Writer Marian Keyes: I’ve been sober for 30 years

SHE wrote a best-selling novel about a woman becoming sober. And now, two decades after releasing Rachel’s Holiday, Irish author Marian Keyes is celebrating 30 years of being teetotal herself.

Revealing the milestone, she admitted that it ‘broke my heart to stop drinking’, but ‘if I’d kept drinking, I’d probably be dead by now’.

The broadcaster and author, pictured, went to rehab for her alcoholism in January 1994 after a suicide attempt when she was 30, and she has not had a drink since.

In an Instagram post last week, the 60- year- old said: ‘When I realised that the game was up with alcohol, I was devastated. I didn’t think I was an alcoholic, I just thought life was hard, but facing a life without it – I thought I’d be better off dead.

‘As the sober seconds of my life began to stack up, I discovered how wrong I’d been about everything. I only truly began living when I said goodbye to alcohol.’

Her post was flooded with comments from the likes of Elizabeth Day, who wrote How To Fail, and Jojo Moyes, author of Me Before You, thanking and congratulating Ms Keyes.

Four months before she gave up drinking she wrote a short story and sent it to a publisher on a whim. The year after she left rehab her first novel Watermelon was published.

Then, in 1997, Ms Keyes released Rachel’s Holiday – about a woman in rehab – which sold more than 1.5million copies.

She wrote on Instagram: ‘I am so happy. I’m not trying to boast but I’m just telling anyone out there who is struggling that it is possible to do this one second at a time.’