A few weeks ago I read an interview of Alice McDermott in the fall 2019 issue of The Paris Review. I have only read one book by McDermott but I still remember it very vividly because it was the first novel I bought when I arrived in the United States. Back in those days the Cambridgeside Galleria had a small bookstore on its first floor, part of a chain I think, and National Book Award winner Charming Billy had just come out in paperback. The Billy of the title, friend, husband and alcoholic, has just died and his family and acquaintances are trying to come to terms with his passing after the funeral. Reading McDermott's interview in the Paris Review brought back memories of those first few weeks of graduate school twenty years ago, the Tang Hall residential hall at M.I.T., ephemeral friendships with students on my floor (although I still stay in touch with the student who lived in the apartment exactly above mine).
McDermott was the Richard A. Macksey Professor for Distinguished Teaching in the Humanities at Johns Hopkins University until she stepped down in June 2019 at age 66. Funnily enough, she lives in Bethesda, Maryland, a city I spent quite a bit of time in back in 2012 and 2013 without ever knowing she lived there. I wish I had run into her at the local Barnes & Noble, so enjoyable with its large bay windows in the cafe area, or - in D.C. rather than Bethesda - Politics and Prose or Kramerbooks. Oh, the memories of the drive down U.S. 15, the afternoons in D.C. at the Phillips Collection near Dupont Circle or at the Smithsonian, where I loved to work on my laptop in the inner courtyard of the American Art Museum and my wanderings through the National Gallery of Art and my many trips to the Shakespeare Theatre Company, where I saw Henry IV Part 1 twice, in two separate trips from Bethlehem, because I liked the production of that play so much. But, back to McDermott.
What is a bit unusual about McDermott is that she made it in the publishing world - collecting an impressive array of nominations to the most important literary prizes in the country - without fancy diplomas or connections. She didn't have a MFA from a top program. Instead, she received a BA from SUNY-Oswego and a MA from the University of New Hampshire. I loved the part in the Paris Review interview where she mentions she generally works on two novels at the same time - something that has happened to me in the past, when I had to put aside one and start another to clear my mind before going back to the first one.
Of course I enjoyed all the insights into McDermott's process, her discussions about her choices of narrators, her willingness to start out writing without knowing in advance where the writing is going to take her. She has shaped her writing life like a real job, writing five days a week, about eight hours a day, but because of her two-novel habit, she really works on one novel about twenty hours a week - something that is a bit daunting for me to imagine. I can write two hours every morning before going to work (I like getting up early), but that would still mean finding ten hours every weekend to match McDermott's progress on at least one of her novels. She also talked about the Catholic-writer label that stuck to her "like gum to a shoe". Society likes to label people but can there be something more irritating for a writer, especially one as prolific as McDermott, than being shoved into a neat box? I loved this sentence: "When my brothers and I grew old enough to rebel, my father would warn us not of the fires of hell but of the times ahead when we might need the comfort faith provides."
This was a very thoughtful, informative interview in which McDermott's personality shone through and I truly had the impression of knowing her a bit better after I was done reading. If she reminds me of my time in Cambridge, Jennifer Haigh reminds me of my years in Pennsylvania (because of Baker Towers, set in a coal-mining town of PA, of course) and I hope Haigh gets to be interviewed by The Paris Review too someday.
