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
almost claim
After a long run of almost thirty years, you get to the point where you say, 'These are my concerns.' It's not so much this is what I set out to claim - it is a kind of refrain.
characters either fails faith works
For me, having characters who are part of a faith then allows me to talk about how that faith either works or fails them without having to attack the institution.
cell children constantly cultivate notion trying
I am trying to cultivate the notion that constantly misplacing one's cell phone is a charming eccentricity... my children aren't buying it.
accept characters death interested life move time
I'm interested in characters who should know better, who know they should give up, move on, accept life as it is, with all its constraints - life, death, time - but don't.
anywhere legal novel original pad
I like that original romance of having a pen and a legal pad and going anywhere in the world and being able to write a novel with just those two things.
asked brothers complete imperious nobody saying sentences
I was the youngest; I had two imperious older brothers - I didn't get to often complete sentences at the dinner table. So writing was a way of saying what nobody asked me to say.
family people
For immigrant generations especially, family is the first structure, or shelter, for a people who are in exile.
change interested pure
Memory is not pure. Memories told are not pure memories; memories told are stories. The storyteller will change them. I've always been interested in that.
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.
memories echoes gone
The lesson, I suppose, is that none of us have much control over how we will be remembered. Every life is an amalgam, and it is impossible to know what moments, what foibles, what charms will come to define us once we're gone. All we can do is live our lives fully, be authentically ourselves, and trust that the right things about us, the best and most fitting things, will echo in the memories of us that endure.
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.