McDermott, Alice 1953-

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McDermott, Alice 1953-

PERSONAL:

Born June 27, 1953, in Brooklyn, NY; daughter of William J. and Mildred McDermott; married David M. Armstrong (a research neuroscientist), June 16, 1979; children: three. Education: State University of New York, B.A., 1975; University of New Hampshire, M.A., 1978.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Bethesda, MD. Agent—Harriet Wasserman Literary Agency, 137 E. 36th St., New York, NY 10016.

CAREER:

Writer. Lecturer in English at the University of New Hampshire, Durham, 1978-79; fiction reader for Redbook and Esquire, 1979-80; consulting editor of Redbook's Young Writers Contest; lecturer in writing at the University of California, San Diego; teacher of writing workshops at American University; writer-in-residence, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, 1995 and 1997; writer-in-residence, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD.

MEMBER:

Writer's Guild, PEN, Associated Writing Programs, Poets and Writers.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Whiting Writers Award, 1987; National Book Award nomination, 1987, and PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction nomination, 1988, both for That Night; National Book Award, 1998, and American Book Award, Before Columbus Foundation, 1999, both for Charming Billy; finalist, Pulitzer Prize for fiction, 2007, for After This.

WRITINGS:

NOVELS

A Bigamist's Daughter, Random House (New York, NY), 1982.

That Night, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 1987.

At Weddings and Wakes, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 1991.

Charming Billy, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 1998.

Child of My Heart, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 2002.

After This, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 2006.

Contributor of short stories to Redbook, Mademoiselle, Seventeen, and Ms.

ADAPTATIONS:

Child of My Heart was adapted for audio cassette and CD and released by Audio Renaissance, 2002.

SIDELIGHTS:

Award-winning novelist Alice McDermott deals with many aspects of love and family life in her novels, including a love affair between a cynical editor and a novelist, a romance between two teenagers in the early 1960s, and the many nuances of an Irish-American family. She infuses her works with inventiveness and originality and is praised for her storytelling skills, her lyrical writing, and her descriptive detail and imagery. Michael J. Bandler, writing in Tribune Books, noted: "McDermott is a spellbinder, adding a cachet of mystery and eloquence to common occurrences."

McDermott's first novel, A Bigamist's Daughter, concerns Elizabeth Connelly, a twenty-six-year-old editor at a vanity publisher. Her job consists of reading the summaries of books (instead of the entire manuscript), heaping enthusiasm and praise on the author, extracting payments of 5,000 dollars or more from them, and then trying to explain why the book was never published. Two years of this kind of work at Vista Books has turned Elizabeth into a cynic, and it is at this point in her life that she meets and becomes involved with a southern client still in search of an ending for his novel about a bigamist. Consequently, Connelly ponders her own father's frequent absences from home as she was growing up. As Elizabeth's memories of her father begin to resurface, "she becomes more appealing; she loses the harshness and superficiality that initially alienate the reader," maintained Anne Tyler in the New York Times Book Review. LeAnne Schreiber, writing in the New York Times, praised the humor in A Bigamist's Daughter: "The laughter is wicked but not cruel." And Tyler concluded that the novel "is impressive," adding that at certain moments "McDermott sounds like anything but a first-time novelist. She writes with assurance and skill, and she has created a fascinatingly prismatic story."

A National Book Award finalist, McDermott's second novel, That Night, examines love and the loss of innocence through the story of two teenaged lovers and their separation. Set in suburbia during the early 1960s, the novel begins with the story of the night referred to in the title. Rick, one of the neighborhood boys, has been trying to get in touch with his girlfriend, Sheryl, for a number of days, only to be put off by her mother, who will not tell him where she is. His anxiety and rage finally culminate with a visit to Sheryl's house. Accompanied by a bunch of drunken friends, Rick pulls Sheryl's mother from the house, threatening her and demanding to see her daughter. The men in the neighborhood come to her rescue, and a battle (in which no one is injured) ensues, with Rick ending up in jail. What Rick does not know is that a few days earlier Sheryl discovered she was pregnant and was whisked away to a cousin's house in a different state. All of this is recalled by a grown woman who was a child of ten during the time of Rick and Sheryl's romance. The incident becomes her initiation (and that of many others in the neighborhood) into the failures of love and the realities and many disappointments of the adult world.

That Night "is concerned not only with … [the] loss of innocence but also with the mundane disillusionments that go with adolescence and the rites of growing up," described Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times. Bandler maintained that McDermott "has taken as mundane a subject as one can find, a suburban teenage romance and pregnancy, and infused it with the power, the ominousness and the star-crossed romanticism of a contemporary Romeo and Juliet." What separates That Night "from the mass of literature that takes on the barely middle-class suburban experience is the almost baroque richness of … McDermott's sentences, the intellectual complexity of her moral vision and the explicit emotion of her voice," asserted David Leavitt in the New York Times Book Review. Leavitt added, "That Night gloriously rejects the notion that this betrayed and bankrupt world can be rendered only in the spare, impersonal prose that has become the standard of so much contemporary fiction, and the result is a slim novel of almost nineteenth-century richness, a novel that celebrates the life of its suburban world at the same moment that it mourns that world's failures and disappointments." Bandler concluded that through her descriptions of "suburban violence" and "loss by separation, McDermott has wrought a miracle, one that is enhanced even more in its telling."

In her 1991 novel At Weddings and Wakes, "McDermott's strategy is to use family gatherings to tell the tales of individual family members and the tale of the family as a whole," pointed out Catherine Petroski in Tribune Books. The family that McDermott presents is Irish-American and consists of four sisters, only one of whom—Lucy—is married and living with her own family in Long Island. The other three—May, an ex-nun; Agnes, a businesswoman; and Veronica, an introverted alcoholic—still live at home with their stepmother in Brooklyn. The wedding referred to in the title is between May and the mailman Fred, and the wake is also for May, who dies very suddenly just after her wedding. Through her presentation of such a fractured immigrant family, McDermott examines the many tensions that can arise, including the question of how their heritage should be honored. "Many of the Townes' antics are straight out of the prototypical dysfunctional family," observed Petroski. "Its members play their self-destructive and self-limiting roles; they deny the truth and themselves; they are often (usually unwittingly but sometimes not) as cruel to each other as they are tender." Petroski concluded that "it is the actual words of this novel that I will remember—words that bring us a generously imagined, flawlessly realized, extraordinarily complex story of memorable characters whom otherwise we would never have known."

McDermott's fourth novel, Charming Billy, was a surprise winner of the 1998 National Book Award. The story is, on the surface, about the life of Billy Lynch, a charming Irish-American who dies from alcoholism at the age of sixty. Yet the novel also probes the whole Irish American culture and what happens to those who break away from it. Running back and forth in time, Charming Billy tells of the title character's return from World War II and his romance with a lovely Irish girl. He carefully saves money and sends it to her so that she can join him in America, but she is never heard from again. Billy's cousin tells him that she died of pneumonia, but in fact she simply took the money to open a gas station and marry another man. Broken-hearted, Billy spends the rest of his life mourning his lost love, even though he subsequently marries another woman. At his wake, Billy's friends discuss his life and the tragedy that marred it.

A Publishers Weekly reviewer called Charming Billy a "poignant and ironic story of a blighted life" and called attention to "dialogue so precise that a word or two conjures a complex relationship." Michiko Kakutani, a reviewer for the New York Times, stated that "Ms. McDermott's people, unlike so many characters in contemporary American fiction, are defined largely by their relationships to other family members, relationships that are delineated with unusual understanding of how emotional debts and gifts are handed down, generation to generation, and how that legacy creates a sense of continuity and continuance, a hedge against the erasures of time. In Charming Billy, Ms. McDermott writes about such matters with wisdom and grace, refusing to sentimentalize her characters, even as she forces us to recognize their decency and goodness. She has written a luminous and affecting novel."

Commonweal writer Rand Richards Cooper pointed out that there is still more to the book than the story of Billy's life or his community. The narrator, though she is a rather ghostly figure, is also a very important one, for she represents the people who have broken free of the claustrophobic Irish-American communities to seek greater freedom and individual identity. In finding these things, Cooper suggested, she has also lost a great deal, for McDermott's book shows that "to shrug off the burdens of group identity is also to shrug off ferocious attachments; and McDermott's novels express doubt about whether, as ties attenuate and the old neighborhood sinks further into the past, anything as vivid and nourishing will take their place. The grand struggle to wrest one's self from the group delivers her protagonists to this deeply American paradox: that getting a life of your own brings a diminished sense of who you are."

In an interview for the Irish Times with Jocelyn McClurg, McDermott rejected the idea that her writing shows a preoccupation with death, yet she allowed: "If you're Irish-Catholic—emphasis on Catholic—you're taught to see the world in a certain way, to see life as brief and death as the thing to be prepared for." McClurg commented that "McDermott has developed a style that is completely her own, a multilayered approach to storytelling that effortlessly shifts between points of view, between present and past." McDermott responded: "I don't think our memories work chronologically. … Writing fiction is an attempt to make more sense than life makes."

In McDermott's next book, Child of My Heart, the author's main character is once again an Irish Catholic, and death—in this case, the death of both pets and humans—remains a seminal part of the story. Nevertheless, the novel is somewhat of a departure from her other books in that it is her first coming-of-age, loss-of-innocence story. "Certainly it's something I challenged myself to do consciously because I hadn't done it before," she told Molly McQuade in a Booklist interview. According to McQuade, McDermott called the book "her most heavily plotted fiction, and the most straightforwardly chronological."

The story revolves around the novel's fifteen-year-old narrator, Theresa, a budding Lolita-like beauty whose parents move to the upper-class realm of the Hamptons on Long Island in hopes that she will catch the eye of one of the rich scions and live happily ever after in the lap of luxury. True to at least part of her parents' wishes, Theresa is constantly ogled throughout the book; but the oglers are largely older, married men. When Theresa does decide to succumb and lose her virginity, it's to the advances of a septuagenarian artist already married to a woman much younger than himself. Much of the story focuses on Theresa's other obvious gifts—that is, as a nurturer and caretaker as she spends one summer in the early 1960s babysitting children and pets. In addition, she has invited her cousin Daisy to spend the summer with her. Unknown to anyone at the time, Daisy is dying. To her charges, including Daisy, Theresa is a heaven-sent angel who gives unconditional love to many who will ultimately face tragic loss and sorrow. Much of the novel also revolves around the seemingly mundane day-to-day life of Theresa, such as Theresa changing diapers and visiting the beach. "But McDermott's novel hangs upon that which roils under its surface—disease, adult corruption, the power of art and Theresa's burgeoning sexuality," Tom Deignan pointed out in a review for America. In an interview with Dave Weich for Powell's City of Books, McDermott described her novel this way: "The story arises from the voice of a girl who refuses to be reconciled to some simple truths about relationships and how we live and die. The world as Theresa sees it is not acceptable to her. In her own way, she remakes it."

Writing in the Weekly Standard, reviewer John Podhoretz stated that he had long admired McDermott's novels but concluded that "Child of My Heart is a cloying mess." He added: "McDermott tries but fails to infuse the day-to-dayness of ordinary life with mythical beauty." Another reviewer, writing in the Economist, remarked that McDermott "captures the world of a gorgeous fifteen-year-old girl to an impressive degree," adding that the only thing missing was the "squirm of rebellion" that most teenagers exhibit. Michelle Vellucci, writing in People, noted that McDermott "renders with subtlety and restraint an adolescent's blurry view of the adult world. In spare prose she paints deceptively simple pictures and allows the complex truths hidden within to slowly appear."

In her interview with Weich, McDermott remarked that she wrote Child of My Heart "very quickly" compared to her usual pace of writing and "without much planning" following the terrorist attacks in the United States on September 11, 2001. She also noted that, when she writes, she wants to do more than just tell a story. "We're bombarded with stories," said McDermott. "Everybody's got a good story. The six o'clock news has a good story just about every night. Oprah has lots of stories. Story is one thing, but that's not what I go to literature for. I go for that line-by-line, felicitous use of language to another end than simply telling me what happened to somebody at some time in their life."

Indeed, After This, which chronicles the life of an ordinary middle-class Irish Catholic family from the post-World War II years through the 1970s, was much admired for this attention to nuance and detail. The novel, wrote Jocelyn McClurg in USA Today, "shines in its small moments," which include vignettes from the early years of the Keanes' marriage as well as episodes in which their adolescent children confront the social upheavals of the age, such as abortion and the war in Vietnam. As Houston Chronicle reviewer Lisa Jennifer Selzman described the book: "Everything happens; little happens. The earth shudders in the movement of a hand, the lowering of an eye. Life accumulates before and after those events of resonance that define all else." Even so, Selzman felt that the novel's "dreamy writing [sometimes] seems at odds with the subject matter: the rawness of the sexual revolution, the enormity of the atrocities associated with the war."

McDermott acknowledged in an interview with the U.S. Catholic writer Maureen Abbod that writing about war in this novel presented some challenges. "How do you make us hear again what we already know—that this is a great tragedy?," she commented. Setting the book in the past, she wrote, brings up "the risk of the appeal of nostalgia." But the point, she added, "is not to simply recreate or bring back a time, but to use that as a means to get beyond, to what feels always true." For many critics, After This succeeds in doing just that. "No other fiction writer," wrote Brian Doyle in the Christian Century, "has caught the dreams and drearies, the grace and grit, of the urban American Irish Catholic experience with her resonance and power."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Volume 90, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1996.

PERIODICALS

America, February 17, 2003, Tom Deignan, review of Child of My Heart, pp. 26-27; October 9, 2006, Paul J. Contino, "Caught at the Crossroads," p. 26.

Atlantic Monthly, October, 2006, Joseph O'Neill, review of After This, p. 110.

Book, November 1, 2003, "Dream Me Home Safely," p. 65.

Booklist, September 1, 2002, Molly McQuade, "Alice McDermott's Five-finger Exercise," interview with McDermott, p. 56; July 1, 2006, Donna Seaman, review of After This, p. 9.

Books, September 3, 2006, Conan Putnam, review of After This, p. 9; December 3, 2006, "Alice McDermott on Her Writing, Reading," p. 3.

Christian Century, February 20, 2007, Brian Doyle, review of After This, p. 49.

Christian Science Monitor, September 12, 2006, Yvonne Zipp, "A Family Grows on Long Island; Quiet Storytelling Evokes Midcentury Suburbia as Alice McDermott Traces the Lives of the Keane Family," p. 13.

Commonweal, March 27, 1998, Rand Richards Cooper, "Charming Alice: A Unique Voice in American Fiction," p. 10; January 31, 2003, Margaret O'Brien Steinfels, review of Child of My Heart, pp. 28-29; October 20, 2006, Peter Quinn, "Clement & Loving," p. 25.

Contemporary Literature, winter, 2005, "An Interview with Alice McDermott."

Economist (London, England), January 4, 2003, review of Child of My Heart, p. 68; September 2, 2006, "Still Waters; New Fiction," p. 77.

Entertainment Weekly, December 5, 2003, review of Child of My Heart, p. 107; September 8, 2006, Jennifer Reese, review of After This, p. 163.

Houston Chronicle, February 23, 2003, "Seductive Storytelling; McDermott's Spare Prose Teems with Implication," p. 19; August 31, 2006, Lisa Jennifer Selzman, review of After This.

Irish Times, February 27, 1999, Jocelyn McClurg, interview with McDermott.

Kirkus Reviews, May 15, 2006, review of After This, p. 8; July 15, 2006, review of After This, p. 694.

Library Journal, September 1, 2006, Starr E. Smith, review of After This, p. 138.

Ms., fall, 2006, "Scenes from a Marriage."

National Catholic Reporter, February 9, 2007, Antonia Ryan, "Longing for an Unseen Future," p. 4.

National Post, July 21, 2007, Kate Chisholm, review of After This, p. 14.

Newsweek, November 18, 2002, Malcom Jones, review of Child of My Heart, p. 80.

New York Times, February 1, 1982, LeAnne Schreiber, review of A Bigamist's Daughter, p. 13; March 28, 1987, Michiko Kakutani, review of That Night, p. 10; March 24, 1992, Michiko Kakutani, review of At Weddings and Wakes, p. C15; January 13, 1998, Michiko Kakutani, "The Ties That Bind and the Regrets That Strangle," p. E9; February 23, 2003, Ramin Ganeshram, "A Long-ago Island Inspires Her Fiction," p. 16.

New York Times Book Review, February 21, 1982, Anne Tyler, review of A Bigamist's Daughter, pp. 1, 28-29; December 5, 1982, review of A Bigamist's Daughter, p. 36; April 19, 1987, David Leavitt, review of That Night, pp. 1, 29-31; April 12, 1992, Verlyn Klinkenborg, review of At Weddings and Wakes, p. 3; January 11, 1998, Alida Becker, review of Charming Billy, p. 8; November 23, 2003, review of Child of My Heart, p. 28; September 10, 2006, Paul Gray, "Family Album," p. 15.

People, January 20, 2003, Michelle Vellucci, review of Child of My Heart, p. 54; March 10, 2003, review of Child of My Heart, p. 47.

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, September 3, 2006, Diana Nelson Jones, review of After This.

Publishers Weekly, March 30, 1992, Wendy Smith, "Alice McDermott," interview with McDermott, pp. 85-86; October 6, 1997, review of Charming Billy, p. 73; June 19, 2006, review of After This, p. 37.

Redbook, September 1, 2006, review of After This, p. 52.

Rocky Mountain News, September 7, 2006, Jenny Shank, review of After This.

School Library Journal, February 1, 2007, Jackie Gropman, review of After This, p. 148.

Southern Review, winter, 2007, Lorraine M. Lopez, review of After This, p. 237.

Time, September 25, 2006, Richard Lacayo, "The Family That Drifts Together," p. 82.

Times Literary Supplement, June 15, Terri Apter, 2007, "On the Edge of Feeling," p. 20.

Tribune Books (Chicago, IL), April 30, 1987, Michael J. Bandler, "A Spellbinding Tale of Young Romance," p. 3; March 29, 1992, Catherine Petroski, "Life's Vital, Mysterious Family Rites: Alice Mcdermott Tells an Irish-American Story," pp. 1, 4; November 23, 2003, review of Child of My Heart, p. 2.

USA Today, September 5, 2006, Jocelyn McClurg, review of After This, p. 6.

U.S. Catholic, March, 2007, Maureen Abood, "Between the Lines," p. 24.

Washington Post Book World, September 3, 2006, "Where the Heart Is: From the Author of ‘Charming Billy’ Comes the Vivid Story of an Ordinary Family in Extraordinary Times," p. 3.

Weekly Standard, December 9, 2002, John Podhoretz, review of Child of My Heart, pp. 31-33; October 9, 2006, David Skinner, review of After This.