“I do have pen pictures of them, that I add details to when I need to, but I don’t have something that I can just cast my eye at and say “A-ha! That’s that person.” but I especially loved the people in this book, for some reason I felt very tenderly, and four of the main seven characters are men and it was very very nice to be able to write about men in a nuanced way, and realise that they’re finding modern life and late-stage capitalism extremely difficult as well. I feel very very fond of my characters, even the occasional baddies.” With such a huge cast of characters, Graham wanted to know how Maria keeps track of all them: “I never had a whiteboard in my life until the book I’m writing now, so there wasn’t one for Grown Ups. So what genre would this book fall under? So at the start of Grown Ups one of my characters gets concussion, blows the gig wide open.” “This woman, it happened, I thought that’s a great idea for a book.

This thing doesn’t last for long, but it does a sizable amount of damage… well it does last.” She got into tonnes of trouble and nobody could figure out what was wrong with her, until they traced it back to the fact that she’d had a concussion. Marian told Graham that this element of the story was inspired by real life: “I know somebody who got a concussion and suddenly she couldn’t stop herself from saying the things she was really thinking. “Everybody behaves like adults on the outside, they have manners and they keep their mouths shut and they don’t say what they really think, until somebody says something, she actually gets a concussion.” On the surface they get on very well, obviously below the surface things are far murkier and far livelier, if you get me.” People know things about each other that they’re not meant to know, and in Grown Ups there are three brothers, their various wives, ex-wives, adult children, step children, and they all spend a lot of time together. All families are complicated, and families, if they spend a lot of time with each other, they invariably pick up a lot of secrets. “It’s a gripping story about a big complicated family. So reads the synopsis for Marian Keyes’ latest novel Grown Ups, the paperback edition of which has just been published, but how does Keyes herself describe it? The author was a guest on The Graham Norton Radio Show this morning to tell us more.

Marian keyes grown ups characters