'By the time I was 18, I had almost died a couple of times," says novelist Christine Dwyer Hickey. "I suppose that's why I've lived my life as somebody who consciously thinks they're going to die."

The Dublin-born writer had been involved in two car crashes. Then, when she was in fifth year, she got very ill with a virus and spent months in isolation in Cherry Orchard Hospital. During that time she gobbled up books.

This jolt about mortality was no bad thing, but rather than look back in morbidity, Christine gets on with life and laughs a lot.

The minute I meet her, there is a glint in her eye. She cuts a glamorous figure with her glossy hair piled high, her glistening lipstick and her patent-leather two-tone brogues. She is loud and dramatic, but delightfully so. She makes faces, acts out stories and is so funny and irreverent that had she not made a name for herself as a successful writer, she could always knock on RTE's door and demand her own television show.

For many a year, she was the life and soul of the party. She is the eldest in her family and has four brothers. When she was a teenager she tells me that she got into all sorts of trouble -- "drinking flagons, caught by the police, brought home by the scruff of the neck -- 'Is this yours?' -- and me dangling on the end." These days, this mother of three grown-up children lives a quiet life in Palmerstown and puts all her energy into her writing.

"When I'm at my computer, I'm a very serious person. The work matters and I give it my all. I'm an awful worrier. If you had the kind of childhood I've had, you always think something bad is around the corner. But I don't get anxious when I'm writing."

She often asks her husband Dennis to have a look at her works in progress. (They first met 20 or so years ago in the queue in Kentucky Fried Chicken, Baggot Street at 2am) When he marks her writings, she refers to him as "He with the throbbing red pen."

Christine is probably best known for her award-winning novel Tatty, which told the story of a young girl growing up in Walkinstown. It is about a child's view of the world and the drinkers around her. Although it is not totally autobiographical, she concedes that she mined some of her childhood memories for it. "What I found most upsetting was waking up in the night and hearing rows," she says.

"But we did have a lot of fun too." There is sadness in Tatty but the humour still shines through, which is pretty much like Christine herself. Her fifth novel, Last Train from Liguria has just been published. It is an ambitious novel which spans from the Twenties to the modern day. She pulls it off with great aplomb. It is about a young Irish girl who goes to work as a tutor in Italy in the Thirties, just as Fascism rears its ugly head. "I read all about Mussolini and the anti-Jewish laws," she says. "When I discovered them, it changed the whole book. They didn't want to talk about it in Italy. Even when I asked the librarian, he became very uneasy."

"I remember as a child seeing something about the Holocaust and concentration camps on television and I was hysterical. I just couldn't ignore it. I was in the Jewish museum in Shanghai last year and the man who worked there said, 'You Jew lady?' because I got so upset. In Shanghai they took in as many Jews as wanted to come in and sheltered them. You never hear about that. It was so moving to see it."

It is no accident that her latest novel is set in Italy. Since Christine and her husband re-mortgaged their house in the early Nineties and bought an apartment in Imperia, it has become her part-time stomping ground. (They try to stay there a month at a go, three times a year.) With her ever-improving Italian, she has got under the skin of the culture. And so, she followed a friend's suggestion that she should write about Italy.

"I also wanted to write an Italian book without using the word 'bougainvillea'. Usually, it's all prettiness all the time. "

The first time Christine set foot on Italian soil, she was "a gonner," she says.

"Italians are an intriguing race. They are always trying to feed you and hug you and kiss you but take someone's parking space and they'd shoot you. They're like the Irish when we've had a few drinks on us, except they haven't had the drink. I love the little street dramas, the way they go for a walk and a gawk. And they have festivals for everything. They even have a Bonsai festival -- you know those little stupid trees. They just celebrate life in a different way. Their day is punctuated by little treats. The first time I went to Italy I just felt I belonged there. I knew that I wanted to be part of this more than I ever felt about anything."

When she was about to sign for the apartment, Dennis was in Dublin, on edge. Not having seen the dilapidated place, he had reason to be. On the morning of the signing, when Christine had conveniently left her mobile phone behind her, he tracked her down to the estate agent's office. When he questioned what she was doing, she told him straight.

"I said, 'Dennis, if your feet are cold, put on a pair of socks.' If you waited for when you were ready to do something, you would never do anything," she tells me.

This was how her life had started out.

"We never did anything sensibly. When we got married, we only had seven quid in the bank. I said to Dennis, will we buy a house. He said, 'How can we?' But we got a loan to get the deposit. I used say, 'You go into the bank. You look like Jesus. They'll believe you.' When we were first married, I couldn't understand why he would be worrying about a bill. I'd say, 'You don't have to pay that until the man comes knocking on the door.' That was the way I was brought up."

She laughs at this but says she has since changed her ways. There must be much mirth when she is in Italy. Although she is using less sign language now, she gets mixed up with certain similar words. Often, she tells people that she is cooking for someone's genitals. (In Italian, the word for parents is quite similar.)

She reads Italian women's magazines and watches all the chat shows. "There's a support group for wives against mother-in-laws. The mothers-in-law will come on the chat shows and say, 'She is not a good wife. She does not iron his underpants.'"

Christine is a born storyteller but she always knew that she wanted to be a writer. She says that her late father was a huge influence on her, especially in this regard. She grew up on a nondescript housing estate in Walkinstown, where most of the fathers washed their cars on Saturday mornings. With its overgrown garden, their house was incongruous and the fact that her parents had separated and the children stayed with the father only added to their odd status.

"My father was a gambler but he also had a sideline as a spray-painter contractor. He had an outfit of 10 men. As a young girl, I used to be squashed into the car with all auld fellas, coughing and spluttering on top of me. They'd stop off at an early house, to steady their nerves before they went to work. I would have crisps and orange. My dad used to bring me to all the race tracks -- Leopardstown, the Curragh. My childhood was up and down. He was either flush or broke. I knew from an early age never to sign for a registered letter."

Christine's father had a lot of writer friends -- Patrick Kavanagh, Brendan Behan and Michael Hartnett, to name but a few. She believes that he was a frustrated writer but when he showed Kavanagh some of his poetry, the Monaghan poet told him to stick to what he was good at, making money.

"I often felt resentful about that. It's a terrible thing to tell someone not to do it," she says.

The writing life didn't seem like nirvana to young Christine.

"You just didn't feel that it was a very happy life. They were miserable and always fighting."

Christine took a while before she got down to writing. When she was first married she helped her husband set up his legal agency business from home. "I'd be on the phone and breastfeeding at the same time. She says that she was still a child when she first became a mother herself. "A psychiatrist would say that I was trying to recreate the childhood that I didn't have. I remember one day my eldest girl, sitting on the floor, said 'Oh Mammy, I'm fed up enjoying ourselves. Can we just not enjoy ourselves today?' I was like a Butlins Redcoat. I think part of me has never grown up. That's no harm, I suppose."

When Christine was coming up to a significant birthday, she tried to write. (There had been an abandoned novel years before that.) She wrote some short stories and one of them won an award in Listowel. Then she entered and won again, and also an Observer/Penguin competition. After that, she started on novels.

Her husband and her children have supported her all the way.

"I'm fed up with people giving marriage bad press all the time. Everyone said it wouldn't last, but somehow it did. When Dennis and I go out, we're probably the ones still married to the same person. My life started for me after I got married. I had security. I thought if he said boo to me, I'd be gone, but that isn't how marriage works. We're great pals for a start and we get on very well. I think it helps if you still fancy them because obviously you've got to sleep with them.

"A while ago I slipped in dog shit and crashed my knee. I was on crutches and I said to Dennis, 'Imagine if you couldn't have sex for the rest of your life?'

"He said, 'If you couldn't, you couldn't'.

"I said, 'Sure, what would be the point of you otherwise?'"

Last Train from Liguria is published by Atlantic Books, price €15.60. Christine Dwyer Hickey will read from her novel at the Dublin Writers Festival on June 6, at 2pm in the Project Arts Centre, with Julia O' Faolain and Claire Kilroy. www.dublinwritersfestival.com

She will also read at The West Cork Literary Festival in Bantry Library, on July 9 at 1pm with Dermot Bolger.

www.westcorkliteraryfestival.ie

- Ciara Dwyer