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.'
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.
I do have friends in Pittsburgh, and I had some wonderful experiences there.
attending believed characters city days enjoyed fictional life listening loved music parents poems poetry school york
I believed in fictional characters as if they were a part of real life. Poetry was important, too. My parents had memorized poems from their days attending school in New York City and loved reciting them. We all enjoyed listening to these poems and to music as well.
felt grew san
I'm a coastal person. I grew up in Long Island and lived in San Diego. I felt landlocked in Pittsburgh. Psychically, it just wasn't the place for me.
conscious trying
I'm very conscious of trying to make something epic out of something small and ordinary.
anyone magical moss playwright romantic school struck
In grammar school I read 'Act One' by Moss Hart, and being a playwright struck me as the most magical and romantic career anyone could have... But I never did write a play.
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.
act kinds
In the act of reading, especially reading fiction, where a world is being created, all kinds of matters of belief come into play.