"Sullivan is among those emerging feminist cultural critics who are breaking a critical silence: her study of fiction, films and plays by Northern Irish women not only charts new territory in Irish studies, it also provides a model for doing Irish cultural criticism."--Katherine Kirkpatrick, editor of Border Crossings: Irish Women Writers and National Identity

In this examination of the cultural production of critically acclaimed women novelists, filmmakers, nonfiction writers and dramatists in Northern Ireland, Megan Sullivan insists that their work demonstrates that the...

Clarissa Pettaway has waited five years for her father to come home from prison. When the day finally arrives, her mother makes a special dinner, and her father calls her his favorite names: Oh, Clarissa, Sissy, Sassafrass Girl, I’m never gonna leave you again. Soon, however, Clarissa discovers it isn’t all that easy for people who have been incarcerated to rejoin their families and reenter society. Clarissa has to learn to cope with the reality of her father being out of prison, and all of the confusing, conflicting emotions it creates in her. Two books in one,...