Alice McDermott
Alice McDermott
Alice McDermottis an American writer and university professor. For her 1998 novel Charming Billy she won an American Book Award and the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth27 June 1953
CityBrooklyn, NY
CountryUnited States of America
hand material readily
Being Irish-American myself, Irish-American material is readily at hand to me.
adolescent appealed appealing books both romantic sinking suppose
Right away I think of two books - 'Wuthering Heights' and 'Rebecca' - and of just sinking into them as a young reader. I think they must have appealed not just to my romantic adolescent soul, but I suppose there's also an appealing darkness in both of them.
lose love manipulate
I love a well-plotted story. But I'm just not that kind of writer, and it's not necessarily by choice. When I manipulate plot, I feel I lose authenticity.
plot
I don't want to write about violence, and I don't want to hang a plot on a murder. I think it's cheap.
among anyone faith people ways
I think a misconception among many non-religious people is that anyone with a strong faith is, in all ways and at all times, blindly consistent, unwavering, unquestioning.
catholic children education gone inner life looking talking though value
My children have gone to Catholic school... Part of their whole education is talking about the inner life and looking at your life, even though you're only 15 or 16 - thinking about your mortality, thinking about the value of your life, thinking about your obligations.
call experience formed language lots oral prayers song spirit third time twice
Much of my experience with language was formed in the church, which has an oral tradition. There are lots of repetitions in prayers and song refrains. There's a sense of incantation, that if you call not once and not twice but for a third time, the spirit appears.
kids
I was one of those kids who always wrote.
tools world language
Language is the writer's only tool - we really don't have anything else - but our language contains within it our entire experience of the world.
stories
We are surrounded by story.
sooner-or-later sells good-writers
A good writer sells out everybody he knows, sooner or later.
speaks-out interesting parent
My parents were both first-generation Irish Catholics raised in Brooklyn. But it was more for me - it was that women of that generation were even less likely to express themselves, more likely to have that active interior life that they didn't dare speak out.So I was interesting in women of that era. I was interested in the language of that era. There's so much. And, certainly, this is cultural, so much there wasn't spoken about.
guilt wells glorious
Guilt is glorious when it's well earned.
differences worry firsts
I'm always telling my students, don't - don't worry so much third person, first person. It doesn't make that much difference.