It was lucky that the Guide managed to catch up with Marian Keyes at all. She may look calm sitting in an armchair in the swish hotel lounge -though enviously eyeing up the comfy sofa currently occupied by lunching ladies -but our chat is but a brief respite in the middle of a hectic schedule. That morning alone, one of Ireland's most popular writers has signed 500 copies of her new book Angels. The following day she's off to Hungary to do a publicity tour which is immediately followed by a fundraising trip with Concern to Ethiopia. She's also got the builders in, who basically have to take the front off the house to deal with the lintels and a little dry rot; oh, and the hotel's messed up the sandwich order, too.

"I have dysfunctional relationships with everything! Sandwiches, lintels! Maybe that's why the new book was so easy to write. The main character Maggie isn't angst -ridden at all, whereas a lot of my other characters are. They're obviously an extension of me! Writing Angels was like going on a break."

The book is yet another fine example of Marian's ability to combine gutsy humour with darker themes such as depression, failure and downright feeling bad about yourself. Though, as she says herself it's less dark than any of her previous outings.

The humour is achieved by transplanting Maggie Walsh from the heart of Dublin into the heart of LA, where she heads after the collapse of her marriage and finds herself surrounded by some of the more bizarre and colourful characters in the movie industry. The spark for the novel came from Marian's own experiences in Tinsel Town.

"My book Rachel's Holiday was optioned by Touchstone Pictures, part of Disney, in 1998 and they flew me over to LA for three days. It was crazy going all that way for three days -I usually need a week to get over a two-hour flight -but they put us up in a beautiful hotel on Sunset Strip. Everyone was buffed and tanned. All the guys who worked at the hotel were 'on' all the time, they were obviously actors looking for their big break. I ended up being so freaked out with how I looked, that I took 'agin' all my clothes and went out shopping.

'And I walked. Nobody walks in lA. The gobshite! The heat and the humidity were so bad and everyone was looking at me, it was horrible. Really weird. We had dinner with the producer and the scriptwriter in a fancy restaurant, in a private room, because they're so paranoid, and nobody ate anything. Between the ten of us, they ordered three desserts. I had to fight them off diving into mine."

Marian ended up being so intrigued and fascinated by the place that it became the setting for Angels. "But I didn't want to buy into the place. I wanted to tell it more from an outsider's point of view, someone who finds it ridiculous and bizarre." And in complete opposite to the Hollywood Wives kind of stuff, she wrote about the people who don't make it.

"I wanted to focus on people who have a dream and what happens when it doesn't work out. Maggie's life in the book looks like a failure -her marriage doesn't work out, she loses her job. Everything had gone and she had nothing left to define herself by. So what do you do when it all goes gammy; when it all falls apart? I think that's when we find out what we're capable of who we are and what we're made of."

She's a firm believer that life taking a turn for the worse doesn't always have to mean the end of the world. It's been the key throughout all of her work and it's based, quite openly and honestly, on her own life "going off the rails" and actually not turning out to be such a disaster after all.

Marian has never been shy about talking about her former battle with alcohol and depression and the fact that it's been the catalyst for a lot of the sadder moments in her books. She wrote most movingly about it in essays and articles collected in the book Under The Duvet. A whole chapter was devoted to the moment she realised she was caught in a nightmare.

Angels, however, allows her to have more opportunities for comedy.

"The possibilities for having fun were huge because of the LA way of life being so different to the Irish. The biggest laugh comes when Maggie's mammy arrives out there. I just thought it would have been such a hoot if my own mother had been there with me. We were begging her to come. She would have taken no nonsense -she'd have made them eat their dinner, never mind them going to throw up afterwards."

Maggie is very much a rounded character, however -the events which led to her arrival in LA are slowly revealed throughout the book and revealed to be heartbreaking. All the more so, because Maggie doesn't know how to process the emotions that follow from the miscarriages she suffers and her husband's infidelity. "She's no gift for introspection and it was challenging to have all these terrible things happen to her without any equipment to analyse or process them. But I think she did really well."

Reading the book and being aware of how Marian's past has informed her work, you can't help but wonder what part of Maggie's traumas she has endured herself She's clearly aware that's what I'm thinking, as she volunteers the information freely.

"It's inevitable things that have happened to me are channelled into the book. I've gone on record to say that I'd love to have children and I haven't had them, but my experience of childlessness isn't Maggie's. It was probably inevitable that I was going to write about the issue of women in their thirties wanting to have children. And when's the right time? Can you buy yourself another year? For four years it was a big concern for me and it's a concern for a lot of people I know.

"I'm very different from Maggie and the way it happened to her. My experience was just the spark. It touched a chord. Having children has become something that you put off until the last minute. I put it off until I thought I was as safe as I could be in a career and it didn't happen. I'm fine, I've made my peace with it now, but it's sad. Sad that our society isn't supportive of the issue."

Next on the agenda, however; is much more of a global issue with her fundraising trip to Ethiopia on behalf of Concern. She became involved after giving a speech on the charity's behalf about the role of women in the developing world. "I'm such a lick-arse swotty Virgo that I couldn't just wing it. I went into Concern to do loads of research and found out the most amazing facts, although they were really depressing. Uke the fact that women do two-thirds of the world's work and only earn one tenth of the world's wages and own one hundredth of the property. They told me about the co-operatives they have set up for women in many African countries and I was so enthusiastic about what I heard, they asked me if I wanted to go. Of course I did." (We'll let you know in a few weeks how Marian got on).

On return from Ethiopia it will be time for a well-earned rest. One of the disadvantages of her incredible success would appear to be living life on the road. "In the last eleven months I've been on 80 flights. In June I was on a tour of America which was just hideous, so so tough. When I got back, I crashed. I couldn't do anything I was so tired and I had to take time off"

As ever; Marian was able to find the funny moments in the midst of her exhaustion. "I was in Russia earlier this year and they were so melancholic, they were fabulous. They're so passionate in their melancholy that they love the darker side of my books! I was doing a reading in a place called Nizhny Novgorod and half the town were there because they don't get out much and nobody goes to see them. Didn't the electricity in the whole city fail -it was fabulous!

They were mortified and trying to say 'This never happens' and I was saying 'No, this is great. Can we queue for things now!' "
 

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