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
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.
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.
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.
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.
among anyone faith people ways
I think a misconception among many non-religious people is that anyone with a strong faith is, in all ways and at all times, blindly consistent, unwavering, unquestioning.
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.
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.
equal gives life odd pleasure time
Read everything. Write all the time. And if you can do anything else that gives you equal pleasure and allows you to sleep soundly at night, do that instead. The writing life is an odd one, to say the least.
leaves memoir outside poet rather somewhat uncover
The thing that fiction can do is look from the inside out rather than from the outside in. Even memoir leaves me somewhat frustrated. I think now we need a poet to uncover what isn't on the surface.
believed experience human literature shared
I've always believed you go to literature to find the shared human experience, not the categorized human experience.
ask graduate students understand whether work
At the beginning of every semester, I ask my graduate students whether there is something I should read that will help me understand their work.
kids
I was one of those kids who always wrote.
I was born in Brooklyn, but I never lived there.
catholic children education gone inner life looking talking though value
My children have gone to Catholic school... Part of their whole education is talking about the inner life and looking at your life, even though you're only 15 or 16 - thinking about your mortality, thinking about the value of your life, thinking about your obligations.