SOURCE: “Patrick McCabe: A Comedy of Horrors,” in Publishers Weekly, Vol. 245, No. 46, November 16, 1998, pp. 50-1.

In the following interview, McCabe discusses his career as an author.

On a Wednesday night so dark and wet it has cleared the Sligo streets of life, P[ublishers] W[eekly] arrives at Patrick McCabe's terraced house in the center of town and immediately feels like an intruder into a scene of everyday domestic turmoil. McCabe, a two-time Booker Prize nominee, is cursing a computer that will not allow his 13-year-old daughter to go on-line in search of information on the Titanic. It's for a school assignment, she complains; he tells her to look it up in a book; she tries once more to connect, failing again. More mutterings at the screen are drowned out by the sounds of other householders marching from room to room upstairs. The telephone rings, and a young...