Rachel's Holiday: A Hay Festival and The Poole VOTE 100 BOOKS for Women Selection

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What I love about Marian's writing is that sense of conversation with the reader; she's your best, funniest friend telling a story, a story that's honest, sometimes darker than you initially expected. In the case of Rachel's Holiday, Marian absolutely nails the gulf between how the addict sees themselves and how they're seen by those that care for them. It's a generous, loving, insightful book that never shies away from the horrible reality of dependence and addiction. She’s only agreed to her incarceration because she’s heard that rehab is wall-to-wall jacuzzis, spa treatments and celebrities going cold turkey – plus it’s about time she had a holiday. What's interesting is that this writer didn't make the process light and fluffy. Rachel had a painful and slow road to recovery. Her process of denial was EXCRUCIATING for me, but I came to understand her. I came to see why she had been such an idiotic idiot head! Rachel’s Holiday is a classic example. It’s not about Rachel going on a holiday! It’s about Rachel spending a little time in an Irish drying-out clinic at the insistence of her parents. Rachel doesn’t mind too much, she thinks it will be like a little spa holiday and she might even drop a few pounds too but she wasn’t bargaining for the harsh realities ahead of her.

I say all of this to put into context my reasons for really hating Rachel. Her predicament was just too familiar for my tastes. Will make you laugh and make you cry, but will also reveal the truth of who you really are' Louise O'Neill McGreevy, Ronan (16 October 2019). "Marian Keyes becomes first Irish writer to donate digital archive". The Irish Times . Retrieved 16 September 2021.Rachel’s Holiday came very highly recommended by my friends Jana and Ali, both of whom mentioned that this was one of the few books that has been with them many years, through various moves, bookshelf cleanouts, etc. Both of their copies were falling apart. They said it was amazing. And it WAS. Even Mum, although she wouldn’t admit to it. She liked to pretend that she liked everyone, in the hope that it might help her jump the queue into Heaven. Steele, Francesca (31 January 2020). "Marian Keyes: the best-selling author on diets, sexism and being inspired by Gen Z: The popular writer's new book follows the story of a large, chaotic family with similarities to her own" . Retrieved 31 January 2020. Keyes comes from a big family... and enjoys writing about life inside a large nest. The best way I can describe first reading Rachel's Holiday was that it felt like coming home. I felt that Marian truly understood women, their feelings, emotions, struggles, concerns and complex- ities. She is an exceptionally gifted writer who somehow makes her skilled storytelling appear effortless.

I wasn’t defending myself as well as I normally would have. But, to tell the truth, my trip to the hospital had taken more out of me than just the contents of my stomach. I felt shaky and not inclined to fight with Dad, which wasn’t like me at all. Disagreeing with my father was something I did as instinctively as refusing to sleep with moustachioed men. When Marian Keyes announced she had written a sequel to her 1997 smash hit novel, Rachel’s Holiday, social media went into overdrive. Rachel’s Holiday – which sold more than 1.5m copies and spawned generations of devotees to Keyes’s writing – was a cultural phenomenon, following protagonist Rachel Walsh as she struggled to come to terms with drug and alcohol addiction during a spell in a Dublin rehab clinic, the Cloisters. There was silence while I tried to absorb the fact that I was once more without a job. Was God Beadle rerunning old tapes up there? Saying goodbye to fun and freedom will be hard – and losing the man who might just be the love of her life will be even harder. During her appearance on Desert Island Discs in March 2017, Keyes told the host that "[by] conditioning women to think that what they find empowering or valuable is worth less than what men consider to be worthwhile, women are prevented from reaching for parity and the gender gap in power and money between men and women is kept in the favour of men". [11]Keyes became known for her novels Watermelon, Lucy Sullivan Is Getting Married, Rachel's Holiday, Last Chance Saloon, Anybody Out There, and This Charming Man, which, although written in a light and humorous style, cover themes including alcoholism, depression, addiction, cancer, bereavement, and domestic violence. [1] More than 35 million copies of her novels have been sold, and her works have been translated into 33 languages. [2] Her writing has won both the Irish Popular Fiction Book and the Popular Non-Fiction Book of the Year, each on one occasion, at the Irish Book Awards. Rachel's Holiday is Marian Keyes at her best. No other writer manages to combine the sad and the hilarious as well as she does, making you laugh and cry within the same paragraph.