Actually, most people seemed to put her down and blame her personally for getting ill - what on earth? Unless the author wanted to talk about the stress the tour put upon the characters and I seriously think that could have been done in about two or three paragraphs.

She got easily taken advantage of and I wanted to give her a wake up slap every time she backed down and let people stomp all over her. This stunning novel will sweep you up as you travel with Stella through the changes that life inevitably throws us all. But Marian nevertheless does a valiant job with this book -- it wasn't laugh-out-loud but it was amusing and clever, as usual.After enjoying the limelight as the author of a successful memoir, Stella is back home in Dublin: broke, a little overweight—and devoid of inspiration for her next book.

I felt the wheels of my own car beneath me, moving without my say-so, and I was staring into the eyes of the man driving the Range Rover, our gazes locked in horror, united in the strange intimacy of knowing we were about to hurt each other and being entirely powerless to prevent it. I didn't dislike The Woman Who Stole My Life but neither did I wholly enjoy it as much as I expected.I tried very hard to like Stella Sweeney, to empathise with her life, and while she was paralysed it was easy enough - lost in her thoughts, not knowing whether she would recover, die or remain in such a state indefinitely. The timeline is a little messy to begin with, starting with a fender bender that happened a few weeks before Stella got sick and then jumping to the 'present day' almost two years later and then back in time - heralded by a quote from the book Stella wrote after her recovery - to the day her illness was diagnosed. I know the hospital machine and doctors in general are completely misrepresented in the media, but do people even WANT massages from their doctors? The story flips between the present and the past and, like I have said, initially it's slightly confusing as to what is actually going on.

She seems stuck in a little box of fear and preconceived notions, and nothing changes, not even after nearly losing her life - no new insights, no understanding. During her appearance on Desert Island Discs in March 2017, Keyes told the host that "[by] conditioning women to think that what they find empowering or valuable is worth less than what men consider to be worthwhile, women are prevented from reaching for parity and the gender gap in power and money between men and women is kept in the favour of men". A life that seems very far away now, as Stella eats Jaffa Cakes in her bedroom in the fictional suburb of Ferrytown, aware that she is “all washed up”. Keyes appeared on BBC's Imagine, aired in February 2022, [5] [6] explaining to Alan Yentob how she was distracted from her resolved end-of-life attempt by an episode of "Come Dine With Me"; husband and assistant Tony defused the drama by saying, "let's see how you feel when we've finished watching it," and so began her slow recovery from depression. Marian's stunning new novel The Woman Who Stole My Life is about losing the life you had and finding a better one.

The thing I liked least was the way that almost everybody treated Stella with contempt, especially her appalling (ex) husband Ryan and her precious spoilt son, Jeffrey. The publisher encouraged her to submit a full-length novel and Keyes began work on her first book, Watermelon. The main character, Stella, got diagnosed with a very rare disease that left her paralyzed (except for being able to blink) for almost a year. There’s a great cast of characters in this novel, from the rude and ruthless agent Phyllis, to Stella’s daughter Betsy, a perpetual Pollyanna. A madcap comedy with dramatic undertones, The Women Who Stole My Life demonstrates the flair of bestselling author Marian Keyes ( Watermelon) for concocting surprising, endearing stories with women at their center.