[In the review below, Middleton examines Morrissy's focus on memory and the past's effect on the present in Mother of Pearl.]

This first novel [Mother of Pearl] is a painfully deep exploration of the power of memory—particularly childhood memory—to color and define a life. A tubercular child banished to a sanitorium, Irene Rivers decides early that "there was no God; there was only sickness and health." The patients and staff at Granitefield become her family until, miraculously, she is cured and then, almost as miraculously, "rescued" via marriage.

Irene's hopes for a "normal" life are dashed, however, when she learns that her new husband is impotent. Convinced that the child she deserves is "still out there … unclaimed, waiting for her mother," Irene steals a child from the hospital nursery in a nearby town, leaving the birth mother with "the terrible truth that someone had wanted her baby more than she had." The child, Pearl, grows up haunted by curiously mixed memories of two childhoods—claimed by two women and belonging to neither.

Mother of Pearl is desperate, searching, and full of questions about what constitutes both family and true memory. Children—lost, stolen, found, in the form of ghosts—serve as markers, important clues in the fragmented lives Morrissy examines. But there is no resolution, and questions lead only to other questions. The reader is left feeling uneasy, forced to draw her own lines between reality and illusion, which is just what the author intended.