I thought I might find some peace from it," says Keyes. "I thought it would be a good thing to do, because of my habitual self-loathing and the kind of unpleasantness I put myself through with my own thoughts. She can pinpoint the moment when it happened: in September 2009 she had just done an eight-day residential self-help therapy course intended, she says, to "deal with your demons", involving early starts, late nights and a giving-birth-to-yourself process. I just felt the old me was gone forever," she says in the first interview she's given since it struck. "I don't want to sound self-pitying, but I felt the old me had been washed away, as if there had been an avalanche, and I'd come to and found myself in a totally different landscape, so I didn't know where anything was. She spent time in a psychiatric hospital, and took every known variant, combination and dose of anti-depressant. She couldn't formulate sentences her brain felt as if it had slowed right down. Always prone to bouts of depression – "on the spectrum of people, there's happy at one end and Beckett at the other and I'm down at the Beckett end" – she was plunged into something she describes as "catastrophic". T hree years ago, Marian Keyes believed she would never write again.
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