Marian Keyes

Keyes was waiting tables and then working in accounts in London, drinking heavily, when she posted four chapters and an outline to a Dublin publisher on a whim; she was in treatment before the answer arrived, and finished the book there. Watermelon appeared in 1995. The novels are shelved as comic and are about alcoholism, domestic violence, addiction and the death of a child, which is the joke and also not the joke at all. Rachel's Holiday follows a woman certain she has no problem; Again, Rachel returns to her twenty years later. She has written at length about her own depression.