Marian K has got it wrong – Marian F is a true pro

MARIAN KEYES gave a brilliant interview to Marian Finucane last weekend but, ironically, it was a post-broadcast flurry of tweets that told us more about the bestselling chick-lit queen.

Annoyed at how the entire interview was taken up with her battle with depression – a subject which, in the past, Keyes, pictured, has practically promoted as her signature theme – she took to her tweet machine.

She accused Finucane of not letting her talk about happy stuff, claimed she was so upset that she couldn’t sleep for 43 hours and that even her mother was furious at the ‘interrogation’. She rounded off by accusing the interviewer of having the ‘compassion and empathy of a cardboard box’. Ouch!

Now Marian Finucane needs no defending, least of all from me, but I doubt she would be where she is today if she could not relate to people or lacks sympathy.

Anyone who heard her remarkable interview with her dying friend, Nuala O’Faolain, or saw her documentary on her late friend knows that it’s just not her style to wear her heart on her sleeve.

Unlike some female broadcasters who almost tremble with feeling and admiration for their interviewees and shower them with mawkish praise, she is a cool cucumber.

She is probing and intelligent and her greatest skill is the way she can reveal her subjects with one incisive, perfectly timed interlocution. It sets her apart from the growing army of simpering female interviewers who think their job is to conduct slushy love-ins with whoever ambles into the studio.

Perhaps that’s what Marian Keyes was expecting last weekend. But she should appreciate that her candid and illuminating interview with Marian will have helped a lot more people than a thousand girlie chats about fashion and frivolities.