Hello,
I'm Lauren Laverne and this is Desert Island Discs Postcards where we share a selection of some of our favourite moments from some of our most memorable castaways.
It's 30 years since the writer Marion Keyes published her first novel, Watermelon.
Here she is talking to Kirsty Young in 2017 about how she feels when she's just finished writing a book.
I always think I'm spent, I am used up, I feel like it's nuclear winter.
I have to kind of go off and live my life a bit and eventually it's like the daffodils in the spring like pushing through the frozen ground
like it it eventually comes back but it takes a while.
What is the sensation that is so familiar to you then when you think ah there it is?
It's when I meet somebody and I notice something about them and a sentence starts playing in my head and most of my characters start like that,
and I think, right, here we go, and it's as small as that.
In terms of the subjects that you write about, caring for elderly parents, dealing with depression,
domestic violence, I have this suspicion that how you are categorised, you know,
in this phrase, popular fiction, well, if ever we could damn somebody with a phrase,
that might surely be it, yes, how dare you, or comedy romance.
Oh, yes.
Why do you think you're put there?
because I'm a woman and
because for good or for ill lots of women enjoy my books and they relate to them and in my own little way I feel that they are quite empowering and I think that anything that empowers women or makes them feel like hello there could I have some equal pay or how about access to the management jobs anything that makes us oppity has to be slapped down and so
if we like something by telling us it's rubbish it makes us feel a bit silly
for having liked it in the first place and you know I know so many men will be listening to this and saying but that's not true but