‘He just took over the story’ – Máire Fisher chats about the main character in her new novel The Enumerations
More about the book!

Máire Fisher chatted to Polity SA about her new novel, The Enumerations.

In The Enumerations, Fisher scrupulously explores the effects of mental conditions on a family. She shows the great power of those who hold us as we learn to harness the strength within us.

In the video, Fisher talks about Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, which her main character suffers from, and explains how the character came to her.

‘It’s not as if I set out to write a book about somebody who was OCD, that wasn’t my aim,’ Fisher says. ‘What happened was, I’ve been writing for quite a while, and in that time I had written a few half finished novels, and they were sitting waiting to be finished.

‘When I finished Birdseye, which was my first novel, I went to my drawer, where the other novels were languishing, and in the one story there was a woman called Maddie, who was working in a bookshop. And she had a brother who was in some kind of treatment centre, but I didn’t know why. So I thought, let me go back into their past. So I went to start exploring him, and he just took over the story.

‘So there’s a woman still sitting in a bookshop, and at some point I really should go back and tell her story!’