I thought of suicide 40 times every day, Marian Keyes admits
SHE is an accomplished novelist who has sold more than 30 million books. But even at the height of her success, Marian Keyes was privately so racked with depression that she contemplated suicide 40 times a day.
Today she tells in candid detail how she found it ‘very hard’ to stop herself acting on those impulses and had to make ‘an enormous effort’ not to self-harm.
And she speaks of her stays in a psychiatric hospital – although none of the treatments she tried worked, and the torment only lifted as the disease of depression ‘ran its course’.
Ms Keyes, 53, tells how the anguish came out of the blue in 2009.
‘It started quite suddenly,’ she explains on Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs today. ‘I was at a barbecue one Sunday afternoon and I started to feel intense anxiety and I couldn’t understand it. Everything inside me started to speed up. I started to feel like I was dreaming that the people I was talking to weren’t real.
‘It got worse and worse... I had never experienced anything like it. I stopped being able to sleep. I stopped being able to eat. I couldn’t have conversations.’
Her condition deteriorated to the point where she was admitted to a psychiatric hospital. But Ms Keyes recalls: ‘I thought I’d feel safe in there, and I felt even less safe. I came out, and went back in again.
‘Then the kind of suicidal impulses started. It was very hard to physically stop myself from going through with it. For months and months every day was an enormous effort to not do the acts of wounding myself.’
She tells interviewer Kirsty Young that the most intense period, when she considered killing herself 40 times a day, went on for 18 months.
Ms Keyes – who has tackled subjects such as depression, domestic violence and alcoholism in her books – says none of the cures and therapies she tried helped her. But in 2014
she suddenly found herself coming out of the abyss. She says: ‘Nothing worked but the passage of time. It [depression] ran its course. It’s an illness and it ran its course.’
Ms Keyes suffered anxiety as a child in Ireland in the 1960s and 1970s, when she was so scared of being late for school she wore her uniform to bed under her nightdress. ‘I was always afraid,’ she says. ‘Fear and shame are my two core emotions, always were.’
Her battle with depression followed an earlier struggle with alcoholism when she moved from Ireland to London and took up a bohemian lifestyle in a squat. But she says: ‘As my addiction got worse so did my denial. Alcohol was the love of my life; it was my best friend.’
Salvation would come after Ms Keyes decided to write for the first time, and she has now been sober for 23 years. She says: ‘One afternoon I was at home when I should have been at work and I read a short story in a magazine and something in me said, “You could do that”. I got a pen and paper and started writing there and then. It didn’t get me sober, but it gave me something to hope for.’ Desert Island Discs is on Radio 4 today at 11.15am.