Saved by Cake - review

BUY NOW

So many good men would like to believe that women are no different. That we're all in it together, just the same. That everything that seems to divide us is culturally imposed, not inevitable, not intrinsic.

Then these good men, these wishers and hopers, run into brute fact. They are confronted by a phenomenon that just can't be reconciled with everything they want to believe about gender being just a construct. They get it right in the face: cake. Women and cake.

Cake is everywhere right now. There are whole districts of London - okay, Primrose Hill - largely turned over to the production of cupcakes, by women, for women. They have become the universal answer to every crisis. Sacked by the bank? Make cupcakes. Midlife crisis, divorce, breakdown? Cupcakes again. Financial collapse, ecological catastrophe, the death of God? Cupcakes, it is.

Marian Keyes is one of the great pioneers of chicklit. Since publishing her first novel in 1995, she's sold more than 22 million books worldwide. So she's vastly successful.

Yet she has suffered from severe depression and alcoholism, experiences that have fed into the surprisingly tough themes of her fiction. She has been admirably open about these struggles in her life and has revealed recently that she has been so badly affected as to be unable to do anything, let alone work. "I couldn't sleep; I couldn't breathe; I couldn't eat; I couldn't read." For this, she deserves every sympathy and any remedy she can find can only be welcomed.

But her solution is not hers alone, nor exclusive to her clinical condition. You guessed it? It's cake. Baking cakes. Never before has this strange pursuit, so baffling to at least half the population, been presented so starkly as the very essence of life.

Marian Keyes puts it like this: "To be perfectly blunt about it, my choice sometimes is: I can kill myself or I can make a dozen cupcakes." She means it too. She's tried everything. Antidepressants, hospitalisation, yoga, meditation, behavioural therapy, acupuncture. And then came cakes.

She hadn't baked since school. Then she made a friend a birthday cake and now she can't stop. She couldn't eat all the cakes so she gave them away, until when people saw her coming, "baked goods in hand", they tried to hide.

Here now is her cake book, giving us her cakes by proxy. Here they all are, intimately introduced and lovingly pictured: cupcakes and cheesecakes, meringues and macaroons. Pecan Pie and Barmbrack, Red Velvet Cupcake Swirls and Luxury Blueberry, Pine Nut and Chocolate Cookies.

It is a crowded field, baking books. New ones appear every week. Yet Marian Keyes's stands out for its extremity. Cake or die. We can only thank her for her clarity and admire her courage. We men to whom cake is a closed book, who last voluntarily ate a bun when we were nine, can't delude ourselves any more. We have to accept it now: women and cake, and all that that means. Such a long, hard road lies ahead.

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