[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 Fifties, is, among other things, a brilliant book about mothering. Morrissy takes a story—the tale of a barren housewife kidnapping another woman's child—that might occupy a few lines in a tabloid, and explodes it. Woven throughout is the Biblical view on the subject: Solomon's money-back-guaranteed way to spot a 'real' mother. In Morrissy's novel no such rules apply: biological ties are no more binding than the fanatical, fantastical desire to parent and be parented.

Not that she romanticizes the obsessive imagination. In Mother of Pearl lies and secrets multiply like tumors and ultimately cause a botched birth that left this reader weak. Morrissy has been accused of wilful pessimism. Is she surprised? 'My characters, Irene and Rita, are not happy bunnies. They're women without many options and little independence. People who are trapped tend to turn to desperate measures.'

She has, she says, no idea what a typical Mary Morrissy reader would be like, but she assumes they'd probably be female. She explains, very slowly and cautiously, that her father died when she was 13 (Lazy Eye is dedicated to him). 'My sister and I were the last in the family. I suppose I had a much more female upbringing than my brothers, who were older. My mother is a very, very important influence in my life.' (Mother of Pearl is dedicated to her.)

The other, less positive, influence has been the Catholic church. She lost her faith at 21—'I realised there was a way out of all those terrible moral dilemmas that centered around boys, you know'—and she's glad to be rid of her spooks. She has fought to make her writing 'not Irishy, Irishy, but mythic, universal'.

Some would say this goal has already been reached. Last year Morrissy won a Lannan Literary Award in the States, a prize worth $50,000. It's one of the few awards that you don't have to apply for, which is wonderfully fitting—you can't imagine Morrissy putting herself forward for it. As she says, 'I go through troughs where I don't feel it's justifiable to describe myself a writer—I guess that's the absolutist Catholic in me. So this is an endorsement.' Then again, Morrissy is still working as a journalist for the Irish Times: 'You get addicted to the pay packets. I've not made any decisions about what I want to do next. The boss keeps coming round'—she mimics herself timidly typing—'saying "are you still here?'"

She imagines a future involving many more books, 'I'm a monster when I'm not writing, I feel so guilty.' Her worst nightmare is that she will repeat herself. 'There are writers who just keep writing the same book. I admire people like Philip Larkin who say, "Right, I've said now what I wanted to say, there it is." I've got a feeling even if I got to that point I'd still be sitting down at the desk writing dementedly thinking "I'm sure there's something else".'

Now that she has writing in her life, there's very little room for anything else, and that includes children of her own. Morrissy believes that even in 1996 there's still a lot of pressure on women to reproduce—often from other women. 'I was married at one stage and friends would often say, "any news?" It's a very intimate question and I used to think, what right have you to ask me that?'

She is also convinced that it would have been harder to write Mother of Pearl as a mother. 'For some reason it's all right to say we feel ambiguous towards friends or lovers but it's not acceptable to say "I feel very ambiguous about this child and sometimes I feel like killing it, sometimes I hate it." 'She struggles to put it another way. 'We all like to think we're the product of great love and cherishing, but the fact is that most of us don't know how we were conceived, whether we were wanted.' She thinks for a moment. 'Perhaps if I had children I might not be able to write in such a detached way about them.'

Would she consider having children in the future? 'It doesn't escape my notice that here I have all this equipment and that it's unlikely that it's going to be used. But I'm 38 now, nearly 39, and time is ticking on and I wouldn't want to have a child on my own, you know. I wouldn't want there to be an absent father.'

And yet the fathers in her novels are half-sentient beings, swallowing lies like greedy children. 'Yes, they lack imagination. But there are good fathers: the doctor who cures Irene, and Rita's father.'

I point out that both men act as single parents; good parenting is thus always equated with isolation and claustrophobia. Morrissy smiles. 'I've got my babies,' she says, and points to my copy of Mother of Pearl. It does seem the perfect arrangement—after all, a book demands a single parent.