Fiction:My second worst nightmare is to be trapped in a car boot with an angry Rottweiler. My worst nightmare is to be trapped in a car boot with an angry Rottweiler and to have nothing to read. Recently I found myself in exactly this situation (minus the car boot and the angry Rottweiler).
Chained to a radiator in a Swedish publishing house, there was one book and one book alone in English and that happened to be Jordan's debut novel. Desperate as I was not to be alone with my own thoughts, I had to stop on the second page: it was like drowning in candy floss. So my hopes weren't high for Kerry Katona's first novel.
Tough Love is part of the new genre called Starlit - C-list celebs write - with a lot of "editorial assistance" - a novel inspired by their low-grade celebrity lifestyle.
Tough Love's blurb promised me a "gritty" read and, in fairness, who better than Kerry to provide a bit of grit. A disrupted upbringing, accusations of cocaine-fondness, burglaries, breakdowns, breast augmentation, all the boxes are ticked. She was in the papers - again - the other day for smoking - again - while pregnant - again.
So. Tough Love. The story of Leanne Crompton, a page three model and lovely, lovely, lovely girl. Originally from Grim Up North and now living in London but still as down-to-earth as you like. A really lovely, lovely girl who just happens to get her knockers out to keep herself and her seven-year-old daughter, Kia, in lard sandwiches. Ah yes, Kia. No financial help from Kia's dad unfortunately, as his identity is a "national secret". The reader discovers early on in the book that he's none other than Jay Leighton, ex-Manchester Rovers superstar footballer, trapped in a loveless marriage with his talentless, ambitious wife, Lisa, who stays with him despite his flagrant infidelities because she knows that together they're worth more than they are apart. Leanne, like the sound skin she is, has kept schtum all these years, but when she gets dropped by her agency, it takes only two short weeks for her to completely run out of money (everything happens so much faster in tabloid-time). She has to return home to Grim Up North; to her drunkard mother, Tracey; ne'er-do-well father, Paul; jailbird brother, Markie; bulimic sister, Jodie; and a couple of other siblings with less well-defined dysfunctionality.
Lisa Leighton (wife of Jay Leighton - keep up!) is afraid that now Leanne is out of dosh she'll go to the Sundays and dob Jay in it. With the aid of her sat nav (for reasons which escape me, much is made in the novel of Lisa's sat nav) Lisa drives to Grim Up North and offers Leanne £800,000 (€1.2 million) to keep her gob shut. (Why £800,000 I couldn't help wondering. Why not a nice round figure like a million?) But Leanne, showing once again what a lovely, lovely girl she is, refuses Lisa's non-round-figured offer.
Tough Love is like Footballers' Wives meets Shameless meets Jeremy Kyle. Most pages feature all-day drinking, girl-on-girl public brawling, mild arson, hot-tub infidelity, baggies of cocaine and so on, ad infinitum, but instead of the "gritty" I was promised, the tone is firmly tongue-in-cheek.
However, I'll be honest here: until the last quarter, when the wheels come off entirely, it's not so bad. Admittedly my expectations couldn't have been lower but, in fairness, I've read worse. Often by "real" writers - many of whom are up in arms about this cynical publishing development. But my thinking is that people who have never read anything in their lives apart from Take a Break magazine (a truly depressing publication featuring headlines such as "I Woke Up During My Liposuction!") will read Tough Love. And they'll probably enjoy it. So much so that they might be tempted to read another book. And as far as I'm concerned anything that gets people reading can't be that bad.
Marian Keyes has written eight best-selling novels and two volumes of non-fiction. Her ninth novel, This Charming Man, will be published in May 2008 by Michael Joseph
Tough Love By Kerry Katona Ebury Press, 318pp. £6.99