Q&A with Alice McDermott
Alice McDermott will be at the National Book Festival on August 30 at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center at 5:20 p.m in the Fiction & Mystery Pavilion, signing prior to the event at 3:30 p.m. Politics & Prose is proud to be the official bookseller for NBF this year! We’ll be previewing some of the great talent here all throughout the month of August.
Your most recent novel, Someone, has been described by reviewers–along with rapturous praise–as a story of an ordinary family, led by an ordinary heroine. Is that how you would describe the story? How did the novel first begin for you?
Readers of Someone have objected to the use of the word ordinary to describe Marie–the novel’s narrator. I understand their point. I suppose from the start I thought of her not so much as ordinary as unnoticed–a woman of no apparent achievement or distinction, one who comes of age at a time (mid 20th Century) and a place (working class Brooklyn) when women weren’t much asked their thoughts or their opinions, but a woman who has, nevertheless, an active interior life (don’t we all?), and a heroic part to play within the life of her own family. She’s a character not much heard from in her own life and not much heard from, it seemed to me, in fiction. That notion was the starting point for me–the old Death of a Salesman injunction that attention much be paid…
Tell us about the title. What made that the right choice for this book? Were there other contenders?
Someone was always the working title, although for a long time I was certain that something more clever and literary would eventually occur to me. But, of course, it wasn’t long until I realized that any more complex or ironic or post-modern-y title would have been all wrong for this story–whose complexity is all beneath the surface. I also like the way–for the careful reader, at least–the title helps to make the word resonate a bit each time it appears in the text.
I’m a great admirer of titles that are long and intriguingly clever, but I haven’t yet written a novel that merits such a thing–for which I am always wiling to apologize to publicists and booksellers.
You teach at Johns Hopkins. What are the challenges, the fun parts? Is there any text you return to again and again in teaching, or any one piece of advice?
The challenge is mainly beltway traffic to Baltimore. The fun is helping talented young writers come into their own, making other people read books I want to talk about, spending time with brilliant kids who believe in the power of the literary arts. I try to make an effort not to be the old sage dispensing one-size-fits-all advice, and yet I hear myself paraphrasing Faulkner probably more than I should, assuring my students that only the old verities and truths of the human heart are worth writing about, worth “the agony and the sweat.”
The National Book Festival on August 30th is in your neighborhood. Any advice for visiting authors on what not to miss when in town?
I grow proudly patriotic every time I visit the National Gallery or the Hirshhorn. Our tax dollars at work. But even a stroll through the neighborhood around the Convention Center will give a visitor a glimpse of D.C.’s energy.
Can you give us any sneak preview into what you might be working on now? Or what you are currently reading?
Working on another novel–always working on another novel it seems. It’s a shape-changing thing, so there’s not much I can say about it at this stage. I am reading the galleys of a number of spring books, trying to catch up before the semester starts. Rereading the stories in Dubliners and Love Medicine and The Street of Crocodiles, thinking about this fall’s class. Looking forward to the publication of Tony Early’s Mr. Tall and Matt Thomas’s We Are Not Ourselves. Also rereading Wuthering Heights, because it’s still summer and I can.
Alice McDermott is the author of several novels, including After This, Child of My Heart, and Charming Billy, which was awarded the American Book Award and the 1998 National Book Award. Her other novels, That Night, At Weddings and Wakes and After This were all shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize. Her latest novel, Someone, was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award. McDermott teaches at Johns Hopkins and lives with her family outside Washington, D.C.
