The series also gives a glimpse into their parents. They live in Dublin, Ireland and are going through various struggles. Keyes has written about each of them. She is an Irish novelist whose series on the Walsh family is written in the Irish setting. It literally made me cold. All the little hairs on my skin lifted and a chill settled somewhere between my ribs. Terrified, I tried to cheer myself up by having a little fret about the amount of work I’d have to do the following day, but no dice. So then I reminded myself that my parents were getting older and that I’d be the one who’d end up having to take care of them, and tried to scare myself with that instead. I had just launched into an orgy of switching stuff off when someone said, ‘Going home, Maggie?’ It was my boss, Frances, and her already? might have been silent but I still heard it. a b Hunt, Elle (12 March 2017). "Novelist Marian Keyes reveals fight against constant 'suicidal impulses' ". The Guardian . Retrieved 30 September 2017.

Liam’s broken his toe,’ Garv said. ‘His new flatscreen telly fell on it: (Liam and Elaine had every consumer durable known to man -and I stress man, not woman. Give me a mobile phone and a hair-curler and I’m happy. But Garv, being a man, yearned after digital this and Bang & Olufsen that.) ‘So tonight’s off: Keyes has written frankly about her clinical depression, which left her unable to sleep, read, write, or talk. After a long hiatus due to severe depression, a food title, Saved by Cake, was published in February 2012. [8] Which is precisely what I bought for that evening’s meal. I mounted the pavement, ran into the Spar and flung a couple of pizzas and some breakfast cereals into a basket. And then Fate intervened. Cheer up, it probably broke when it fell off the wall. And one day soon you’ll be able to afford one of your own.’ By contrast, Rachel’s Holiday was written in 1997 when Marian was living in London. At the time she had a fulltime job as an accounts clerk and was putting in a lot of work on her sobriety. There was no time for ‘Cultural Pursuits.’ She claims to be the only person on earth who has never seen a single episode of Friends. While other people were going to music festivals, she was attending AA conventions. The only movie she remembers going to around then was Fargo. She regrets nothing.

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Marian Keyes is well known for writing women’s literature based on domestic violence, drug abuse, mental illness and alcoholism. Being an Irish book award Winner with over 22 million copies of her novels have been sold worldwide. What inspired her to write about The Walsh Sisters series was during the time she developed alcoholism, depression and suicidal tendencies. Bad for most of the day. I had a nice ten minutes between four-fifteen and four-twenty-five when I stood on thefire escape and pretended I still smoked.’

It’s impossible for Marian to make a list of everyone she admires because there are just too many of them. She admits that she has a tendency for Sudden Wild Enthusiasms and can fall in love with a person for the jauntiness of their walk, for having lilac hair, for writing a funny book (Emer McLysaght and Sarah Breen), for ‘being sweet in a crime show’ (Nicola Walker and Sanjeev Bhaskar in Unforgotten), for ‘being late but in an irresistibly charming way’, for making crispy roast potatoes, for being Greta Thunberg, for owning up to a facelift (thank you, Marc Jacobs), for being brave enough to say, “Nope, that’s not for me” or for standing up for what they know to be right, even when they’re scared. We’d been married for nine years and it would be hard to say exactly when I’d started to fantasize about it ending. Not, let me tell you, because I wanted it to be over. But because I thought that if I imagined the worst possible scenario, it would somehow be insurance against it actually happening. However, instead of insuring against it, it conjured the whole bloody thing into existence. Which just goes to show. No one ever expected predictable Maggie to do something so unpredictable. And in LA, Maggie can be whoever she wants to be. Each novel in the series has its story; like in Watermelon whatever happens to Clare the readers will have to relate to her emotionally. Who knows what would have happened if I hadn’t? Did something as benign as a box of chocolates alter the entire course of my life?Keyes began writing short stories while suffering from alcoholism. After her treatment at the Rutland Centre she returned to her job in London and submitted her short stories to Poolbeg Press. The publisher encouraged her to submit a full-length novel and Keyes began work on her first book, Watermelon. The novel was published the same year. Since 1995 she has published many novels and works of non-fiction. [7] Her books deal with issues affecting the ordinary person such as depression, domestic abuse, addiction and illness. She tactless these issues in a witty, humorous and compassionate way seeking to identify with the reader while giving the reader hope. T The family is a combination of different levels of crazy portrayed in such a witty way that the reader cannot get enough of them. In 2021 and 2022, Keyes joined Tara Flynn in a series for BBC Radio 4 called 'Now You're Asking', in which they discussed problems sent in by listeners (they called them 'askers').

Marian has written five novels about the Walsh family – Watermelon, Rachel’s Holiday, Angels, Anybody Out There and The Mystery of Mercy Close – which follow sisters Claire, Rachel, Margaret, Anna and Helen. Over the years, 2.4 million readers have come to know the Walsh family as well as their own through these books. Angels centres on Maggie, the oldest and ostensibly most stable Walsh sister. Labelled in the family as the goody-goody, "plain yoghurt at room temperature", she is on the run from a broken marriage. "I've always lived a fairly blameless life," she says. "Up until the day I left my husband and then ran away to Hollywood, I'd never put a foot wrong. Not that many people knew about, anyway." In the last 15 years, Marian has spent an astonishing 153 weeks in the Sunday Times top 10, with 26 of those as No. 1.That credo is what makes Keyes's novels so interesting and so frustrating, and what makes her an artist manqué as well as a marketing phenomenon. With each novel she breaks further away from romance, and closer to the inclusive tragicomic voice of an Irish writer such as Roddy Doyle. She is brilliant at dialogue, sharply observant of manners, increasingly ambitious about narrative structure, unsentimental about the Darwinian dynamics of the family or the competition and hostility hidden in even the best friendship.