Best selling Irish novelist Marian Keyes has revealed how she fought recurring suicidal urges during the worst period of her mental illness.
The writer made the revelation during an appearance on the BBC radio programme Desert Island Discs during which she spoke about her struggle with alcoholism and depression.
During an 18-month period beginning in 2009, the writer said she struggled not to harm herself. She was no longer able to eat, sleep and interact with others and she ended up in hospital.
“Then the suicidal impulses started and it was very hard physically to stop myself from going through with it,” she said. “For months and months, every day was an enormous effort not to do the acts of wounding myself.”
However, Keyes revealed that her recovery was 'really speedy.' “Nothing worked but the passage of time … It's an illness and it ran its course."
In the programme she makes a clear distinction between the 'melancholy or depressive' feelings she had hitherto experienced and the serious illness that struck her some years ago. "Anything I had before was a blue day by comparison. This was altered perceptions, a mental illness.”
Keyes' novel The Mercy of Mystery Close dates from that period. In 2013, she told the Guardian newspaper that the scene in which the heroine plotted to kill herself in a hotel room was inspired by her own life.
"I had two goes, going out assembling the whole kit and buying paper and Sellotape to write the note," she said, elaborating on that experience and the connection with her protagonist Helen.. "The conversation Helen has with the man in the shop, I actually had that, with him asking: ‘What is it you’re proposing to cut?’
"It was so bizarre to be standing in a DIY shop, buying a knife to open my veins with. I was absolutely going through who would find me … I wasn't in my right mind." In the course of the Desert Island Discs programme, Keyes also spoke about her battles with alcoholism and her drinking while living in London.
The 53-year old writer's 12 novels have sold 35 million copies in total and have been published in 33 languages. Her 13th book, Calling The Breaks, will be released on September 7.
