Fiction: Lia Mills's first novel, Another Alice, published in 1996, hit the bestseller list and attracted much critical praise for its examination of childhood both remembered and lived through the eyes of a mother and daughter.
Almost 10 years later, Mills returns to fiction writing with a second novel, Nothing Simple, which sets out to explore the terrain travelled by an Irish couple when they hit the emigrant trail to the US, leaving behind the stultifyingly grim Ireland of the 1980s.
"I would never in a million years have foreseen myself like this, a big woman, nearing thirty, sitting on a swing in a deserted playground in Houston, Texas, trying to imagine where my angry daughter might have gone to hide from me." So concludes the opening of the novel, and with it Mills effortlessly catches the the sense of bewilderment felt by her narrator, Ray, who, at 20, fell headlong into a life in America without ever really having a plan other than to follow her techie geek husband, Dermot, wherever his career map took him. Now, on the eve of their return to a more prosperous Ireland, Ray's 10-year-old daughter, Hannah, has run away and Ray is given to thinking back on her past, ranging over her own escape from a cold and controlling mother, through her time as a waitress at a Leeson Street-type dive (as only they were in the lovely 1980s), to her emigration with her new husband.
Station Hollow, a backwater of urban Houston, becomes the Wisteria Lane of Mills's imagination, although her quite exquisite descriptions of Texan sights, smells and heat owe far more to Mills's own experience of living in the US than they do to Desperate Housewives. Nevertheless, Station Hollow abounds with housewives who live in varying degrees of unglamorous desperation, from a weirdly Stepford-like cheque fraudster to a woman whose husband leaves her for another man, to a silent indoors Chinese woman whose enigmatic presence is felt rather than seen. As Ray's husband sets about building a career, it is up to Ray in her daytime life to forge connections and integrate into this community which, to her Irish eyes, often seems perplexing. It is Mills's depiction of friendship-forging and relationship-negotiating, child-rearing and home-building, that is the real triumph of Nothing Simple, and although all this might seem like the home territory of chick-lit, Mills's virtuosity as a writer lifts this novel well above the confines of that genre.
Yvonne Nolan is a freelance TV producer, journalist and critic
Nothing Simple By Lia Mills Penguin Ireland, 257pp. €12.99