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ANYBODY OUT THERE? by Marian Keyes
On Sale: April 24th
Paperback
464 pages
ISBN-10: 0061240850
ISBN-13: 9780061240850
Marian Keyes has introduced readers to the lives, loves, and foibles of the five Walsh sisters -- Claire, Maggie, Rachel, Helen, and Anna -- and their crazy mammy. In this funny, heartbreaking, and triumphant new tale set in the Big Apple, it's Anna's turn in the spotlight.
Life is perfect for Anna Walsh. She has the "Best Job in the World" as a PR exec for a top-selling urban beauty brand, a lovely apartment in New York, and a perfect husband -- the love of her life, Aidan Maddox. Until the morning she wakes up in her mammy's living room in Dublin with stitches in her face, a dislocated knee, and completely smashed-up hands -- and no memory of how she got there. While her mammy plays nursemaid (just like all of her favorite nurses on her soaps), and her sister Helen sits in wet hedges doing her private investigator work for Lucky Star PI, Anna tries to get better and keeps wondering why Aidan won't return her phone calls or e-mails.
Recuperating from her injuries, a mystified Anna returns to Manhattan. Slowly beginning to remember what happened, she sets off on a search to find Aidan -- a hilarious quest involving lilies (she can't stop smelling them), psychics, mediums, and anyone in the city who can promise her a reunion with her beloved...
Written in her classic style, marrying the darker parts of life with humor and wit, ANYBODY OUT THERE? is Marian Keyes's best novel to date, a wonderfully charming look at love here and ever after.
Marian Keyes is the author of eight novels and two essay collections. She lives in Ireland with her husband and their two imaginary dogs.
Anna Walsh is a wreck. Recuperating in Ireland following her massive injuries from a car accident, she has been dubbed "Frankenstein" by the local youth. Anna heals quickly in the bosom of her large, quirky family, whom Marian Keyes fans will know well --- this is the fourth book featuring a Walsh sister. She's eager, but bordering on anxious, to get back to her real life in New York City, to her "best job in the world" (PR rep for the hip cosmetics brand Candy Grrrl) and to her beloved husband, Aidan.
Through flashbacks, we learn about Anna's past --- how she moved to New York, how she landed her glamorous job, how she met Aidan and married him following a whirlwind romance. Anna's history makes it clear that she and Aidan are the real deal --- their love is as true as it gets --- so why has Aidan mysteriously disappeared, refusing to respond to Anna's email and voice mail messages?
Desperate to reconnect with Aidan, Anna goes to great lengths --- consulting horoscopes, dubious fortunetellers, even the psychic to the stars --- without much success. Only a letter from Aidan's ex-girlfriend promises to bring Anna a different kind of connection to her husband, one she wasn't looking for but that promises to change her life forever.
As the extent of Anna's loss becomes clear to readers, Keyes's novel develops an emotional depth that exceeds any of her books to date. Keyes has always been known as an author whose novels surpass the Chick Lit tag with which they are often labeled. The heartbreaking story of grief and hesitant renewal in ANYBODY OUT THERE? has few easy answers and happy endings; instead, Keyes delivers a compelling, honest portrait of a woman who has lost herself and isn't quite sure if she's ready to be found. "Would I be holding my breath forever," Anna asks herself, "waiting for the world to right itself?"
All this probably sounds like a bit of a downer, but rest assured that Keyes's trademark collection of diverse, eccentric characters is back, including Anna's busybody mother and private investigator sister, both of whom correspond with Anna by means of hilarious emails. Anna's job and the foibles of life in the Big Apple also provide plenty of fodder for Keyes's observant humor. Fans of her previous novels will find much to treasure here, while readers who are being introduced to Keyes's talents for the first time will rush to scoop up the other novels about the Walsh family (WATERMELON, RACHEL'S HOLIDAY, and ANGELS).
--- Reviewed by Norah Piehl
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60 Second Interview with Marian Keyes
Marian Keyes, 37, claimed the mantle of chick-lit queen with her first offering, Rachel's Holiday, and since then her Midas touch has gilded everything she's written. In Sushi for Beginners, Keyes transplants the action to the back-stabbing, freebie grabbing climate of Dublin's magazines, where heroine Ashling Kennedy tries to keep her head above water and out of her bitch boss's radar.
Are you incredibly superstitious?
Mediumly, yes. I always read my horoscope and I'm more inclined to believe it when it's bad rather than when it promises good things. My mother is a card-carrying Catholic so whenever I want or need something I make her say prayers for me. She's been a pretty busy woman.
Has the sex'n'shopping book usurped the Aga saga?
Sex and shopping was about ten year ago, then came the Aga saga and now it's come full circle and we're back to the full-blown sex and shopping novel again - ordinary girls have become glam again: lad lit's probably up next.
Celebrity death-match between Bridget Jones and Ashling Kennedy, who would win?
Oh Bridget, I'm sure. I don't think Ashling has the anger. Then again she's very practical, she may well have some kind of rape device in her handbag. OK, I think it would be neck and neck but despite her practicalities Ashling would probably talk Bridget down, persuade her out to the pub.
You've been called the hottest young female writer in Britain, how does the mantle fit?
It's an enormous compliment but I don't wake up in the morning and think: 'Wa-hey, I'm the voice of the nation.' It's wonderful to think what I'm writing is touching chords as I'm very honest in my books and the fact it has such a wide identification makes me feel better. I always though I was kind of weird - clearly I'm not.
You're naturally shy, has it abated any?
I'm still very easily intimidated but as I've got older I've got less neurotic, less judgmental, more accepting of myself. It's a lovely, compensatory aspect of growing older, that those voices in your head recede. Your hair might be going grey but the voices in your head aren't as loud.
How do you do your writing?
I always write from my bed, under the duvet. It's 11 am now and I'm still in my nightdress. I start at around 7.30 or 8 am and do a full eight hours.
You did a job at the Irish Tatler to research Sushi for Beginners; was it all back-stabbing and freebies?
It was a lot tougher and a lot less glamour that I'd imagined. The big surprise is they work very, very hard. It was a small team, they work long hours and they were all good at multi-tasking. The whole thing with freebies is they stay at the top of the foodchain and there's no trickle-down. It was good to demystify that.
What's your idea of pure, unadulterated bliss?
A big box of Maltesers, a foot massage and a holiday brochure.
Richard Nixon, Jeremy Beadle or Noel Edmonds - and you have to sleep with one of them.
Oh, you're evil, they're terrible ones. Well, I think Richard Nixon is a very bad man and Noel's jumpers are absolutely awful. I think it's going to have to be Jeremy Beadle as the least awful option.
Who's your ideal Milky Way man - the man you can metaphorically eat between meals without losing your appetite?
Keanu Reeves. I was always very fond of him. I think he's very well meaning, he's got heart and he's a beautiful looking man.
After your own personal struggles you were very vocal about alcoholism and depression. Do you regret that now?
That was one of the things I was thinking about when I went so public, that it's nothing to be ashamed of. It's a condition like diabetes. Nobody wilfully decides to become an alcoholic. It we could be more accepting and more open, I think people would be able to unburden themselves and get support. But the whole area has been taboo for so long, I think this really hindered people in getting help.
Your books hinge on searching for happiness, have you finally found it?
God, I'll touch wood here. I spent all my life yearning, wanting my life to be different, wanting me to be different. Now, well, I'm not throwing my hat up in the air every day but I am very accepting of myself and very, very grateful for what I have. I suppose you can't say fairer than that.
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Prologue
There was no return address on the envelope, which was a little weird. Already I was slightly uneasy. Even more so when I saw my name and address…
The sensible woman would not open this. The sensible women would throw it in the bin and walk away. But, apart from a short period between the ages of twenty nine and thirty, when had I ever been sensible? So I opened it.
It was a card, a watercolour of a bowl of droopy-looking flowers. And flimsy enough that I could feel something inside. Money, I thought? A cheque? But I was just being sarcastic, even though there was no-one there to hear me and, anyway, I was only saying it in my own head. And indeed, there was something inside: a photograph. Why was I being sent this? I already had loads. Then I saw that I was wrong. It wasn’t him at all. And suddenly I understood everything.
Chapter One
Mum flung open the sitting-room door and announced, “Morning, Anna, time for your tablets.”
She tried to march briskly, like nurses she’d seen on hospital dramas but there was so much furniture in the room that instead she had to wrestle her way towards me.
When I’d arrived in Ireland eight weeks earlier, I couldn’t climb the stairs, because of my dislocated kneecap, so my parents had moved a bed downstairs into the Good Front Room.
Make no mistake, this was a huge honour: under normal circumstances we were only let into this room at Christmas time. The rest of the year, all familial leisure activities --- television-watching, chocolate-eating, bickering --- took place in the cramped converted garage, which went by the grand title of Television Room.
But when my bed was installed in the GFR there was nowhere for the other fixtures --- tasselled couches, tasselled armchairs --- to go. The room now looked like a discount furniture store, where millions of couches are squashed in together, so that you almost have to clamber over them like boulders along the seafront.
“Right, Missy.” Mum consulted a sheet of paper, an hour-by-hour schedule of all my medication - antibiotics, anti-inflammatories, anti-depressants, sleeping pills, high-impact vitamins, painkillers which induced a very pleasant floaty feeling, and a member of the valium family which she had ferried away to a secret location.
All the different packets and jars stood on a small elaborately-carved table - several china dogs of unparallelled hideousness had been shifted to make way for them and now sat on the floor looking reproachfully at me --- and Mum began sorting through them, popping out capsules and shaking pills from bottles.
My bed had been thoughtfully placed in the window bay so that I could look out at passing life. Except that I couldn’t: there was a net curtain in place that was as immovable as a metal wall. Not physically immovable, you understand, but socially immovable: in Dublin suburbia brazenly lifting your nets to have a good look at ‘passing life’ is a social gaffe akin to painting the front of your house Schiaperelli pink.
Besides, there was no passing life. Except… actually, through the gauzy barrier, I’d begun to notice that most days an elderly woman stopped to let her dog wee at our gatepost --- sometimes I thought the dog, a cute black and white terrier, didn’t even want to wee, but it was looking as if the woman was insisting.
“Okay, Missy.” Mum had never called me ‘Missy’ before all of this. “Take these.” She tipped a handful of pills into my mouth and passed me a glass of water. She was very kind really, even if I suspected she was acting out a part.
“Dear Jesus,” a voice said. It was my sister Helen, just home from a night’s work. She stood in the doorway of the sitting room, looked around at all the tassles and asked, “How can you stand it?”
Helen is the youngest of the five of us and still lives in the parental home, even though she’s twenty-nine. But why would she move out, she often asks, when she’s got a rent-free gig, cable telly and a built-in chauffeur (Dad). The food, of course, she admits, is a problem, but there are ways around everything.
“Hi Honey, you’re home,” Mum said. “How was work?”
After several career changes, Helen --- and I’m not making this up, I wish I was --- is a private investigator. Mind you, it sounds far more dangerous and exciting than it is, she mostly does white collar crime and ‘domestics’ - where she has to get proof of men having affairs. I would find it terribly depressing but she says it doesn’t bother her because she’s always known that men were total scumbags.
She spends a lot of time sitting in wet hedges with a long-range lens, trying to get photographic evidence of the adulterers leaving their lovenest. She could stay in her nice, warm, dry car but then she tends to fall asleep and miss her mark.
“Mum, I’m very stressed,” she said, “Any chance of a valium?”
“No.”
“My throat is killing me. Warcrime sore. I’m going to bed.”
Helen, on account of all the time she spends in damp hedges, gets a lot of sore throats.
“I’ll bring you up some ice-cream in a minute, pet,” Mum said. “Tell me, I’m dying to know, did you get your mark?”
Mum loves Helen’s job, nearly more than she loves mine and that’s saying a lot. (Apparently, I have The Best Job In The World TM.) Occasionally, when Helen is very bored or scared, Mum even goes to work with her; the Case of the Missing Woman comes to mind. Helen had to go to the woman’s apartment, looking for clues (air tickets to Rio etc, as if…) and Mum went along because she loves seeing inside other people’s houses. She says it’s amazing how dirty people’s homes are when they’re not expecting visitors. This gives her great relief, making it easier to live in her own less-than-pristine crib. However, because her life had begun to resemble, however briefly, a crime drama, Mum got carried away and tried to break down the locked apartment door by running at it with her shoulder --- even though, and I can’t stress this enough, Helen had a key. And Mum knew she had it. It had been given to her by the missing woman’s sister and all Mum got for her trouble was a badly mashed shoulder.
“It’s not like on the telly,” She complained afterwards, kneading the top of her arm.
Then, earlier this year, someone tried to kill Helen. The general consusus was not so much shock that such a dreadful thing would happen, as amazement that it hadn’t come to pass much sooner. Of course, it wasn’t really an attempt on her life. Someone threw a stone through the television-room window during an episode of Eastenders --- probably just one of the local teenagers expressing his feelings of youthful alienation, but the next thing Mum was on the phone to everyone, saying that someone was trying to ‘put the frighteners’ on Helen, that they ‘wanted her off the case’. As ‘the case’ was a small, office fraud inquiry where an employer had Helen install hidden camera to see if his employees were nicking printer cartridges, this seemed a little unlikely. But who was I to rain on their parade --- and that’s what I would have been doing: they’re such drama queens they actually thought this was exciting. Except for Dad and only because he was the one who had to sweep up all the broken glass and sellotape a plastic bag over the hole until the glazier arrived, approximately six months later. (I suspect Mum and Helen live in a fantasy world, where they think someone’s going to come along and turn their lives into a massively successful tv series. In which, they will, it goes without saying, play themselves.)
“Yes, I got him. Ding-dong! Right, I’m off to bed.” Instead she stretched out on one of the many couches. “The man spotted me in the hedge, taking his picture.”
Mum’s hand went to her mouth, the way a person would on telly, if they wanted to indicate anxiety.
“Nothing to worry about,” Helen said. “We had a little chat. He asked for my phone-number. Cack-head,” she added with blistering scorn.
That’s the thing about Helen: she’s very beautiful. Men, even those she’s spying on for their wives, fall for her. Despite me being three years older than her, she and I look extremely similar: we’re short with long dark hair and almost identical faces. Mum sometimes confuses us with each other, especially when she’s not wearing her glasses. But, unlike me, Helen’s got some magic pull. She operates on an entirely unique frequency, which mesmerises men; perhaps on the same principle of the whistle that only dogs can hear. When men meet the two of us, you can see their confusion. You can actually see them thinking, They look the same, but this Helen has bewitched me like a drug, whereas that Anna is just so-what…
Not that it does the men in question any good. Helen boasts that she’s never been in love and I believe her. She’s unbothered by sentimentality and has contempt for everyone and everything.
Even, Luke, Rachel’s boyfriend - well fiance now. Luke is so dark and sexy and testosteroney that I dread being alone with him. I mean, he’s a lovely person, really really lovely, but just, you know… all man. I both fancy him and am repelled by him, if that makes any sense and everyone --- even Mum --- I’d say even Dad --- is sexually attracted to him. Not Helen though.
All of a sudden Mum seized my arm --- luckily, my unbroken one --- and hissed, in a voice throbbing with excitement. “Look! It’s Jolly Girl, Angela Kilfeather. With her Jolly Girl girlfriend! She must be home visiting!”
Angela Kilfeather was the most exotic creature that ever came out of our road. Well, that’s not really true, my family is far more dramatic what with broken marriages and suicide attempts and drug addiction and Helen, but Mum uses Angela Kilfeather as the gold standard: bad and all as her daughers are, at least they’re not lesbians who french-kiss their girlfriends beside suburban leylandii.
(Helen once worked with an Indian man who mistranslated ‘gays’ as ‘Jolly Boys.’ It caught on so much that, nearly everyone I knew --- including all my gay friends --- now referred to gay men as ‘Jolly Boys.’ And always said in an Indian accent. The logical conclusion was that lesbians were ‘Jolly Girls’, also said in an Indian accent.)
Mum placed one eye up against the gap between the wall and the net curtain. “I can’t see, give me your binoculars,” she ordered Helen, who produced them from her rucksack with alacrity --- but only for her own personal use. A small but fierce stuggle ensued. “She’ll be GONE,” Mum begged. “Let me see.”
“Promise you’ll give me a valium and the gift of long vision is yours.”
It was a dilemma for Mum but she did the right thing.
“You know I can’t do that,” she said primly. “I’m your mother and it would be irresponsible.”
“Please yourself,” Helen said, then gazed through the binoculars and murmured, “Good Christ, would you look at that!” Then, “Buh-loody hell! Ding-dong! What are they trying to do? A Jolly Girl tonsilectomy?”
Then Mum had sprung off the couch and was trying to grab the binoculars from Helen and they wrestled like children, only stopping when they bumped against my hand, the one with the missing fingernails and my shriek of pain restored them to decorum.
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