Alice McDermott: Fiction that intends to be something other than enter...

Language is the writer's only tool - we really don't have anything else - but our language contains within it our entire experience of the world.

Alice McDermott

language tools world

The lesson, I suppose, is that none of us have much control over how we will be remembered. Every life is an amalgam, and it is impossible to know what moments, what foibles, what charms will come to define us once we're gone. All we can do is live our lives fully, be authentically ourselves and trust that the right things about us, the best and most fitting things, will echo in the memories of us that endure.

Alice McDermott

echoes gone memories

A good writer sells out everybody he knows, sooner or later.

Alice McDermott

sooner-or-later good-writers knows

In the reading and writing life, delight, for me, is where the mystery lies. Easy enough to figure out how scenes of violence or tragedy or titillation or grossness or even sentimentality can move us, but how the written word elicits delight - what Nabokov calls that shiver in the spine - is much harder to calculate and define.

Alice McDermott

reading lying moving

We are surrounded by story.

Alice McDermott

stories

When I'm not writing, I can't make sense of out anything. I feel the need to make some sense and find some order, and writing fiction is the only way I've found that seems to begin to do that.

Alice McDermott

writing order needs

The writing itself is the thing that generates stories for me.

Alice McDermott

stories writing

What makes a sentence, a phrase, a moment, or a scene delightful? Something about recognizing the truth in it, hearing the music in it, understanding, intuitively perhaps, that the words are just right. It's not a matter of even context - delight is not limited to scenes or descriptions of happiness or beauty - but of aesthetic appreciation of the thing itself. As a reader, I find it's that moment when I want to stop reading, and also that moment when I know I can't. Delight is that it's what takes me by surprise and reminds me why I love the literary arts above all others.

Alice McDermott

reading appreciation art

Without explaining why, and, most of all, without naming other authors or books, I can only say my novels are influenced by love and death.

Alice McDermott

love-and-death explaining book

It now appears that the world is filled with people who believe that everyone should be interested in everything they have to say about anything - people who tweet, you might call them. I find this so astonishing, my own hubris pales in comparison.

Alice McDermott

believe people world

I'm always telling my students, don't - don't worry so much third person, first person. It doesn't make that much difference.

Alice McDermott

differences worry firsts

As a writer, I'm too busy and worried to experience the delight while composing my own work, although, of course, I hope a reader will find something of it when the work is complete. But I do try to figure out where in their experiences certain characters of mine, who are not necessarily readers, and certainly not writers or artists, find an equivalent sensation: of delight, of astonishment, of whatever it is that briefly - and brevity seems essential - reassures us, connects us, sends a shiver of inarticulate recognition down our spines: Oh, yes: life.

Alice McDermott

artist trying character

Guilt is glorious when it's well earned.

Alice McDermott

glorious wells guilt

A book tour is, first and foremost, an exercise in humility.

Alice McDermott

humility writing book

We are at the mercy of time, and for all the ways we are remembered, a sea of things will be lost. But how much is contained in what lingers!

Alice McDermott

mercy sea way

I'd like to be better at short, snappy answers.

Alice McDermott

answers

Heightism is the last unchecked prejudice.

Alice McDermott

prejudice lasts

My parents were both first-generation Irish Catholics raised in Brooklyn. But it was more for me - it was that women of that generation were even less likely to express themselves, more likely to have that active interior life that they didn't dare speak out. So I was interesting in women of that era. I was interested in the language of that era. There's so much. And, certainly, this is cultural, so much there wasn't spoken about.

Alice McDermott

speaks-out parent interesting

"Someone": I understood that this was a character who in her own life her voice hadn't much been heard and in literature her life isn't much heard. For me, it was resisting all the more appealing characters and listening to the voice that hadn't been much heard from.

Alice McDermott

voice listening character

We turned onto the last landing. Going out with this guy, I thought, would involve a lot of silly laughter, some wit--the buzz of his whispered wisecracks in my ear. But there would be as well his willingness to reveal, or more his inability to conceal, that he had been silently rehearsing my name as he climbed the stairs behind me. There would be his willingness to bestow upon me the power to reassure him. He would trust me with his happiness.

Alice McDermott

laughter names silly

Fiction that intends to be something other than entertainment has a certain obligation, I think, to convince the reader, every time, that what is to be evoked - character, experience, idea - is worthy of his or her consideration, intellectual energy, close attention.