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Life
1957- ; moved to Houston, Texas with her husband and three children for ten years, 1980-90; prevented from working by residence laws; bought typewriter at Salvation Army and wrote stories; grad. through American correspondence college; returned to Ireland, 1990, and commenced MA at UCD, while her husband proceeded to Burma as oil consultant; |
began PhD but turned to writing in 1992, when draft of Another Alice (1996), a novel of child-abuse, was accepted by Kate Cruise O’Brien at Poolbeg; abandoned second novel; founded writers’ group and engaged win public art commissions (writing) through S. Dublin Co. Council and Ballymun Regeneration; issued Nothing Simple (2005) a story of a modern Irish family emigrating to America; |
discovered cancer during a dental visit, March 2006; issued In Your Face (2007), a blow-by-blow account of her battle against cancer of the mouth; lives in Dublin. |
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Works
Fiction, Another Alice (Swords: Poolbeg Press 1996), 392pp.; Nothing Simple (Penguin Ireland 2005), 400pp.
Memoir, In Your Face: One Woman's Encounter with Cancer, Doctors, Nurses, Machines, Family, Friends, and a Few Enemies (Penguin Ireland, 2007), 288pp.
Miscellaneous, ed., “You Had To Be There!”: Stories and Poems from Ballymun [by] Karen Brady et al. (Dublin: BRL 2003), 186pp., ill. [drawings by Alice Maher]; contrib. to Caitriona Moloney & Helen Thompson, eds., Irish Women Writers Speak Out: Voices from the Field, with a foreword by Ann Owen Weekes (Syracuse UP 2003), q.pp.
Also ‘Lia thought she just had toothache. It turned out to be something far more terrifying’ - adapted from In Your Face, in the Daily Mail (6 Nov. 2007), “Health” [with photoport; available online or see copy, attached; accessed 18.08.2008.]
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Criticism
Interview article, in Books Ireland (April 2005), pp.75-76; ‘The books I haven’t written’, in Books Ireland (Nov. 2007), p.245 [port.]. See also Gerry Smyth, The Novel
and the Nation: Studies in the New Irish Fiction (London: Pluto Press
1997), pp. 93-97.
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Notes
Diagnosis: Lia Mill's cancer was diagnosed as invasive nondifferentiated squamous cell carcinoma and was followed by maxillofacial surgery and radiology.
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