SOURCE: "Quite Contrary," in The Observer, No. 10658, January 28, 1996, p. 16.

[In the following essay, drawn from an interview with the author, O'Sullivan relates details of Morrissy's upbringing and her views on family, writing, and children.]

Irish writer Mary Morrissy does for the nuclear family what Jaws did for midnight dips. Her first novel Mother of Pearl picks up where her collection of short stories, Lazy Eye, left off: in a landscape of unerring dysfunction.

Morrissy distrusts ideas of normality. When I meet her in a Soho cafe—a corpulent figure in a shapeless gingham coat, with a crop of dulled red hair—she greets me with 'It's very chilly, isn't it?' Her brow wrinkles. 'It's been ever so mild in Dublin—very odd'. It's as if, in her mind, mildness itself is a breeding ground for trouble.

Her novel, set in an unidentified Irish town in the...