Folkburned mybooks becausei backed repealing abortion ban..these peopleare zealots

MARIAN Keyes has been changing her name on Twitter. Last week, in the run-up to the Irish abortion referendum, it was Marian KEYES. Now, to celebrate Friday’s landslide vote, it’s Marian K66.4%YES.

Her one-line biography on the site does not mention the 54-year-old’s 13 international best-selling novels. It just says: “I helped Repeal the Eighth.”

“It’s the most monumental thing that’s ever happened politically to me,” she said. “It’s always enraged me. From the age of 15 I remember thinking, I am being fed a load of nonsense.

“I remember being told at school any woman who had an abortion always regretted it and suffered terrible depression afterwards. And they’re still pushing that narrative.”

Not all of her home-based fans feel the same. When she joined other celebrities to raise cash for the Repeal campaign, there was a backlash.

“Some people have burned my books,” she said in a matter of fact voice. “It wasn’t even hurtful. These people are absolutists. They are zealots. Hoping to make common ground with them is pointless.”

Marian’s most recent book, The Break, is about a couple who have a sabbatical from their marriage. While they are apart, the wife gets pregnant and makes the journey, familiar to so many Irish women, to London for an abortion.

Marian wrote The Break before the referendum was announced but when she felt change was in the air.

She said: “Normally, I wouldn’t make a decision with my head by putting in a political point as a storyline but this time I did.

“I knew something bad was going to happen to Amy which would compound the fact her husband had fe***d off and abandoned her.

“It’s only a small storyline but I lay out for people who haven’t a clue just how grim and gruelling and lonely and sorrowful it is to have to make that journey.

“To travel in secret and lie about why you’re going, to have to get the money together and not tell people what you need it for, to have a medical procedure in a foreign country, to come back still in pain w t t w r b h w