By Jessie Tu
FICTION
My Favourite Mistake
Marian Keyes
Michael Joseph, $34.99
When I was a child perusing the local library, I used to notice entire shelves of brightly coloured books with perkily animated covers — the author’s name etched in a bold, cursive font: Marian Keyes. Her books seemed to take up half the entire adult fiction section.
Throughout the years, I’ve seen them wedged in every street library or on the shelves of surf leisure resort receptions — their thick girth resembling ceramic bookends. My Favourite Mistake is her 16th novel and offers all the signature Keyesian (not Keynesian) tropes fans have come to love.
All her signature tropes are in Marian Keyes’ 16th novel.Credit: Simon Schluter
She is a master of snappy dialogue, brisk pacing and lively, sympathetic (“uniquely defective” — her own words) characters. Her books are always about ordinary (white) women, who hesitantly skitter from long-term partnerships to loosely defined statuses, from one kind of man (sensible, reliable) to another (reckless, unreliable). But the power of her personality (and her love) inevitably turns these men around, and in the end, she has her happily ever after.
Her novels broadcast a singular kind of story (adult fairytale) to a singular sort of audience (adult women). Frankly, she deserves more praise for her consistency in carving out astute, older, female characters.
Her stories are always about women and the forces they come up against, which means that they’re always about male power, because no woman in history has lived a life immune from its reaches. Keyes is not interested in questioning the broader affectations of male power (patriarchy), rather, the individual, the personal cost of being a female heterosexual. Her stories are always political, if you believe that there is nothing more political than who you sleep with.
In her latest novel, we’re jettisoned back into the lives of the Walsh sisters, with our almost 50-year-old heroine, Anna, having abandoned her high-flying NYC life in beauty PR for a quiet sea change in her motherland of Ireland.
Her relationship with her boyfriend meets its undramatic end in the Big Apple — a casualty of the pandemic – and she takes up a job doing PR for a ritzy eco-retreat in the Irish hinterlands outside Dublin; think white linen robes, organic kale smoothies, guests with chemically plumped cheekbones.
Her job? To allay the fears of a wounded community who believe that the resort will turn their little slice of paradise into the next Hollywood getaway.
Being perimenopausal hasn’t been much fun, either. And then there’s that pressing loneliness of being romantically unattached and a non-property owner at middle age, as everyone else her age seemed “anchored by … long marriages, children, homes with attic conversions, pension plans” – what has she to show?
Enter Joey Armstrong, the reckless, unreliable man she’ll turn into the Golden Husband. Winning back “the one that got away” is mission number two. This is a man who Anna is told to stay clear of: “It’s really only women that Joey is mean to.” (Red flag?) But again – adult fantasy, so we’re gunning for them to resolve their unresolved sexual chemistry. Nearing 50, the stakes are different now. Anna can take risks with her love life (and her vagina).
Even Keyes’ language is erect with libidinal force: “The landscape went full-on desolate” followed soon by: “Eventually, they became full-on mountains.”
In many ways, Keyes is writing against our contemporary miseries. When you live in a world that actively hates you for being the wrong gender and sex, you do what you can to find sanity and comfort in the things that bring you joy and hope.
Girls can go from Disney in their girlhood to Marian Keyes in their adulthood, clear eyed that the latter is just another fantasy, but circumspect enough to know the importance of them regardless of age.
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