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Alice McDermott

Alice McDermott Books

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That Night

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After This

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Someone

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Absolution

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Charming Billy

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“It made it easier that they both believed in the simplest kind of afterlife - that my father could say to her, even in those last days, joking but without irony, 'You're going to get tired of hearing from me. I'll be asking you for this that and the other thing twenty-four hours a day. JESUS, you'll be saying, here comes another prayer from Dennis.' And my mother would reply, her voice hoarse with pain, 'Jesus might advise you to take in a movie once in a while. Give your poor wife a rest. She's in heaven, after all.' It was a joke, but they believed it, and they believed, too, I think, that their love, their loyalty to one another, was no longer a matter of chance or happenstance, but a condition of their existence no more voluntary or escapable than the pace of their blood, the influx of perception...There was, in their anticipation of what was to come, a queer self-satisfaction. It was clear now that they would love each other until the last moment of her life - hadn't that been the goal from the beginning? They would love each other even beyond the days they had lived together; was there any greater triumph?”

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Book:Charming Billy
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“If you want to see how far we have not come from the cave and the woods, from the lonely and dangerous days of the prarie or the plain, witness the reaction of a modern suburban family, nearly ready for bed, when the doorbell rings or the door is rattled. They will stop where they stand, or sit bolt upright in their beds, as if a streak of pure lightning has passed through the house. Eyes wide, voices fearful, they will whisper to each other, "There's someone at the door," in a way that might make you believe they have always feared and anticipated this moment - that they have spent their lives being stalked.”

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Author:Alice McDermott
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“But Mrs. Meany, see, the women went on, leaning forward, despite how her heart was broken, pulled herself together, anyway, to put on a good face for the rest of the family at home. And she went back, Sunday after Sunday, right up until the Sunday before she died. Mrs. Meany put her beautiful love - a mother's love - against the terrible scenes that brewed like sewage in that poor girl's troubled mind. She persevered, she baked her cakes, she hauled herself (the goiter swinging) on and off the ferry, and she sat, brokenhearted, holding her daughter's hand, even as Lucy shouted her terrible words, proving to anyone with eyes to see that a mother's love was a beautiful, light, relentless thing that the devil could not diminish.”

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Book:Someone
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“And when Mary nodded, Pauline said, "You'd better hurry then, you know how how is," and laughed to show she would not be married to bald John Keane for all the tea in China. In her laugh was every confidence Mary had ever shared with Pauline about her husband's failings, every unguarded criticism, every angry, impromptu, frustrated critique of his personality, his manners, his sometimes morbid, sometimes inscrutable, sometimes impatient ways. A repository, Pauline and her laugh, for every moment in thier marriage when Mary Keane had not loved her husband, when love itself had seemed a misapprehension, a delusion (a stranger standing outside of Schrafft's transformed into an answered prayer), and marriage--which Pauline had had sense enough to spurn--simply an awkward pact with a stranger, any stranger, John or George, Tom, Dick, or Harry. A repository, Pauline and her laugh, her knowing eye, for all that Mary Keane should have kept to herself.”

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Book:After This
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“Ils se leurraient, bien sûr, au sujet de Sheryl. Elle n’avait jamais été bien jolie. Et, à mesure que le temps passait, ils se leurraient davantage. Ils disaient qu’elle avait été très belle. Quand ils voulaient définir la beauté d’une autre fille, ils la trouvaient « aussi jolie que Sheryl », parant leur compliment d’un fond de tristesse, de destinée tragique, et bien souvent l’interlocuteur répondait : « Espérons que celle-ci tournera mieux. », nous laissant entrevoir sur quel fil dangereux marchaient les jolies filles.”

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Book:That Night
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“Il y avait dans la voix de Sheryl une certaine tristesse quand elle criait bonne nuit à son amie, et je l’associais au décès de son père, mais je suis certaine à présent que c’était plutôt la répugnance à voir la soirée s’achever déjà, à voir les enfants disparaître et les lumières s’allumer dans toutes les maisons qui bordaient la rue – des lumières qui allaient lui brûler les yeux dès qu’elle rentrerait chez elle, qui aplatiraient les tables et les chaises, rendraient les murs verts du living-room aussi décourageants que le triomphe des gens idiots. La répugnance à abandonner une soirée d’été pour une petite maison étouffante, la télévision et la compagnie de deux veuves solitaires, quand il n’est que neuf heures du soir (la mère de Sheryl était très stricte sur l’horaire de sa fille) et que le garçon qu’on voudrait aimer va rester libre dans l’immensité du monde jusqu’à onze heures ou minuit.”

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Book:That Night
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“Sa laideur était célèbre dans le quartier, non point tant à cause de son propre physique, qui était plutôt banal, que de celui de son mari. Mr. Evers était irrésistible, il avait cette finesse des traits, cette beauté hollywoodienne qui pouvait rendre timide la plus âgée des mères, et c’étaient les supputations sur les raisons pour lesquelles un homme comme lui avait pu épouser une femme comme elle qui avaient métamorphosé cette malheureusement simplement quelconque en un symbole de laideur pour tout le quartier.”

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Book:That Night
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“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.”

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Author:Alice McDermott
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“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.”

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Author:Alice McDermott
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“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.”

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Author:Alice McDermott
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“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.”

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Author:Alice McDermott
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“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.”

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Author:Alice McDermott
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“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.”

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Book:Someone
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