Marian Keyes, the doyenne of Irish chick-lit, lives in a manner that befits a proper chick. She has a very smart, chi-chi Georgian house with electronic gates, green and yellow interiors, purple sofas and a blue kitchen that's just dying to star in its own TV cookery series. Outside the living room window, a stone Buddha sits stoically among the nodding scarlet poppies. It is vaguely satisfying that such a person lives in the Dublin suburb of Dun Laoghaire just a little farther round the bay from the Martello Tower where Joyce set the opening sequences of Ulysses. Satisfying because Marian Keyes represents a wholly different kind of Ireland. Putrefying mothers, begone! Furtive Catholic sexual guilt, wherefore art thou? The impoverished, benighted tide that lapped soupily at the ankles of the Irish writers of the '40s and '50s has turned and taken its baggage out to sea.

The diminutive, girlish, 38-year-old is slightly frazzled; she leaves for America in two days time to promote her new novel Angels, just out from William Morrow, and one gets the feeling that somewhere in her house there are e-mails arriving with itineraries and last-minute schedule changes. As befits a proper "Imelda" (Keyes's term for a shoe lover, after Imelda Marcos), Marian wears a pair of ankle boots so improbably pointy-toed and spike-heeled as to make one worry about the health of her phalanges. Whatever the footwear, a whistle-stop tour of the U.S. doesn't daunt Keyes. She's been there, done that, before.

Angels, Keyes's sixth novel, takes Maggie Walsh Garvan (another one of the Walsh sisters, whose siblings have graced two previous novels, Watermelon [Avon, 1998] and Rachel's Holiday [Morrow, 2000]) from her good-girl Dublin life and nice-but-dull husband to Los Angeles, the city of tucks and good looks, where celluloid scorns cellulite.

It's hard to arrive at a clear-cut definition of chick-lit, but Marian Keyes's work fills many of the requirements. Brightly colored, chunky books featuring self-deprecating heroines with "issues," body dysmorphia and unreliable taste when it comes to men. Whilst in the wake of the success of Bridget Jones's Diary, many writers and critics have sought to dismiss chick-lit as froth, Keyes's fiction is so genuinely funny, sharply observed and winning as to make such reservations seem stuffy and wrongheaded. Nor is she afraid to tackle darker, more serious themes. In fact, it is a hallmark of her work that she manages to combine her great comedy-writing skills with an ability to examine issues like addiction or abortion with clarity, empathy and delicacy.

"I write the books I write to keep me positive and optimistic about the human condition because I'm too prone to melancholy. It makes me feel hopeful. I know I might get better reviews if I wrote downbeat endings, but I just couldn't. I write for myself," says Keyes curling up on her sofa. All her life, Keyes has felt out of kilter, "incomplete," "less than," though the chipper, optimistic tone of her books belies this. She believes she was an "addict-in-waiting" when she discovered alcohol in her teens. Despite taking a law degree, she never went on to practice law, gravitating instead toward London where she waitressed, then worked in an accounts department, all the while honing her drinking skills. "I could outdrink men twice my size and I thought this was sexy." But whilst her friends got married and mortgaged and became parents, Keyes kept on drinking and by her late 20s had "developed an uncanny ability to find men who could endorse my self-loathing." She managed to frighten herself out of her stupor when, after months of solitary drinking, she attempted suicide in 1994 and spent the early part of 1995 in rehab. Keyes can't point to any early trauma that triggered the self-hatred that led to alcoholism; a sister has a similar tendency toward "being in touch with her dark side" and a County Clare grandfather had "difficulty coming to himself" each morning (a terminal morning grouch). The long-term consequences of an addictive personality are still with her. "I have no dimmer switch. I'm either on or I'm off. I'm incredibly thorough, I don't ever half-do things and I feel incredibly uncomfortable if I have to."

Looking back she says, "I think of my drinking life as a life where I was stitched into silence. I was always afraid to say what I was really thinking or feeling. I was curled in on myself, but sobriety curled me outwards and brought a compulsive need to communicate, maybe because it was simply long overdue." Another source of good fortune was her "volatile, close, warm, bickering family" full of natural raconteurs and on whom she has based the Walsh family of her novels.

By the time Keyes delivered her astonishingly accomplished first novel, Watermelon, she had already started a relationship with Tony Baines, and it is precisely here that Marian Keyes's life begins to mirror her art. For the last eight years, Tony, now her husband, has been her constant support and genuine partner in all that she does. The quiet, confident Englishman gave up his career as a computer analyst to run their home, administer the burgeoning business that is Marian's writing career (in 2000 she ranked 67th on a list of the wealthiest women in Britain and Ireland) and act as gatekeeper. He discusses embryonic characters with her over breakfast, tells her not to be jealous of other writers and is altogether "very Zen." Keyes says, "He's very much in my corner and it's nice to feel that there's two of us. I'm always afraid to say how great he is because it's so precious."