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
character voice listening
"Someone": I understood that this was a character who in her own life her voice hadn't much been heard and in literature her life isn't much heard. For me, it was resisting all the more appealing characters and listening to the voice that hadn't been much heard from.
stories
We are surrounded by story.
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.
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.
family people
For immigrant generations especially, family is the first structure, or shelter, for a people who are in exile.
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.
against awful characters confined faith rebelling
Most of the characters I write with don't think an awful lot about their faith. They're not always questioning the church or feeling confined by the church or rebelling against the church.
believe catholics examined faith interior life people
I believe that the interior life is the same for all of us. And because they're steeped in faith, Irish-American Catholics are a people who have a language for the examined life.
above believe choose faith novel ultimately
I think 'Charming Billy' ultimately is a novel about faith and what we believe in and, above all, what we choose to believe in.
both catholics raised
My parents were both first-generation Irish Catholics raised in Brooklyn.