![]() It featured Claire, a young woman ditched by her perfect husband an hour after the birth of their daughter, and Claire's wacky Irish family, the Walshes, who, like Keyes's own family, included five siblings. Watermelon, published in 1995, the same year she got married. My usual reaction would have been to back away and hope I never ran into her, but I was in this new place." The result was "It was one of those 'Oh my God' moments. Unfortunately, editor Kate Cruise O'Brien wanted to see it. When she got out she packaged her stories off to the Irish publisher Poolbeg with a letter falsely claiming she was working on a novel. ![]() She didn't stop drinking at first, but she did start writing, completing five stories in the next few months before she returned to Ireland after a suicide attempt and finally went into rehab. ![]() "I thought, I would like to do that," she recalls. ![]() ![]() She was a suicidally unhappy single 29-year-old stuck in a dead-end London admin job and increasingly forgoing heavy social drinking for the convenience of private binges when she read a short story that had won a writing contest in a magazine. Besides, happy endings do happen after all, the cozily married, best-selling, 42-year-old author is living one herself. ![]()
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