• Solomon’s Seal and Other Stories (London: Phoenix House 1997), 144pp.
• The Beautiful Changes (Dublin: Lilliput Press 2002), 224pp. [stories].
• Protection (Penguin Ireland 2005), 309pp.
• When Light is Like Water (Penguin Ireland 2018); Do., issued as Straying (NY: Scribner 2018) [short-listed for Irish Book Awards]

• Circles Around the Sun: In Search of a Lost Brother (Penguin Ireland 2011), 233pp.

• ‘A Nuclear Adam and Eve’, in Arrows in Flight: Stories from a New Ireland, ed. Caroline Walsh (Dublin: TownHouse; UK & US: Scribner 2002), pp.233-66.
• ‘If a guy doesn’t think this is fun ...’, in The Dublin Review, 16 (Autumn 2004), pp.37-48 [infra].
• ‘Our Own George Clooney: the UN in Somalia’, in The Dublin Review (26 Winter 2007-08) - extract available online; accessed 23.02.2021.
• ‘What Are we Still Doing in Guantanamo?’, in Los Angeles Review of Books [Quarterly Journal, No. 14] (29 May 2017) - available online; accessed 23.02.2021.
• ‘Tainted love: why women still pay for adultery’ [Women and Adultery in Contemporary Fiction], in The Guardian (11 Aug. 2017) - available online; accessed 23.02.2021.

• review of The Sexual Life of Catherine M., trans. Adriana Hunter (Serpent’s Tail), in The Irish Times (29 June 2002) [‘... what you get in this book is a chronicler more tedious, more self-indulgent, than any dinner-party bore you have ever clapped ears on ... this blend of voraciousness and apathy rings false’].
• review of Chinua Achebe, The Education of a British-Protected Child, in The Irish Times (16 Jan. 2010), Weekend, p.10.
• review of Siri Husvedt, The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves, in The Irish Times (6 Feb. 2010), Weekend, p.12.
• review of America and the Pill: A History of Promise, Peril, and Liberation,  by Elaine Tyler May, in The Irish Times (24 July 2010), Weekend [q.p.].
• review of The Children of Lovers: A Memoir of William Golding, by Judy Golding [his daughter], in The Irish Times (23 April 2011), Weekend [‘written in a clipped, engaging and unsentimental style’ q.p.]
• review of Jane Shilling, The Stranger in the Mirror: A Memoir of Middle Age, in The Irish Times (29 Jan. 2011), Weekend, p.11.\.
• review of Bird Cloud, by Annie Proulx, in The Irish Times (26 Feb. 2011, Weekend, p.11).
• review of The Long Goodbye: A Memoir of Grief by Meghan O’Rourke, in The Irish Times (13 Aug. 2011), Weekend Review, p.11;
• ‘The other side of psychosis’, review of The Locked Ward: Memoirs of a Psychiatric Orderly, in The Irish Times (21 Jan. 2012), Weekend, p.10.
• [...]

When did you first begin to write, and why? Do you remember the initial urge to pick up a pen and get words down on paper?
I first began to write in a diary, like a lot of kids. I began to publish when I got out of college and was working at a newspaper in Portland, Oregon. I was sort of a gofer, but I was surrounded by editors who kindly agreed to read my submissions, and occasionally to publish them. My first published short story resulted from my knocking on Dermot Healy’s door one rainy day in Sligo, when he was running a magazine called Force 10. He changed the ending without telling me, and I remember thinking: ‘Is that allowed?’

How would you describe yourself and your work to people who may not know your writing already?
I think one thing I would say is that I like to write both fiction and nonfiction. And I think these two ways of writing have begun to infuse each other in my work, so that my latest novel reads like a memoir, and my memoir - hopefully - reads a little like a novel.

To what extent do you draw on your own autobiography for fiction? Are authors compelled to write about what they know?
Authors are compelled to write about what excites and interests them. My feeling about a lot of novels I pick up is that they don’t feel necessary - I mean first and foremost to the writer. They don’t feel like books that absolutely had to be written. As for autobiography, sometimes I draw on it a lot, sometimes hardly at all. The point is that the story has to stand on its own, and whether it rings true or not bears zero relation to whether things in the story happened in real life.

You draw on the war in Iraq and Afghanistan in your story, Life on Earth. Do authors have an obligation to be political or make an important point, do you think?
I don’t think writers have any obligation other than to write the world as they see it, and to aim to write as well and as honestly as they can. Writers are like people - some are political animals, others aren ‘t; to pretend an interest in something you’re not really interested in makes for bad writing. As for making an ‘important’ point, it has to be important enough for a writer to spend the time crafting the story and for a reader to spend the time reading it. But it needn’t be ponderous or solemn. Comedy is important, too. And any time you put two people into a relationship, you’ve got politics.

Where did the first spark of inspiration for that story come from? How did the plot and characters develop? Was it an easy process?
In 2013, I moved back to the US - to Washington, DC - after having spent 24 years living abroad. To find myself in America’s capital city was like getting a crash re-entry course in my home country. During those first months in DC, I read David Finkel’s wonderful books, The Good Soldiers and Thank You for Your Service, which are alluded to in my story when the narrator talks about reading a book on the surge in Iraq, and there being no sexier feeling than coming under fire, and the state soldiers are often in when they come home from war. I started to think about the civilian/military divide in American society, and about how we - ‘we’ being liberals and civilians like the woman in the story - outsource our ‘security’ in ways we’d rather not always think about. DC can feel steeped in the kind of vibe that the story attempts to depict: an end-of-days anxiety, power, militarism, surveillance, paranoia. At the same time, the city’s demographic is very left-of-centre, no matter who’s in the White House, so there are really interesting currents in DC jostling and conflicting with each other. The story attempts to enact some of those conflicts in the form of a brief affair between a conservative military officer and a liberal English professor. The female character thinks that the officer represents a form of safety in an anxious age, but of course discovers that the kind of safety she’s looking for doesn’t exist anymore and maybe never did, because it’s not about being safe from a specific threat; the anxiety is something more free-floating and elemental.

Do you always like the characters you create? Is it important to feel sympathy for your protagonists?
I don’t always entirely like my characters, but I always want to understand why they are the way they are and what drives them, and that process involves the development of empathy. I think it’s far more important that you find your characters interesting than that you like them; and if you do dislike them, you can’t allow the story to become a way of beating up on them - which is boring and a very one-sided fight.

Which short story by another author has had the most profound effect on you and why?
About 30 years ago, I discovered the story, In the Heart of the Heart of the Country, by William Gass. There was a lot going on it - structurally and narratively - that I didn’t entirely understand, but I knew I was reading something extraordinary: a story that went at its subjects obliquely, and yet in language that was devastatingly precise. I loved its fragmentation, its repetitions, all the beauty and loneliness. It showed me some very important things about the possibilities of the short story form.

And finally, is there anything you’d like to say about being shortlisted for the Sunday Times EFG short story award?
It’s a huge honour to have your work recognised by other writers, and to be in company with writers whose work you’ve read and admired. All those clichés people trot out at such times: they’re really true.

‘A precise memoir about a schizophrenic sibling’, review of Circles Around the Sun, by Molly McCloskey, in The Guardian (Fri, 1 Jul 2011); available online; accessed 23.03.2021.

Every once in a while, a writer's voice hits such a clear note, the resulting book has the kind of sweetness that makes you hold it in your hands a moment before finding a place for it on your shelves. Circles Around the Sun is this kind of book: it's a keeper. A memoir of a schizophrenic brother, written with great care and simplicity, it is one of those stories that waited until its writer was ready to tell it.
 Molly McCloskey is an American author who has lived in Nairobi, Kosovo and Ireland. She was born 14 years after her brother Mike, so she was only a child when he first became a worry to his parents. It is always somehow hard to see your family properly, and this difficulty is compounded when they become obscured by mental illness. Who is Mike McCloskey? His sister goes through early photographs looking for clues. Here he is as a toddler: ‘His fair skin and blond hair lend him a radiance, as though he exists in a flash of sunlight.’ And again as a boy: ‘Thin as a rail, with freckles and a brush cut he flips in the front with a bit of Butch wax.’ This ‘fragile’, ‘angelic’ boy will be, in middle age, unkempt, a chain smoker, who walks with ‘the thorazine shuffle’ and speaks with the flattened affect of schizophrenia.
 The McCloskeys are a good-looking family. Her parents were so handsome and wholesome they featured in a 14-page photo spread in Ladies Home Journal in September 1953. Loving, frugal, outgoing, they were portrayed as the ideal postwar couple. Molly's father was, at the time of Mike's early decline, the coach of a failing basketball team. He subsequently turned his career around, by bringing the Detroit Pistons to win the National Basketball Association league.
 Mike too was competitive, and he got a basketball scholarship to college. His life, in the American way, might have peaked just there- if only the ball had found the net. But success seemed already too problematic for Mike and his story was, for a while, the story of the 1960s, as he took drugs, went on road trips and dropped out. Mike was the guy- and we all know someone like him- who disappeared into adolescence and never made it back.
 What makes McCloskey's tale distinctive is the steadiness of her questioning gaze on the problem of personality and what it is to be ‘well’. As college becomes more difficult, his girlfriend notices how Mike's sweetness became ‘overlaid with something false and stylised, like he was straining to detach himself from who he had been, and with unconvincing results.’
 Schizophrenia makes Mike somehow less authentic to his sister, as if the whole business was a kind of bad faith. Nor does the fact that he is helpless make him nice. The adult Mike sees himself as living among ‘retards’ and McCloskey nails the feeling of inadequacy the mentally ill engender; how they can make ordinary people feel so guilty and inadequate. ‘Despite his disdain for the niceties of human relations,’ she writes, ‘there was an expectation that we would not call him on his own fabrications or delusions.’ On a visit in 2007, she felt ‘as transparent before him as I had when I was 12 and he'd turned his condescending gaze on me and laughed out loud as I walked by. “You look lonely,” he said, and sat down.’
 The love between children and parents makes some sense to us; what McCloskey tries to understand is the fugitive, surprising and constantly reconstructed love that exists between siblings. She looks at Mike and wonders not just who he is now, but whether he is also a key to her; a piece of information that lies latent in her own genes?
 McCloskey was in her youth a catastrophic drinker - she seemed to bring a kind of American innocence to the project. She lived for some years in County Sligo, not short of good pubs, and gave up alcohol after a bad Christmas binge there. It is tempting to think of her as an amateur among the more seasoned, hard-working drinkers of that place, but she describes sobriety with the tenderness of the true drunk: ‘In the beginning,’ she says, ‘I just felt forgiven.’
 If there is something to be learned from these pages, it is the redeeming power of something well described. Precision may, after all, be a kind of prayer. Molly McCloskey is a fine fiction writer, whose drift away from the United States has made her work hard to label: we are, perhaps, more attuned to the voices of migrants who travel the other way. She writes as someone displaced: open-minded, exact. Word by word she makes her way home. [End.]