Book review: Marian Keyes’ latest is dusted with customary empathy, generosity, and optimism

Written in the first person, the novel’s tone is casual and chatty, and it skilfully interweaves the protagonist’s past in New York with her present in Ireland

Marian Keyes has sold more than 35m copies of her books since her debut, ‘Watermelon', in 1995. File picture: Dean Chalkley/PA

• My Favourite Mistake 
• Marian Keyes 
• Michael Joseph, €18 

Starting with her 1995 debut Watermelon, Marian Keyes’ novels have sold more than 35m copies worldwide.

Recent accolades include winning Author of the Year at the 2021 Irish Book Awards and then at the 2022 British Book Awards.

In February of this year, a portrait of Keyes was unveiled at the National Gallery of Ireland.

In March, it was announced that her novel Grown Ups will be adapted into a TV series for Netflix.

The centrepiece of the 60-year-old’s fiction is typically a sturdy female protagonist whose quest for happiness requires confronting formidable obstacles.

If the top note of her novels is breezily comedic, playing just underneath are darker themes, including depression ( Lucy Sullivan is Getting Married), addiction ( Rachel’s Holiday), and domestic abuse ( This Charming Man).

All these familiar qualities animate Keyes’ 16th novel, My Favourite Mistake.

The main character, Anna Walsh, attempts to reinvent herself in midlife (“I’m not the person I was but I’ve no clue who I’m going to be”) and grapples to reconcile her need to take risks with her fear of getting hurt.

The action opens with Anna taking a “flamethrower” to her life: after 18 years in New York, she decides to return to Ireland.

Triggered by the pandemic, Anna has split from her long-term partner Angelo (to combat anxiety, he used meditation; she used wine) and resigned from her stressful public relations position (her job was to be “a professional liar”) for a Manhattan cosmetics brand.

Small, kind, and wearing, according to her sister, “Resting Eejit Face”, Anna’s return to Dublin is soured by five months of unemployment.

Then friends in Connemara make her an offer.

Just as they start building a luxury coastal retreat, the site is vandalised.

Rumours are swirling that the retreat will remove ancient rights of way and destroy a famine memorial. As local resentment festers and violence is threatened, Anna’s friends ask her to meet with the townspeople to rescue their faltering plans.

But the job means working with the investors’ broker, Joey Armstrong — a man with whom Anna has had a tangled relationship.

Written in the first person, the novel’s tone is casual and chatty, and it skilfully interweaves the 48-year-old’s past in New York with her present in Ireland.

Imbued with the author’s trademark humour (Anna’s sister “budgeted for Botox the way other people budget for car insurance”), My Favourite Mistake also plays with the tropes of the romance genre: in one scene, Anna fails to persuade a male character to have sex with her.

The novel’s drumbeat is the protagonist’s effort to forge a new identity when she lacks the markers of marriage and children that her peers use to define their lives.

Adjusting to change, in multiple senses, is a touchstone.

Diagnosed as perimenopausal, Anna is also grieving the loss of two of the most important people in her life.

She comes to appreciate that any relationship must incorporate each person’s “wounds” and discovers a “dirty little secret”: some intense friendships, like romantic relationships, end.

As rumination over missed chances evolves towards painful acceptance, Anna also realises her unwillingness to recognise other people’s capacity for change (“my feelings hadn’t yet caught up with the facts”).

Keyes’ momentum, however, stutters in the second half of this 600-page novel.

Plotlines that shift towards the detective genre feel like a distraction and the suddenness of some (thinly-sketched) characters to admit their criminal wrongdoing stretches credibility.

But mostly My Favourite Mistake is dusted with Keyes’ characteristic empathy, generosity, and optimism.

“Life reshapes, repurposes, files things away,” Anna suggests. “Life heals, reveals, uncovers, all in its own sweet time.”