Marion Dante has written her memoir as therapy for coping with life outside a convent after 32 years as a nun, she tells Rosita Boland

When Marion Dante turns up for her interview, the first thing she does after shaking hands is to spread out eight index cards with hand-written notes on them over the table.

"That's so I don't forget to tell you anything," she announces brightly. In 10 years of interviewing, the appearance of index cards as prompts is a first for me. It's true that people come to an interview prepared to answer questions, but Dante looks as if she's come prepared for an exam. She places the cards neatly in front of her, laid out numerically, quite unselfconsciously. It's a telling gesture, one that suggests an unusually methodical, organised approach to most elements of a life. But then, perhaps it is not really that surprising, since Limerick-born Marion Dante did spend 39 years in the institutional environment of a Salesian convent in England.

Dropping the Habitis the unfortunately punning title of Dante's just-published memoir about her years in the convent, both as a teenager - she entered as a student and aspirant in 1958, aged only 14 - and adult. She wrote it, she says, "as therapy".

Dante was born in Limerick in 1944, where she lived for a time before the family moved to London. Although her parents were married when she was born, she was, as she says today, using the archaic expression "conceived out of wedlock". While she herself was not aware of this for many years, her mother, it seems, felt so guilty about it that Dante was subliminally encouraged by her to enter the convent in Chertsey, Surrey at 14 as a "sin offering to God". More pragmatically, Dante herself wanted to escape the poverty of her immediate surroundings, and she enjoyed the fuss of being an aspiring nun.

"I was living in London, we were poor, I was sharing a room with my two brothers, we were in a furnished flat, and going to the boarding school at the convent was much easier than staying at home," she says. "I was trained as a teacher. I got opportunities I wouldn't have had otherwise." By 21, when Dante took her final vows, she was so institutionalised that there was no question for her of the possibility of exploring an alternative, secular life.

For 32 years, she served as a Salesian nun in England, moving around different schools and convents, coping with the changes that Vatican II brought. They watched television, but only after one of the nuns first covered it with a shawl and got underneath to see if what was being shown was suitable for viewing by the whole community.

Routine was everything. Friendships were not encouraged. Since religious communities, like every other section of society, have their own hierarchies, there was bullying, some of which came Dante's way.

She had a nervous breakdown and was sent to attend an 18-month residential course at what she describes as a "therapeutic centre" for people in religious life who were having problems.

"It was marvellous. We had all sorts of therapy. Art therapy, psychodrama. The downside of that was we analysed ourselves too much and when we came out, we just sort of regressed and were unable to cope with the rawness of life." After much self-questioning, Dante finally asked to be dispensed from her vows, and left the convent in 1991. She moved to Frimley, Surrey, and continued working as a teacher, although a breast-cancer scare meant she retired early, at 50. So what is life like for her now, 16 years later? Did she ever regret not leaving earlier?

Dante, who speaks at all times in a low, uncertain voice, smiles briefly and fiddles with one of her cards. "Yes," she replies simply. "I would have loved to have got married, loved to have had a child. I suppose I would just love to have had someone love me and been there for me." Then she says: "I just don't know the bits and pieces of how to relate to people still. Especially in male company. I'm either too naive or else too familiar, which doesn't quite make for good relations, I don't think."

Actually, if I had had to guess how long Dante had been out of the convent, I would have said far fewer than 16 years. She seems so determinedly unworldly. She says three times that she got her skirt on half-price discount, asks the publicist wonderingly who pays for the waters and coffee we are drinking, and says she finds making all choices very difficult, even if it is simply whether to have coffee or tea.

Is it not liberating to be able to make choices after so long of having them made for you? "No," she says, genuinely aghast. "No, no, no. I still feel a bit institutionalised," she confesses. "Choices and decision-making were all done for me in the convent. I'm still not sure of letting go. I don't relax. It may be my own personality, but I still feel bound into routine and a timetable. Whether that's for comfort or security, I don't know." She is most comfortable socialising in pre-defined groups; her art, writing and badminton groups. "Otherwise I never know what to expect from people."

In the same unselfconscious way she had laid out her prompt cards, she mentions that she is "still saving souls", which she explains by saying she fund-raises for cancer charities. "I'm still trying to find a meaningful existence."

Money was and remains the most difficult thing for her to manage. She never had any significant amounts of it in the convent, and has found buying things - be they clothes, food or her flat - tremendously daunting. She also points out that many religious institutions do not make any pension provision to those who leave. "And the church is so wealthy." It's the only time in the interview she raises her voice.

Does she regret leaving what was her world and home for so long? "No, but I think sometimes I feel sorry for myself in lots of different ways. Lately, I was coming back home from London on the train, and as we got near to the station, people were on their mobile phones, trying to contact somebody and I got so frustrated that I didn't have anybody that I got my mobile phone out and pretended I was talking to somebody, to imagine there was somebody there to meet me."

Dante says she wrote her memoir as therapy, which is a worthy, but sometimes unwise reason for publishing such writing. The last three chapters - describing her anger at being felt up by an Italian priest when she went on holiday after leaving the convent - are baffling for their inclusion. But to Dante, the shoddy, unwelcome, clumsy grope of a strange priest was her reason for writing the book; to her, it encapsulated her delayed anger at the church in general. To the reader, it makes for sad and uncomfortable reading.

One of the words written on her cards is "Dolcis", a brand of shoes. She is wearing a pair of them today, because on her first day in the convent as a 14-year-old teenager, she smuggled in a pair of shiny red Dolcis shoes, which she wore only once before being instructed to stain them a more appropriate black. Today, at least, her shoes are defiantly red.

• Dropping the Habit, by Marion Dante, is published by Poolbeg, €14.99