Alice McDermott began her reading by, well, telling us why she was reading the passages she was reading. She explained that she liked to wait until the last minute to decide what to read, to be inspired by some fact of the day or something the audience says. As a fiction writer she has an “eternal struggle to surprise [herself];” after all, they’re generally the ones doing the surprising.
The first thing she read was not from one of her published novels but was something “still under-construction.” It was a scene describing the main character’s earliest memory–she mentioned that she was fascinated with earliest memories because they were almost always fictionalized, either mostly or entirety–which was of being a baby pushed in a carriage. Though usually when writers try to write from the POV of young, young children, it becomes rather one-dimensional and dull, McDermott managed to create believable urgency in the mind of this baby. The baby wasn’t just a baby, but a character in his own right; he had a personality. The passage ended with him looking over at another carriage, seeing a baby girl, and thinking “there’s the girl I’ll marry.”
The next two things she read were from her last novel, Someone. The first was another first memory, this time from the main character, Marie waiting for her father to come home and the various rituals of her home life. This included the wonderful line: “I sometimes wonder if all the faith and all the fancy, all the fear, the speculation, all the wild imaginings that go into the study of heaven and hell, don’t shortchange, after all, that other, earlier uncertainty: the darkness before the slow coming to awareness of the first light.” The second passage was much later in Marie’s life and described the birth of her first child and all the horror and pain that went with it. Throughout this section, the most striking thing to me was how well the character’s attitude and identity were maintained. The story didn’t feel like McDermott asked hersled “what would a person do in this situation?”, but “what would Marie do?”
There was a brief Q&A section after the reading. During this, a question was raised about how many critics have described this book as about an “unremarkable life.” As someone who has read the book, this is fair criticism–there is nothing remarkable about Marie, she is nothing more than an ordinary Irish girl growing up in Brooklyn. There is no real plot, no great twists and turns, no excitement boiling underneath the surface, there is only Marie. In response to this question, McDermott talked about how it would be easy to say something like “but is any of us really ordinary” to these critics, but she believes that yes, most of us are just ordinary. And that’s the kind of book she was writing. There are numerous glimpses in the book of lives more interesting than Marie, and according to McDermott, it was tempting to let one of these characters take over, to let things actually happen in the book–but she resisted and the novel remains the story of single, ordinary girl.
If this has sparked your interest, Alice McDermott will be having a conversation with Professor Eileen Pollack, this Thursday at 5:30 in the UMMA auditorium. McDermott says many interesting things about writing and gives advice for young writers, so if that sounds interesting, be sure to be there!
