‘Absolutely Imperfect’: In Conversation with Lia Mills

Abstract

Lia Mills is a novelist, short-story writer and essayist. Born in Dublin, she has lived in London and in the USA, but in 1990 returned to her native city to stay and to pursue a writing career. Her debut novel, Another Alice (Poolbeg, 1996), was nominated for the Irish Times Fiction Prize. Gerry Smyth has pointed out that the novel deals with some of the central concerns of Irish fiction, such as ‘the family, madness, dreams, gender and nation—pulling them together into an ultimately enabling vision of the role of women in modern Ireland’ (93). Her second novel, Nothing Simple (Penguin Ireland, 2005), focuses on the difficulties encountered by an Irish family on their arrival in North America and portrays the traditionally sacred institutions of marriage and motherhood as hostile environments for the young female protagonist. Nothing Simple was shortlisted for the Irish Novel of the Year at the inaugural Irish Book Awards and has recently been published as an ebook. In 2006 Lia Mills was diagnosed with mouth cancer. Her experiences of treatment for this life-threatening illness are collected in her memoir In Your Face (Penguin Ireland, 2007), critically acclaimed and described as ‘a life-changing book’ by Anne Enright. Lia Mills’s third novel, Fallen (Penguin Ireland, 2014), is set in 1914–1916 Dublin. It is considered to be one of the most relevant novels of the so-called Irish ‘Commemoration Literature’ and has been chosen as the Dublin-Belfast: Two Cities One Book for 2016.

The interviewer wants to acknowledge her participation in the funded Research Project FF2012-35872.