Love in the ICU

The Woman Who Stole My Life by Marian Keyes is an addictive hospital-themed read that breezes through the more sombre facts and pumps up the drama

The early section of Marian Keyes' The Woman Who Stole My Life sees Dublin-based beautician and mother-of-two Stella Sweeney diagnosed with a rare condition called GBS: Guillain-Barré Syndrome. It's an autoimmune disorder that attacks the nervous system, and leaves one paralysed. Thankfully, the plot doesn't succumb to a similar fate; whatever else happens in the book, the plot remains on the move - and carries till the last page, in a constantly upbeat tone.
A doctor tells Stella that she has a higher chance of winning the lottery than contracting this yoke. The same doctor advises Stella's husband Ryan to take up fly fishing - to inculcate the patience he will need, as his wife's recovery is bound to be slow and testing.
Everything is deliberate and funny. You're reading the script of a sit-com, and you can almost hear the canned laughter.
Stella is unable to even speak for several months. Blinking becomes her language, reminiscent of books such as The Diving Bell and The Butterfly. Keyes even makes mention of them.
Dr Mannix Taylor, Stella's neurosurgeon, tells Stella about '..Diving Bell' - "Written by a man, who, just like you, was only able to move his eyelids. In fact, he could only use one; he was in an even worse situation than you. What I'm trying to say is, if you can blink, you can talk." And so he begins to transcribe her blinks to alphabets, and then to words, till the words become a Twitter-style compilation. But that's later in the book.
A brusque yet concerned neurosurgeon and a blinking paralysed woman with a self-deprecating humour; there's seduction in the air. And so we breeze along waiting for love to unfurl in the ICU. All to the soundtrack of those easy laughs.
The book has a back and forth timeline. The GBS is in the past. Because of the parallel present day plot, we know Stella recovers and is perfectly fine, on her feet, and stuffing her face with Jaffa cakes as she tries to write, and copes with her rebellious teenage son (the daughter is easier).
The light breezy touch is nice for a bit. But the constant humorous tone can get tiresome. She does throw in a little vulnerability now and then, and when those parts come, they are as welcome as tea.
Like when Stella is lying in bed in ICU and wondering what exactly triggered GBS in her. She starts to wonder if her getting the disease had anything to do with being a good person. "Guillan Barre was so very rare that I had to wonder if the cause was something different, something darker. Maybe God was punishing me because I wasn't a good person."
But then Stella rationalises. "Maybe the way I'd been not good was that I hadn't fulfilled my truest potential - that seemed to be an actual crime these days, according to magazines."
For most of the time, Keyes' light touches are lovely. The breeziness to me is why the book works, in a popcorn sort of way, but works nonetheless.
Soon after this self-torment in the ICU, Stella reinforces to herself that she has indeed been a good person. ".You don't have to do something dramatic to fulfil your truest potential. Not everyone can find a cure for cancer. Someone has to make dinners and sort the socks."
As time passes in the ICU, Stella begins to blink her wise one-two line sayings to Mannix Taylor. The sayings become a collection and subsequently a book.
By now GBS is recovered from, Stella gets out of hospital, and a whole different part - including book tours - takes off. Doc and patient are madly in love and two homes are wrecked.
There's no feet shuffling with the narration. If anything, there's too much going on, but despite that, the plot remains tight and buzzing, like the activity timetable of a primary school kid.
Stella goes from running a beauty salon with her shrewd businesswoman sister, to contracting GBS and turning her experience of it into a best-selling self-help novel of ICU wisdom, and leaving her husband for the doc - gripping soap opera-ish stuff!
At more than one instance though, you get the feeling of wanting the story to have gone deeper - less 'ha ha', more meat. But since the characters are nicely neurotic and the pages turn easily enough, I suppose it's permissible for gravitas to have met the gallows.
nivriti@khaleejtimes.com

The Woman Who Stole My Life
By Marian Keyes
> 531 pages
> Published by Penguin Books