What? A Nice Writer Like Her With These People? : Books: Mary McGarry Morris lives a stunningly normal life. The same cannot be said for the quirky men and women in her novels.

Mary McGarry Morris hates questions about the odd characters who inhabit her novels.

She responds by shrugging, pausing, then smiling uncomfortably. “I have the worst time with that,” she said. “Because, I mean, those people are right there. I guess they’re with me, in me, whatever.”

But the queries seem inevitable. If Morris is so nice and normal, why are the men and women in her novels so strange? Why does Martha Horgan, protagonist of Morris’ new novel “A Dangerous Woman” (Viking), yell at people who try to be kind to her? Why does a teen-ager named Dotty steal a child in “Vanished,” Morris’ first novel? Why does Aubrey Wallace leave his wife and children and go along with Dotty?

Morris’ stunningly balanced life yields no clues.

She lives in a neat Victorian house that faces the campus of Phillips Academy. She is 47 years old and married to a man she met on a blind date more than half a lifetime ago, in college. Her five kids came so effortlessly she calls them “instant children.” For many years the joke between Michael and Mary Joan (as she is called) Morris was, “Shall we go to a movie, or shall we stay home and make another baby?”

Thousands of Morris family pictures greet visitors in the entry hall of her home. The dining room has lace curtains. If there is anything out of sync in this calm equation it is only Andrew, Morris’ neurotic toy poodle.

“Maybe I’m not as interested in writing about ordinary, middle-class type of people,” Morris said, holding Andrew on her lap like a cat. “Maybe I find them boring.”

Martha Horgan, Morris’ “Dangerous Woman,” is anything but boring. She is not unattractive, nor is she stupid. But Martha is not quite right. She is almost raped by a group of high school bullies, and the whole town thinks she asked for it. At a “Plastiqueware” party, she becomes obsessed with a set of bowls and nearly assaults the woman who buys it. She shouts at little children, who call her Marthorgan, like an ogre from mythology.

Martha is the kind of woman whose presence invites people to walk on the other side of the street. She poses an unspoken dilemma, Morris said: “On the one hand, you know you probably should be kind, charitable to someone like that. But you know what will happen if you do.”

Morris said her characters--Martha, Aubrey or Dotty--have a quality that people who are less visibly troubled may deny in themselves.

“When I think of these characters, I think in terms of their pain, too,” Morris said. She was sitting at her kitchen table, scratching Andrew’s neck with one hand and reaching for a teacup with the other.

“And I find that same pain elsewhere. Many of the troubles that I see in these characters I find in ordinary people, too,” Morris said. “I’m kind of amused sometimes when people will ask me, ‘Where did you ever come across such characters?’ The message is that they don’t know someone like that.”

But “the Marthas are everywhere,” Morris said.

Growing up in Rutland, Vt., “I knew women like Martha, and men, too. It was a matter of observation, watching and wondering about them, and never really doing anything about it. You know, I never took a Martha Horgan into my life, even though they were out there. But I was certainly fascinated by them.”

The people Morris observed showed up in the stories she began writing as a child. She can scarcely remember a time when she did not write.

But “the identity as a writer was a terrible confusion for me,” Morris said. “I knew that these feelings I felt must be what writers felt. But I hesitated to call myself a writer when I had nothing published.”

So Morris became a social worker in the working-class city of Lowell, Mass. She raised four girls and a boy. She drove to dances and athletic events. She cooked and did the laundry--and wrote, and wrote and wrote.

There were short stories and poetry. There were various novels, none complete. Then the idea for “Vanished” came to her. The manuscript took almost eight years to complete.

Her intention when she began “Vanished” was to write something highly commercial. There was crime, a kidnaping, a kind of formulaic commercial construct. But then there were these quirky characters and a plot that seemed to overshadow the crime.

“I was very committed to it. I liked the story, and I had great affection for the characters,” Morris said. “There was a lot I had invested in it, and it wasn’t just time.

“With ignorance comes courage,” Morris said. “I had no idea how many manuscripts were landing on top of mine.”

Writing was a secret life of sorts for Morris. Only her children and husband knew of her efforts. “It got weird,” she said. “But it was easier. I could protect myself. I didn’t have to answer the questions, ‘Have you heard from the publisher?’ or, ‘Can I read part of it?’ ”

She sent her manuscript blindly to publishers, and when there were no takers, she sent it to literary agents, whose names she had seen in newspaper and magazine articles.

The rejections came by return mail. To console herself, Morris would reread her manuscript. “I would get that lift of spirit when you know that you have read something good, whether it is yours or someone else’s.”

“A very negative letter, a critical letter, a rather scathing letter” from an agent nearly leveled her.

But before giving up entirely on “Vanished,” she sent eight last letters to agents.

“Of the eight letters, I got one negative response, one I didn’t hear from, and six were positive,” Morris said. “It wasn’t a new query letter and it wasn’t a new book. It was as if I had been pushed out of a plane somewhere and landed on my feet.”

Morris placed her book with Jean V. Naggar, the agent for, among other writers, Jean M. Auel. “She was someone who liked something obviously offbeat,” Morris said. In short order, Naggar sold the book to Viking.

“It seemed unreal,” Morris said. “It seemed a very fragile thing. I would not have been a bit surprised if a phone call had come saying it was all a big mistake.”

“Vanished” earned largely dazzling reviews when it came out in 1988, as well as nominations for the National Book and the PEN Faulkner Awards. “I think Viking was as surprised as I was when that happened,” Morris said.

Similar accolades greeted “A Dangerous Woman.” The New Yorker, for example, called it “a tour de force.”

Morris can laugh, now, at how when “the first good review came in on ‘Vanished,’ ” she thought that would be enough to satisfy her. But then she began to get greedy, devouring every review. “I quickly forgot all my little rules, like, well, it doesn’t really matter what the review says because you got it published.”

Still, Morris kept a cool head. As soon as “Vanished” was sold, she listened to “that part of me that respected what I did,” and began writing “A Dangerous Woman.” The praise for her writing was well and good, she said, but “after 40-something years of being completely invisible, it didn’t go to my head. I knew exactly who I was.”

Who she was was a writer attracted to “the darker side, the eccentric side, the queer side” of the human character. Who she was was a writer whose faith in herself withstood a “cushion of failure” from editors and publishers. And who she was was a wife and mother who had real life to keep her humble.

As she spoke, the clothes dryer hummed steadily in the background. “They still expect me to match their socks,” she said.