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
background class early ethic job learned middle might nobody quite work
I learned really early on that I had to treat it as if it were a real job. This might be my middle class background - the Irish work ethic, which isn't quite the same as the Protestant work ethic - but still, it's, 'Get a job and show up every day. Be there. And don't complain. Who do you think you are: you're nobody special; go to work.'
novels publishing rather shouting tend
Publishing a short story can sometimes feel like shouting into the dark... your words come out, and then nothing... but I don't think that's why I tend to write novels rather than stories.
dramatic fertile interested observed
I'm more interested in character than events. I've observed that about myself as a writer. I find events, even the most dramatic sort, not to be such fertile ground.
fiction report task tool tradition writers
Our task as fiction writers isn't just to report something that didn't really happen. We have to give what we write a sense of reality. The tool of our tradition is language.
adjective jewish limiting noun russian whether
Any adjective you put before the noun 'writer' is going to be limiting in some way. Whether it's feminist writer, Jewish writer, Russian writer, or whatever.
drawn
I'm not usually drawn to memoir - many run the risk of self-aggrandizement or score-settling.
call catholic defender faith remains search theologian valuable
I am not a theologian or a historian, and I feel no call to become a defender of the faith, so in my case, the search for what remains valuable focuses on language itself: Catholic prayer, ritual, the naming of things.
human list prize time
You're a human being, and every time a list of prize nominations comes out and your name isn't on it, you do have that thumb-in-the-eye feeling.
catholic church gospels poetry ways
The language of the Catholic Church - the liturgy, the prayer, the gospels - was in many ways my first poetry.
conscious trying
I'm very conscious of trying to make something epic out of something small and ordinary.
inevitable
Loss is inevitable - you have to be blind or naive to think otherwise.
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.