Nothing had happened yet in my life except the need to get out of it.

It is very hard to trace the effect of words on a life.

I became a full-time writer in 1993 and have been very happy, insofar as anybody is, since.

I am a trembling mess from hip to knee. There is a terrible heat, a looseness in my innards that makes me want to dig my fists between my thighs. It is a confusing feeling - somewhere between diarrhoea and sex - this grief that is almost genital.

I'm very keenly aware that there aren't very many women writing literary fiction in Ireland and so that gives me a sense that what I say matters, in some small way.

Story is about pulling the reader in and a plot is a more externalized mechanism of revelation. A plot is more antic, more performative, and less intimate. When you're telling a story you're telling it into someone's ear.

I love the characters not knowing everything and the reader knowing more than them. There's more mischief in that and more room for seriousness, too.