Alice McDermott
Author of Charming Billy
About the Author
Alice McDermott was born in Brooklyn, New York on June 27, 1953. She received a B.A. from the State University of New York at Oswego in 1975 and an M.A. from the University of New Hampshire in 1978. After graduating college, she got a job reading unsolicited manuscripts for Redbook magazine and did show more some freelance reading for Esquire. She has taught writing at American University, the University of New Hampshire, and the University of California at San Diego. Currently, she is the Writing Seminars Professor of the Johns Hopkins University Writing Department. Her short stories and articles have appeared in numerous publications including Ms., Redbook, Mademoiselle, The New Yorker, Seventeen, the New York Times and the Washington Post. She has written several novels including A Bigamist's Daughter, At Weddings and Wakes, Child of My Heart, After This, Someone, and The Ninth Hour. That Night was made into a film starring C. Thomas Howell and Juliette Lewis in 1992. She has won several awards including the National Book Award for fiction in 1998 for Charming Billy, a Whiting Writers Award, and the 2008 Corrington Award for Literature. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Works by Alice McDermott
Associated Works
Secret Ingredients: The New Yorker Book of Food and Drink (2007) — Contributor — 595 copies, 10 reviews
More Stories We Tell: The Best Contemporary Short Stories by North American Women (2004) — Contributor — 66 copies
Selected Shorts: Food Fictions (Selected Shorts: A Celebration of the Short Story) (2007) — Contributor — 11 copies, 3 reviews
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Canonical name
- McDermott, Alice
- Birthdate
- 1953-06-27
- Gender
- female
- Education
- St. Boniface School, Elmont, Long Island, New York, USA (1967)
Sacred Heart Academy, Hempstead New York, USA (1971)
State University of New York, Oswego (BA|1975)
University of New Hampshire (MA | 1978) - Occupations
- novelist
professor - Organizations
- University of California, San Diego
American University - Awards and honors
- Whiting Writers' Award (1987)
F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Outstanding Achievement in American Fiction (2010) - Agent
- Harriet Wasserman (Harriet Wasserman Literary Agency)
- Relationships
- Turco, Lewis (teacher)
- Short biography
- McDermott was born in Brooklyn, New York. She attended St. Boniface School in Elmont, New York, on Long Island (1967), Sacred Heart Academy in Hempstead (1971), and the State University of New York at Oswego, receiving her BA in 1975, and received her MA from the University of New Hampshire in 1978.
She has taught at UCSD and American University, has been a writer-in-residence at Lynchburg College and Hollins College in Virginia, and was lecturer in English at the University of New Hampshire. Her short stories have appeared in Ms., Redbook, Mademoiselle, The New Yorker and Seventeen. She has also published articles in The New York Times and The Washington Post.
Ms. McDermott lives outside Washington, D.C. with her husband, a neuroscientist, and three children. She is Catholic, though she once deemed herself "not a very good Catholic - Nationality
- USA
- Birthplace
- Brooklyn, New York, USA
- Places of residence
- Brooklyn, New York, USA
Bethesda, Maryland, USA - Associated Place (for map)
- USA
Members
Discussions
novel, 50s-60s era, family, four kids? Catholic, one son dies in Vietnam in Name that Book (November 2016)
Reviews
I can't remember who recommended that I give Alice McDermott a try but I have now read two of her novels in the past several weeks and I'm delighted to have added her to my list of favorite authors. This, her latest novel, is exquisite in its rendering of an ordinary life in all its extraordinariness. This is the story of Marie Commeford who grows up in a working class Brooklyn neighborhood with her parents and her brother Gabe. Her intense connection to each member of her family, and the show more nuances of those sweet but complicated relationships, is captured through stories, and through descriptions of moments: their taste, their smell, the sounds and the sights. McDermott effectively creates the evening in the street with shouting boys playing baseball and shy or awkward girls watching them and hoping to be noticed. There is heartbreak. These lives are not easy. But they are worthwhile; they have meaning and hope and place. Marie grows up, marries, has children. The novel follows her through each decade and it's a lovely story.
McDermott explores faith without flinching, without apology for frank doubt and a bit of sardonic practicality.
"All the thought and all the worry, all the faith and philosophy, the paintings and the stories and the poems, all the whatnot, gone into the study of heaven or hell, and yet so little wonder applied to the sinking into sleep. Falling asleep. All the prayers I had said before bed throughout my life, all the prayers I had made my children say --- Our Father, Hail Mary, Glory Be --- the Confiteor if some transgression had taken place --- missed the mark entirely. It was grace, the simple prayer before meals, that we should have been murmuring into our clasped hands at the end of the day: Bless us, oh, Lord, and this thy gift, which we are about to receive."
Ah yes, that is someone who knows what most to be thankful for, who knows the value of escape, in its purest form, escape from pain and loss and loneliness. Sleep is a most precious gift.
McDermott's use of language is both wonderfully straightforward and beautifully lyric. After learning of the lonely death of Bill Corrigan, a character from her childhood, and witnessing at Bill's wake the heartbreak of someone who once broke her own heart, Marie sees into the heart of this man, this Walter. "Walter who had come here tonight --- perhaps the only one of his contemporaries left behind --- come down from the Bronx to weep like a child *before the world closed up over Bill Corrigan's passing*." (italics - between the asterisks - are mine)
It's that last bit that I love. What a way to describe the passing of a human being out of our world, out of our time, eventually out of memory.
And yet, as much as this novel is about loneliness and loss and the terror of both, it is also about love, and about the inevitability of being loved by someone. show less
McDermott explores faith without flinching, without apology for frank doubt and a bit of sardonic practicality.
"All the thought and all the worry, all the faith and philosophy, the paintings and the stories and the poems, all the whatnot, gone into the study of heaven or hell, and yet so little wonder applied to the sinking into sleep. Falling asleep. All the prayers I had said before bed throughout my life, all the prayers I had made my children say --- Our Father, Hail Mary, Glory Be --- the Confiteor if some transgression had taken place --- missed the mark entirely. It was grace, the simple prayer before meals, that we should have been murmuring into our clasped hands at the end of the day: Bless us, oh, Lord, and this thy gift, which we are about to receive."
Ah yes, that is someone who knows what most to be thankful for, who knows the value of escape, in its purest form, escape from pain and loss and loneliness. Sleep is a most precious gift.
McDermott's use of language is both wonderfully straightforward and beautifully lyric. After learning of the lonely death of Bill Corrigan, a character from her childhood, and witnessing at Bill's wake the heartbreak of someone who once broke her own heart, Marie sees into the heart of this man, this Walter. "Walter who had come here tonight --- perhaps the only one of his contemporaries left behind --- come down from the Bronx to weep like a child *before the world closed up over Bill Corrigan's passing*." (italics - between the asterisks - are mine)
It's that last bit that I love. What a way to describe the passing of a human being out of our world, out of our time, eventually out of memory.
And yet, as much as this novel is about loneliness and loss and the terror of both, it is also about love, and about the inevitability of being loved by someone. show less
When a young husband takes his life by turning on the gas in his Brooklyn apartment, his pregnant wife is comforted by a small group of nuns from a local convent who dedicate their service to the sick and poor. Annie is given a job in the convent laundry, where her daughter Sally grows up. The nuns--Sister Immaculata, Sister Jeanne, Sister Saint Savior, Sister Lucy and the rest--adore young Sally and are thrilled when it seems she has received "the calling." But is she truly suited for this show more life?
Hoffman's novel explores the inner motivations of her characters, secular and religious. Some are motivated by sheer love, some by faith, some by desire or ambition, still others by the need to sacrifice or to be admired. The relationship between Sally and her mother is a particularly complicated one, especially when Sally learns that her mother is not quite the suffering widow she had always thought. The nuns, a little family onto themselves and almost substitute mothers to Sally, engage in quiet conflicts over what would be the best road for her future. I especially liked the realism with which these women are portrayed: the nuns are neither saints-on-earth nor the typical caricatures of cruel nuns found in so many historical novels, they are real women who, like everyone else, have multiple emotions, needs, and regrets, who sometimes make mistakes but can also be nurturing and forgiving. Hoffman creates a clear picture of life in early 20th-century Brooklyn, the importance of family and community, and the influence of religious devotion. show less
Hoffman's novel explores the inner motivations of her characters, secular and religious. Some are motivated by sheer love, some by faith, some by desire or ambition, still others by the need to sacrifice or to be admired. The relationship between Sally and her mother is a particularly complicated one, especially when Sally learns that her mother is not quite the suffering widow she had always thought. The nuns, a little family onto themselves and almost substitute mothers to Sally, engage in quiet conflicts over what would be the best road for her future. I especially liked the realism with which these women are portrayed: the nuns are neither saints-on-earth nor the typical caricatures of cruel nuns found in so many historical novels, they are real women who, like everyone else, have multiple emotions, needs, and regrets, who sometimes make mistakes but can also be nurturing and forgiving. Hoffman creates a clear picture of life in early 20th-century Brooklyn, the importance of family and community, and the influence of religious devotion. show less
Tricia is a young wife who accompanied her husband to Saigon. It's 1963, and the expat life of garden parties, evening drinks and children attending the international school while living in lavish homes cared for by local help is still normal. Tricia, by nature a good girl who grew up working class Catholic in Yonkers, is ready to do her part to help her husband's career. She's naturally shy, but keenly observant and she falls in easily with Charlene, a woman with goals and plans and the show more forceful nature needed to carry them out. She's quickly co-opted into Charlene's work, at first bringing toys to hospitalized children (and cigarettes to their parents), then into a plan that involves trips out to a leper colony. But the war is becoming something that can't be ignored and Tricia is forced into looking at how the very best of intentions can do harm.
The novel takes the form of letters written between Tricia and Charlene's daughter, in which Tricia explains how people thought and acted in that time and place, through the lens of what we now know. It's a balancing act, to tell the story of a woman in 1963, through her eyes then and now and McDermott is able to make that work. Charlene's actions, and therefore many of Tricia's were what we would look at now with a critical eye, as does the present day Tricia, looking closely at how what they were doing was just feel-good work for a large part, but also work that sometimes did real good and sometimes real harm. McDermott's characters seem fairly simple on the surface, but there's a lot of complexity under the surface. I will be thinking about the characters and the choices they made for some time. I recommend going into this book knowing as little as possible about it ahead of time. show less
The novel takes the form of letters written between Tricia and Charlene's daughter, in which Tricia explains how people thought and acted in that time and place, through the lens of what we now know. It's a balancing act, to tell the story of a woman in 1963, through her eyes then and now and McDermott is able to make that work. Charlene's actions, and therefore many of Tricia's were what we would look at now with a critical eye, as does the present day Tricia, looking closely at how what they were doing was just feel-good work for a large part, but also work that sometimes did real good and sometimes real harm. McDermott's characters seem fairly simple on the surface, but there's a lot of complexity under the surface. I will be thinking about the characters and the choices they made for some time. I recommend going into this book knowing as little as possible about it ahead of time. show less
In the sixteen short pieces collected here, Alice McDermott touches upon a variety of themes relevant to the writing life. Or, more simply, life. Not strictly a self-help book for writers, it nevertheless reveals numerous lessons she has learned both as an accomplished novelist and as a teacher of would-be novelists.
She writes in an engaging fashion that is always readable, full of insight and wit. And in passing it is often highly illuminating. I especially liked the essays, “What About show more the Baby?,” and “Only Connect (Eventually)”.
Gently recommended for the would-be novelist in all of us. show less
She writes in an engaging fashion that is always readable, full of insight and wit. And in passing it is often highly illuminating. I especially liked the essays, “What About show more the Baby?,” and “Only Connect (Eventually)”.
Gently recommended for the would-be novelist in all of us. show less
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