Journalism: It's the holy grail, the gig every writer wants: an autobiographical column. Confessional journalism it's often called, where everything in the writer's life becomes potential material - the heating breaking down, an argument with a friend, a hot air balloon ride, writes Marian Keyes.
No research, no preparation. I could do that, everyone thinks: just lash out 1,000 stream-of-consciousness words in under an hour each week and collect your fee. Easiest money ever earned. Piece of cake.
That's the thing about talent - it makes the difficult look easy. Róisín Ingle's volume of weekly articles written for The Irish Times over a three-year period are charming, consistently engaging and always relevant. She writes with intimacy and a beautiful lightness of touch and is often very, very funny.
But taken together these articles start to give a picture of post-feminist Irish women. Many of our concerns transcend nationhood and are shared with women of a similar age in the rest of the developed world, which in lots of ways Ingle embodies: she is urban, financially independent, sexually liberated, committed to her career, and has a group of friends that function as her second family; she writes about spiritual yearning, the battleground that is her body, the anxiety about deferring childbirth, indeed touching upon the controversial subject of not having children at all. Thorny questions such as lap-dancing, racism and homelessness are addressed and she doesn't set out to provide easy answers
But Irish women are also different from other post-feminist women, for two main reasons. Firstly, we're still shaking off the shackles of a deeply misogynistic and controlling church, where battered women were told to return to their abusive husbands because "what God has put together, let no man put asunder". A country where, although contraception is legal, abortion is not only illegal but unconstitutional. Secondly, we've grown up living in the shadow of the violence of the North. Thoroughly Modern Ireland has emotionally disconnected itself from its violent history and from its very geography - for many of us, it's as if the six counties don't exist, as if they've been airbrushed from our picture of the island of Ireland.
Ingle, an iconoclast at the age of seven, when she was "outraged at the invasion of privacy masquerading as the sacrament of confession", writes with refreshing honesty about contraception and her one-night-stands and incurs the wrath of the clergy.
As for the Northern question, Ingle travelled to this invisible land and returned home with a man, a house-proud Protestant who comes as a job lot with a bleach-fond mother and a father who is a dab hand with a hammer and nails.
At a time when feminism has stalled as a vital force, when only one in five women vote, when one in four of us is likely to experience domestic violence and where only six per cent of all rape cases result in conviction, Ireland is sadly lacking in populist female journalists gently pushing a new feminist agenda (with a few notable exceptions). Could Ingle take up the baton? I'd like to think so.
However, this book is more than a collection of Ingle's journalism. It begins with a 50-page introduction, where she stirs up the murk at the bottom of her own life: the suicide of her schizophrenic father when she was eight years old; the drowning of a family friend, which she always blamed herself for; her conflicted relationship with her siblings and mother; her food and gambling addictions; her marriage and divorce from a Bosnian fleeing the war in former Yugoslavia.
There's no self-pity here, but a scalpel-sharp dissection of her psyche. The writing is compelling, convincing and heartbreaking. I believe Ingle is considering a novel; I'm looking forward to it.
Pieces of Me is hugely entertaining, thought-provoking and often moving. It also holds great promise - it'll be very interesting to see What Róisín Did Next.
Marian Keyes is a novelist and journalist. Her latest collection of non-fiction, Further Under The Duvet, has just been published by Penguin. Royalties from Irish sales are being donated to the charity To Russia with Love
Pieces of Me. By Róisín Ingle, Hodder Headline, 413pp. €9.99