Keyes mines joys (and pains) of middle age
FICTION MY FAVOURITE MISTAKE
Marian Keyes (Michael Joseph, £22)
Marian Keyes really does do some horrible things to the poor Walsh sisters. There are now seven novels about this rambling Irish family and this is the second “middle-aged” entry. The first, Again, Rachel in 2021, followed Rachel, Keyes’s most famous character, now in her forties and estranged from her hunky ex-boyfriend Luke Costello after something truly appalling blew their world apart.
My Favourite Mistake follows the second-to-youngest sister Anna, whom we last saw in Anybody Out There? (2007), aged 33 and recovering from horrific injuries in her parents’ home in Dublin. Gradually it emerged that Anna had lost her husband Aidan in a car crash. At the end of the book, she found love again in New York with spiritual “ugly-hot” Angelo.
Matching trauma with humour is Keyes’s trademark, so it should perhaps surprise no one that this follow-up begins with Anna and Angelo breaking up during the pandemic. The split could be a mere device to set Anna up for another romantic adventure, but Keyes handles it so carefully that it is anything but. She is interested in middle age, and how it changes us. Anna is not the same person at 48 as she was, and they have simply outgrown each other.
This sends us back to Ireland, where a listless and perimenopausal Anna finds herself doing some
PR for a friend’s high-end spa retreat on the wild Irish coast.
My Favourite Mistake has all the hallmarks of a Walsh romcom: the small-town gossip of modern-day
Ireland (with zeitgeisty references to Ozempic), complete with the whole family – controlling Claire, beautiful, bitchy Helen, reformed Rachel, sensible Margaret and mad Mammy, all of whom arrive to take advantage of Anna’s corporate suite for a free holiday.
At its centre is Joey Armstrong, best bud of Luke Costello. Joey has always been a peripheral bad boy but now he is a divorced, dedicated father – and the primary
love interest. We see him working alongside Anna as local rumours and property damage threaten to derail the retreat project.
Sparks fly, as do misunderstandings, and flashbacks help us piece together why Joey and Anna are so reluctant to make a go of it. Keyes is so good at upping the tension in will they/won’t they scenarios, keeping the characterisation rich and the jokes frequent.
A lot of humour stems from middle-aged difficulties, from maintaining childhood friendships to accessing HRT. The latter becomes a matter of life and death but Keyes somehow keeps it both light and intensely important at the same time.
As is often the case with Keyes’s books, the novel isn’t short – more than 600 pages. I could have done with fewer of the interactions with small-town tradesmen, but Keyes mostly justifies the length because it takes time to set up the complicated relationships, and also to give us enough reminders of what has come before (if you haven’t read any Walsh books previously, you can easily read this one).
Life is long, and Keyes approaches it all with tenderness and insight. “My age felt irrelevant and living to the full necessary,” muses Anna, when she is not contemplating hot flushes or her mad libido. What fun it is to grow older, Keyes says (except, of course, when it’s not).