Sue Miller: Disunited states of America

Sue Miller is much more than the Yankee Joanna Trollope, Sue Fox discovers. Her fiction has its origin in the family breakdowns, and breakthroughs, of a Harvard generation caught between domestic ideals and individual dreams

Sue Miller is amused that Bloomsbury, which recently published her latest novel, The World Below, and reissued four others, has been touting her as America's answer to Joanna Trollope. "I've never read her books, and don't know that I should," she says, steaming milk while the dogs, Mo and Loulou, race around her sunny – but Aga-less – kitchen in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The World Below, Miller's sixth novel, is the story of a teacher in San Francisco who finds herself and her sense of place. She does so largely by contemplating the life of her grandmother, having inherited her home in Vermont. Placing Sue Miller in contemporary American fiction, critics talk about her in the same sentence as Anne Tyler – a comparison she finds startling. "Tyler writes charming, whimsical narratives. I don't think I'm that kind of writer. It doesn't much matter as long as what I write is taken seriously."

Miller describes her writing as "domestic realism". "Jonathan Franzen's [author of The Corrections] discomfort at being taken up by Oprah and women readers opened up some intelligent American journalism about the schisms between male/female; high art/low art – 'womens' books' as opposed to serious books written by men," she says. "There's this whole notion, dominant in the 19th century, that writing novels was a pretty low art form, created for the daughters of shopkeepers to read."

Miller, who has been teaching an undergraduate class in creative writing at Amherst College, breaks into a hilarious grimace. "Ugh! Who would want to be caught reading that kind of trash? The point is, we're in the entertainment industry. Writers need readers. We're not writing in code for ourselves."

While endlessly reworking the dynamics of love and family life, Miller has a gift for storytelling that's uniquely hers. Reading through the themes which permeate all her books – families, marital conflict, the impossible demands and balances between home and work – it is her voice you hear. It's a voice so compelling and full of insight, you need to keep reminding yourself that it's all invented.

"The characters are very real to me," she says. "To some degree, I write out of my own life, but not that graphically." It seems intrusive to ask about the husband she divorced last year. "Being a writer – spending so much time in my head – wasn't the reason the marriage ended."

Now 58, Miller's own life feels a little temporary. She spends time at her house in Vermont but last summer, following the divorce ("it was a much longer marriage than my first one"), she moved from Boston's South End to this three-storey yellow house in a pretty Cambridge street. The setting could have come straight from one of her novels. There are churches, a school, a playground, a shop and welcoming neighbours.

But it's not where she wants to be. "I couldn't find anything reasonable in the South End. I was working on two projects and scheduled to travel all Fall doing readings and lecturing, so I bought this just because it was available." She unpacked her things but promptly put the house back on the market. Post-11 September, real estate wasn't moving, so she stayed put longer than anticipated. Happily, on this blue-skied New England Sunday morning, the market has picked up again. Miller is relocating to her old neighbourhood, where she has found a not-quite-renovated apartment

She was born in Chicago into a family of preachers and academics: sermons were part of her childhood. Their intricate form and timing – so much having to be contained within a certain framework – was something she realised early would be a useful tool for a writer. "I was smart and did well at school, but, at the age of 16, was totally unprepared for Harvard – a wonderful place but terrible for me. The ratio of men to women was seven to one. There were no female teachers.

"Some women I knew did very well and were outspoken in class. They'd gone to the top schools and been trained to argue and write papers. I was just intimidated by all of it. In class I could see other students writing much more polished stories. Mine weren't particularly badly written, but they were boring, because I didn't have anything compelling to say. I thought I'd marry at 20, have four or five children and live happily ever after."

Miller did marry at 20 – but that's where the fairy tale ends. Her husband, whom she met when he was a medical student, qualified as a psychiatrist. In 1968, their son, Ben, was born. Three years later, the marriage was over. Miller took in lodgers and set up the Harvard Yard Child Care Centre, where she worked for eight years.

Steeped in family and marital conflict, she loved being with little children and listening to womens' stories. The Centre became a rich source of material for a future novelist who discovered that she, did, indeed, have something important to say. "Unlike maths, where everything can be over for you if you haven't done your best work in your twenties, writing is rewarded by experience."

In 1986, Miller published, to huge critical acclaim, The Good Mother. It was her first novel: an anguished portrait of a woman caught in a custody battle who loses her daughter because she falls in love with another man.

The Good Mother was on the bestseller lists for six months and the film adaptation, starring Diane Keaton and Liam Neeson, was released two years later. By then, Miller had been awarded a fellowship in the creative writing programme at Boston University and could afford to write. "I was a single mother, scraping a living. Suddenly I had the freedom and financial security to write full-time."

Few of the Harvard marriages among her friends have lasted. "I was the first person I knew with a child, who got divorced, but within five years, most of the marriages around me started crumbling." The ones that have lasted, she says, continually renegotiate their terms. Her son, Ben, in his thirties and living happily but single in Africa, is, she feels, probably wise to be cautious about marriage. "I think all children of divorce feel that. What looks like lasting for ever is no guarantee."

The two are close. Although she knows her books aren't really to his taste, he is proud of and pleased for her success. While I Was Gone, written three years ago, witnesses life from the perspective of a woman who is a mother, a wife, a vet – an individual – trying to handle the past's ceaseless invasion of her present. It sold over a million copies and has two words in tiny print on the dedication page: "for Ben". "He knew me when I was struggling and has seen me through the transformation of my life."

Since 1993, alongside all her other work (including chairing the New England branch of PEN, the American writers' forum), Miller has written a memoir of her father's death from Alzheimer's. Due for publication in America later this year, this is a very different book from John Bayley's Iris. "As a novelist, you have a mask. When I started, I wasn't sure how to write non-fiction – especially something so personal.

"How much of myself or my father did I want to expose? I wrote it because when my father was diagnosed, there was nothing available for a daughter who was also the care-giver and the manager of a case. The books I found were either scientifically impenetrable or patronising."

A much more pleasurable task was editing the 2001 selections of the best American short stories. Meanwhile, families, marriage, love and the gnawing griefs that go with it, continue to fill her head. "When I was a teenager, some marriages were so destructive and disastrous for the adults and children, they should have ended. But divorce was socially much more beyond the pale.

"Now, if a relationship isn't working, even though I'm sure that when people make a commitment to one another they mean it, they can walk away. Maybe divorce has become too easy and people should have to work harder at marriage. I don't have any answers. All I know is that, finally, all of us are alone."

Sue Miller - Biography

Sue Miller, 58, grew up in Chicago. She has an MA from Boston University, and an MEd from the Harvard School of Education. Her many awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her father and both her grandfathers were ministers; at 16, she went to Radcliffe, the women's college at Harvard, graduating in English, but didn't think seriously about writing until her thirties. In 1979, divorced with a young son, she won a writing fellowship from Boston University. Her first published story caught the attention of an agent. While working on a novel and teaching writing, she married for the second time. In 1986, The Good Mother was on bestseller lists for six months and became a film. Family Pictures (1990) was another huge success. Her sixth novel, The World Below, is published (like her other books) by Bloomsbury. Divorced, Sue Miller lives in Boston and Vermont.