The novelist Marian Keyes, 41, lives in Dun Laoghaire, near Dublin, with her husband Tony Baines, who works as her PA.
I HAD all my parents’ attention until I was 3 and my mother went into labour with the first of my four siblings. Dad said that he had to take her to the hospital and I asked if she couldn’t take the bus. I was very anxious and my greatest horror, when I started school, was what I was missing out on at home.
My mother is extraordinarily affectionate and we still sit holding hands. My father was quite controlling but it was done out of love; he had escaped poverty through studying in the evening to become an accountant. When I was 9, my mother spent six weeks in hospital with a back condition. The twins were 2 and never stopped crying. Even now, when I hear that shrill crying I get a knot in my stomach. I would beg the little ones to be good. I was afraid Dad wouldn’t come home to Galway from his job in Dublin because it was so hellish. I took everything to heart and lived with a sense of impending doom.
We moved to Dublin and I became a rebel at 14 but I was a pitifully suburban wannabe punk. I had my first relationship with a boy at 14. It was very chaste. At 15, I fell in love with a big, blond rugby player. I was immature, had tantrums if he looked at another girl and was always getting him to prove he loved me. I was hideously insecure. I compared myself unfavourably with my sister. Boys were mad about her. I was in my late twenties before I stopped feeling jealous of her. At 36, Caitriona is still beautiful and I can say that now without pain and feel only pride in her. I still feel responsible for my siblings, although the youngest are 32. They laugh at me and call me a control freak.
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I studied law in Dublin and had a three-year relationship with someone who was clever and witty. I was self-destructive, manipulative and desperate for reassurance. I took my unhappiness to London, where I became a waitress and worked in an accounts office. Drinking made me forget my shyness and soon my only relationship was with alcohol. I never saw the second half of a play, lost a lot of friends and was a nightmare to work with.
I picked men who endorsed my wretched sense of self-esteem. They treated me badly and I was compliant. In January 1994 I attempted suicide by overdose, and that was the catalyst for getting into rehab. It was the end of the greatest love affair of my life. Back in Ireland my father greeted me with kindness and said: “We can fix this.” He paid the rent on my flat and my job was kept open for me. Then in London, Tony, a friend of my flatmate, asked me out. This was completely different from other relationships. He courted me in an old-fashioned way and we talked a lot. One day I saw him coming round the corner to collect me. It had just finished raining, the smell of wet leaves was in the air and I knew that I loved him. It was shocking but I felt I could trust my feelings.
They say everyone marries their father, and in a way I did. They have the same sense of solidity. After so many years of messiness, I admired his kindness and reliability, things I wouldn’t have put a value on in my previous life. We married in 1995 and moved to Ireland in 1997, when Tony became my dogsbody. He had had a good job in IT but my success as a writer didn’t change our relationship, which is a credit to him.
I wanted a large family and he was game. We had fun thinking of names but it never happened. It has been a source of grief for both of us. We haven’t adopted because I didn’t want any child, I wanted his child. My brother and his wife are very generous, letting us mind their babies.
I am so blessed in Tony. He reads what I write on a daily basis and is honest but gentle with it. I can lose my rag and he comes back with firm kindness. I don’t need an alpha male around and he is without ego. Your relationship with yourself is the foundation stone of all other relationships. I had to learn to love myself before I could let anyone else love me.
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The Other Side of the Story by Marian Keyes, Michael Joseph, £12.99.