>> From The Library of
Congress in Washington, D.C. >> Lynn Neary: This is the
third time I've done this, and I've had so much fun every time. And I've been so excited to see
so many people who love books. It's just wonderful to be
with a crowd of book lovers. This is also not the first time
I have met Alice McDermott. We have spoken before. I visited her at her house in 2002, when her book Child
of My Heart came out. But yesterday I went through the
NPR archives to confirm something that I thought I'd
remembered, but, you know, you forget things these days. I interviewed you for your second
book, which was that night. And I don't know if
you even remember it, but it's in the NPR archives. >> Then it must be true. >> Lynn Neary: So it has be true. So I feel a certain sort of like I
helped the public get to know you and a certain sense of
ownership, which I also think comes with the fact that we are both
Irish-Catholic New Yorkers. Now her family ended
up going to Brooklyn. Mine went to the Bronx. Brooklyn to Long Island,
the Bronx to Westchester, which was a very common
sort of thing. But I think I totally
understand your characters. I mean they're not necessarily
people I ever met, as I was growing up in the Irish-Catholic world,
but there's something about them that you really are able to get at
what the heart of that culture is. And so I have always
identified with that. But I think many people
learned about Alice when she won the National Book
Award in 1998 for Charming Billy. And I'm just going to come
right out and say this. The Ninth Hour is my favorite
book since Charming Billy. This is really a wonderful book. And I know that nobody's really
had a chance to read it yet, because it's not out
there on the shelves. So I'm going to ask Alice, so
that we can talk about it a bit, to just give a little bit of
a summary of The Ninth Hour. Tell us. Give us a little bit of an
idea of what this story is about. >> Alice McDermott:
Well, thank you, first. And thank you, all of you, for
being here and for reading. Thank you. [Applause] Yeah, to you. This novel, what it's about
essentially, is a group of nuns. Sorry, I wrote about nuns. In a small convent
in, yes, Brooklyn. A group of nursing sisters. This is an order that's sort of
an amalgamation of many orders that actually existed,
but I had to create my own for the purposes of the fiction. A group of women who essentially
served the poor in every kind of way from babysitting to housecleaning,
to actual nursing, childbirth, all that in these neighborhoods. In the novel they sort
of adopt a young widow. Her husband has committed suicide. And the novel kind of follows
her life with the nuns, but it's also about the
generation looking back at this. That's kind of what
the story is about. But the meaning for
me, of the novel, or what I wrote the novel for,
I suppose, is more of a kind of a meditation on selflessness, a concept that I think is fading
rapidly in the 21st Century, that sense of giving of one's self. And oddly enough, one of the sparks
for this novel had nothing to do with Brooklyn or nuns,
or Catholicism. I really thought maybe I was
going to escape all those things in this novel, because the very
first germ of the story which came to me years and years ago arose
out of a conversation I've had with a friend who had a vague
recollection of a man who lived in his grandfather's
house way upstate New York who had been his grandfather's
substitute in The Civil War, or his great grandfather. And the idea of substitute
just fascinated me, and it sort of had resonance of
the military now, the substitutes, the people who go so
we don't have to. And I started doing just
research like maybe I'm going to write a Civil War novel. Wouldn't that surprise everyone? [Laughter] Eventually that became
a very small part of the novel. But that idea of taking someone's
place, putting your own life on the lin for someone else either
for money, as many substitutes in The Civil War did,
for some greater good, for some greater glory. And then as soon as I got to the
greater glory, I thought, oh, my, God, it's going to be
another Catholic novel. [ Laughter ] >> Lynn Neary: Well, I have to
admit that when I heard it was about a convent of nuns I
thought, well, of course. She had to eventually
get to the nuns, really. >> Alice McDermott: Honestly. Don't you think? >> Lynn Neary: Played a pretty
big role in the lives of anybody who grew up Catholic
at a certain time. >> Alice McDermott: Yes. Yeah, and I did have that sense
of especially this, New York, and I think probably any of
the major east coast cities. Even in my lifetime, I remember
walking through the streets of Brooklyn in the
late '50s or the '60s. Nuns were everywhere. And if you notice,
you never see them in contemporary film
of street scenes. I came across just a few weeks
ago a Norman Rockwell painting of Union Station in Chicago in 1942. Now I have a scene in
Union Station in Chicago, but it would be more
like the late '20s. And it's a crowd scene and, of
course, there are soldiers in it. And right at the center
are two nuns. And it really brought home to
me how much they were there and how they have been
somewhat erased from our memory. So there was also that
incentive to bring them back and bring their lives
back to our awareness. >> Lynn Neary: Because I was
thinking to myself, you know, it's almost as though, people,
nuns are now parodied very much. >> Alice McDermott: Oh,
my gosh, yeah, sure. >> Lynn Neary: Did you
worry about that at all, in terms of creating
these characters? I mean Sister Saint Sebastian
is the name of one of them, and you can tell us
the name of the order. >> Alice McDermott: The Little
Nursing Sisters of the Sick, Poor Congregation of
Mary before the Cross. >> Lynn Neary: Okay. [ Laughter ] >> Alice McDermott: Yes, and of
course they've been parodied. >> Lynn Neary: And
did you worry at all about getting close to that line? >> Alice McDermott: Absolutely. >> Lynn Neary: Because you are
not parodying them in any way. You really are creating
the world they were in and presenting them
as these caretakers. And I know caretakers, from
past times that we've talked, this is something that's
interesting to you. These women were nurses who cared
about the people they took care of. >> Alice McDermott:
Absolutely, and worked very hard. And I think that was one reason that
I knew right away that if I were to write about nuns, I couldn't
make them teaching orders. Not that the teaching
orders shouldn't. You know, those of us who still
know how to diagram a sentence, most of us learned it from a nun. [Laughter] I shouldn't say us. I could never diagram sentences. Those of you who can
diagram sentences. But I think a lot of the parody, and of course it's
comedy that's accessible to us, and we should laugh. But a lot of it comes through a
contemporary view of nuns that many of us formed as children, because
we remember them as teachers and we remember them as Cheech
and Chong's Sister Mary Elephant. But so I thought if I could focus
on a nursing order, I could do away with some of that,
but still acknowledge that these were independent women, that they were different,
each one of them. Even though they may have
had the same vocation, they were individuals. They worked so hard. What brought them to the convent, each one would have a different
reason for being there. >> Lynn Neary: It is a story
about nuns, but it's also a story about Sally, who is the daughter. Her mother is Annie, who works
in the laundry of the convent, and that's where the
convent comes into play. And also her father has
committed suicide right at the beginning of the novel. And something I found really
fascinating about this novel, it begins with a suicide. There's a love affair, which
is very much part of the plot. And there's somebody who suffers
from depression, we learn later on. And I thought to myself
these are three things that so many contemporary novels
are completely built around and we learn everything you need to
know about suicide, love affairs, and depression they
could possibly know. And yet in this book, as
important as they are to the novel, you tell us very little about, really they never talk
about the suicide. Once we know the affair is underway,
we never get any details of it again until much later in the book. It comes back. And the depression is kind of just,
you know, mentioned that the mother or somebody suffered
from depression. So I wondered about that restraint. Why that restraint? Is that just part of the
culture that you writing about? Is it the way you like to write? >> Alice McDermott:
Probably both those things. I think among many little
pieces of advice, dismaying and confused advice that I
give to my writing students, is be careful your stories are not
too much about what they're about. I guess wonderful looks from
them when I say that, you know, like how the hell do I do that. But I think for me, while those
things are important and part of the life of these women,
of course, I didn't want them to overwhelm the more interesting
aspect which is the dailiness of, yes, there are love affairs, yes, there are suicides,
yes, there's depression. There's confusion. There's unrequited love. All those things are going on, the stuff that storytellers
make so much of. But underneath that, and this
is a novel that's very much about what goes on underground. >> Lynn Neary: Yeah. >> Alice McDermott: There
are women doing the laundry and getting kids off to school,
and taking care of the sick and taking care of the elderly. And I wanted that sense, that that
engine underneath all these story things in some ways is more
dramatic and more important. >> Lynn Neary: It did feel
very Irish to me as well. >> Alice McDermott: Oh,
well, there's that too, the things we don't speak of, yeah. >> Lynn Neary: And this
book goes into that, the things we don't speak of. >> Alice McDermott: Yeah. Yeah. >> Lynn Neary: I mean
it doesn't go into it. It explains. It's about that in a
lot of ways, I think. >> Alice McDermott: Well, I think,
and this may as much in my DNA as is in any literary intentions
that I have. I think there's a sense
or an awareness that too much language
flattens or deprives emotion of all the things we can't say, that
the power of our emotional lives and even in our daily lives. The power of the things we think
and we feel, and we hope for, as soon as we try to put them
into words they become clique. They sound ordinary. They begin to sound like what
everybody else feels when every one of knows, but what we
feel is sort of different. You know, we're not anyone else. And so I think, you know, part
of it is the Irish distrust, maybe because it's a language
that is not really our own. But also I think it's the distrust
of saying too much about things that language can't reach. So in some ways, being
a writer you're kind of tying one hand behind your
back when you're saying, yes, I'm going to work with words, but
words can't say what I have to say. So it is a kind of indirection that
both the characters in the novel, and I suppose their author,
tries to make use of to get at those things we
have no words for. >> Lynn Neary: I wanted to ask you
about your beginnings as a writer, because I read that, you know, growing up you never thought
you could be a writer. It wasn't something you ever
thought of, as a possible career. But that your professor in college
did something very interesting, and that sort of started
you off on the path. And I wonder if you
can tell us that story. >> Alice McDermott: Yes. Yeah. I was one of those
kids who always wrote. I couldn't draw, but it was a way
of sort of controlling the world. I had two older brothers
who both became lawyers. So they spoke constantly
at the dinner table. [Laughter] My father, who
pontificated quite a bit, and I never got to complete a
sentence probably until I was 18. So writing was a way of going
off and saying, well, yeah, I should have said here's my story. But to make a leap from that,
I think a lot of children draw and write and use that
as a way of getting hold of a world that confuses them. So making the leap from that
to that this was something that you could actually
do to make a living. When I finally broke it to my
parents that I was sort of leaning that way, their advice was go to
Katie Gibbs Secretarial School. >> Lynn Neary: I got
the same advice. >> Alice McDermott: Yes, of course. >> Lynn Neary: If you were
an Irish-Catholic New Yorker at a certain point,
you got that advice. >> Alice McDermott: Katie
Gibbs was the place to go. Get your shorthand and you can work in a publishing house,
if you like books. My first year I went to Oswego
State, one of the state universities of New York, which I chose to go
to because it had been rated one of the top three party
schools that year. [Laughter] That's how
serious a student I was. >> Lynn Neary: I don't think of you
as a party girl, but that's okay. >> Alice McDermott: That's why I
needed to go to a party school. And because I loved writing
and reading, I took a class that promised that we
could do some writing. But it was called The Nature of
Nonfiction, and it was taught by a former journalist, a
retired Air Force Colonel who had written a biography
of Amelia Earhart, who was a no-nonsense kind of guy. And our first assignment was to
write an autobiographical essay, which I went off and did. And, of course, I made
up every word of it. Nothing. I write it
in the first person, but nothing that I described
had actually happened to me. It was fiction. And in those days he
was into audiovisual. So he would edit your work on a
screen with an overhead projector. So like if you never thought
about where to put a comma before, you thought about where
to put that comma, because he would be marking
it with his red wax pencil. And he read my little piece,
and he talked about it. And afterwards he said, "McDermott,
come down and see me after class." So I thought he was
going to say nonfiction. Either that or probably if it had
been the 21st Century he would have sent me for counseling. [Laughter] You did that? And what he said to me
when I came down, he said, "I have bad news for you, kid. You're a writer and
you'll never shake it." [Laughter] >> Lynn Neary: Were you
glad to get that news? >> Alice McDermott: Delighted. It was the sun came out,
and it was something. And I thought this is
what the best teachers do. I thought I've always known that,
and I would never have known that if he hadn't said that. Both things at the same time. >> Lynn Neary: You
know, you're a writer that you can tell you choose
your words very carefully. I mean we talked about
there's a tremendous restraint in your writing, which I admire
greatly because it does reveal some of the emotions we've
been talking about, some of the inner workings
that restrain. Somehow reveals something. But do you enjoy the process of
writing, or is it hard for you? >> Alice McDermott: Both. It's difficult and it's
wonderful because it's difficult. I think I've learned at this
point, this is my eighth novel, that the best thing about
this crazy profession and Dr. Breon [assumed spelling]
sent me off on are those moments when you're working on a sentence. When it's not right and you're
turning it around and crossing it out and writing it again. And then you hear it. And you say, okay, not
that that's perfect. I've not felt that yet, but that
sentence is good enough for me to go on and write the next. Or that scene, that's
probably not perfect but I think it's probably
the best scene I can write at this point for this novel. And that's tremendously satisfying. And everything else after that
is either hot or cold gravy, but it's aside from
that great privilege. I mean, in this we
writers have readers to be internally grateful for. This thing you must do,
which is somehow organize or reorganize the world
through the gift of language. You're going to do it whether
anybody reads it or not. And, oh, it's so nice
that somebody does. And so to have that privilege to
spend your hours pursuing the thing that you know you must
pursue is a great privilege. And that still tickles me. I still think I'm a writer. Oh, my God! [Laughter] >> Lynn Neary: So to go back to this
book and to a lot of your books, you do write often about
Irish-Catholics in America. >> Alice McDermott: Yes. >> Lynn Neary: Why do you keep
returning to that subject? >> Alice McDermott: I think
it's probably more Catholicism that draws me than the Irish. They just deliver. [Laughter] But I think
that the questions. As a cradle Catholic,
I was taught to ask. I'm still asking. And, you know, especially
in this book. In this book in particular,
that what is a sacrifice worth. And as I say, being slowly realizing
I'm writing about substitutes. I'm writing about someone
putting his or her own life ahead in the way to protect another. What's the value of that? Why do we do that? What's the impulse to do it? Are they selfish impulses sometimes? And I found myself,
of course, you know, going back to the greatest
story ever told and thinking about the ninth hour is
the hour that Christ dies. It's 3:00 in the liturgy
of the hours. And thinking about that
moment when Christ dies on the cross, this sacrifice. This substitute, if you will. And what was that like? The stillness in the moment
after death when believers and nonbelievers alike must
have been holding their breath. Were we right? Was he right? Was this worth it or was it not? Was it just blood? Just another life gone? And quickly after that,
I also thought, you know, just before Christ dies
he says to the good thief, you know, I'll see you in heaven. You'll be with me in heaven. And I thought what if
he didn't believe that and still made the sacrifice. And then I thought who would
make a sacrifice like that, not believing there would
be some reward for it? And my answer was women. [ Applause ] So suddenly I realized
this is what I need to get after about these nuns. There's got to be a nun among them
whose sacrifice will entail the loss of the promise of the reward
and still she makes it. So I've got a character
who one ups Jesus Christ. I'm just telling you. [ Laughter ] >> Lynn Neary: And her
name is Sister Jean? >> Alice McDermott: And
her name is Sister Jean. >> Lynn Neary: And
Sister Jean is the kind of nun that everybody loved. Because there was a lot of
different kinds of nuns. Some you really didn't like. And, you know, you've
got some in there. >> Alice McDermott: Sure. >> Lynn Neary: She was
one of the kind you loved. Everybody immediately thought Sister
Mary Immaculata, great teacher. She's just this wonderful nun
and plays a big role in the big. And she does something which she
thinks means she's going to go to hell, but it's really
an act of love. How can it be both? >> Alice McDermott: That's
the question, isn't it? Yes. Yeah. >> Lynn Neary: You're going
to answer it; aren't you? >> Alice McDermott: Well,
again it's that moment of stillness, of holding
your breath. For believers it's
a tremendous loss. Her sacrifice means that
she loses the promise that Christ himself
made to the good thief. For the nonbeliever, she has to facilitated a wonderful
life for many people. But she believes she has loss, that she's condemned,
and she accepts that. Yeah. >> Lynn Neary: Another
aspect of Catholicism that you explore here is Sally, the
girl whose life we sort of follow through the book, who is brought up. Her mother worked in the
basement of the convent. So she's brought up
surrounded by the nuns. Inevitably wants to become a nun,
which was a pretty typical thing for many young girls who were raised
in Catholicism at a certain time, but can't go through with it. >> Alice McDermott: Yeah. >> Lynn Neary: And that sort of, I
guess, loss of faith or inability to follow through on whatever you
think your great intentions are, that's also something
you looked at here. >> Alice McDermott: Yeah, well,
most of the scenes in the convent. And again I sort of want to
apologize for all the nuns in this novel and all the
laundry in this novel. Most of the scenes in the convent
take place in the basement laundry, which is where Annie, the widow,
works with one of the meaner nuns. Or she's annoying. She can be annoying. So for Sally, her daughter,
she's raised, there's a cradle in the basement where
her mother places her. And she really grows
up in the basement where they're washing
the nuns clothes. They're washing menstrual
rags at this time. They're washing the bedding
of the sick and the poor, that the nuns bring back from the
places where they do their casework. So she doesn't have a sense of
what the nuns are doing out there in the real world, but
she loves the costuming. And that's really her vocation, is all about wearing those
sweet smelling neat clothes. Her vocation is very brief. It's pretty much one night. [Laugher] She takes the train
from New York to Chicago to join an eviscerate in Chicago. And on the train are real people,
like dirty people who she's supposed to be giving her life to. And they're all awful and
they're mean, and they're snoring and they're eating smelly
food, and the train is noisy. And so by the time she arrives
in the morning at Chicago, it's like no way I want to spend my
life taking care of these people. So it's a very short
lived and romantic view of what the nun's life might be. >> Lynn Neary: Did you
ever want to be a nun? >> Alice McDermott:
I don't think so. I don't think so, although
I had wonderful sweet nuns who I admired tremendously
growing up. And there was always that sense of
these were the working women that, in my generation, we
got to see every day. All the mothers were home. But the working women, the
professional women were the nuns. >> Lynn Neary: One thing I wondered
about too, in terms of your writing about Irish-Catholics in New
York is you're really writing about the past. You're really writing
about, in a sense, your parents' generation
to some degree. In some of your books you deal
with the children, our generation. And I wonder what's left of that. What is left of the Irish? How much is left of it? >> Alice McDermott: I don't know. I suppose there are still
pockets here and there. Every time I go to Ireland, I'm
shocked to realize how Irish I am and how Irish my family was. I thought we were New
Yorkers, you know. When I grew up, everybody's
grandparents were from Italy, Poland, Russia, Ireland, Scotland. And I'm surprised to see
that there are these aspects of our DNA that are similar. But in this book especially, for
me it's not a matter of trying to recapture a lost past. In this book particularly I
wanted to look through the eyes. And actually it's a kind
of collective narrator here that is looking back
through three generations and recreate the past more
vividly than the contemporary world from which the past is viewed. Because for me, that's
a parallel to faith. To be faithful is to
have a sense of a past. The moment on the cross, that is
as vivid or perhaps even more vivid than the life you're leading now. So in this book, in
particular, it was not so much to remember what it was like
in 1920 in good old Brooklyn. I don't really care what it was
like in 1920 in good old Brooklyn. But to have a kind of belief
in a vision of a world that supercedes our confidence in
our daily physical world right now. So I'm not interested. I don't think of this
as a historical novel. Yeah, sure, I had to
do some research, but research is just fun, you know. But I don't think this at all
as an attempt to recapture. I think of it more
as a parable perhaps. >> Lynn Neary: A parable? >> Alice McDermott: A
parable or, you know, an invitation to consider
the ideas that these people in the past were living by and how vividly we can
understand and recreate them. >> Lynn Neary: I think I want
to open the floor for questions. I'm not quite sure if
the mics are up yet. Are they? I can't really see. So go ahead. >> Good afternoon. When I was hearing you talking
about the spareness of the care with which you create the
emotions, so that there's the room around them, I started
thinking about white space. And the whole notion of a printed
page inside the margins has very little white space. But I assume what you're trying
to do is creating a space that somebody will stop at the
end of that sentence or the end of that paragraph and just
sort of think it through. How do you create the white space? >> Alice McDermott: Ha, ha. Thank you. Your hope only the best
readers stop and think. We can only hope for a few of those. But thank you, if you do. You know, there's a great story by Issac Dennison called
The Blank Page, and it's really a story
about storytelling. And she says, or the
storyteller in that story says that if the storyteller is true
to the story, then the silence at the end of the story will
speak louder than any of the words that were used to tell the story. If the silence at the end
of the story doesn't speak, then the storyteller has
not been true to her story. So I don't think of it
as, gee, how am I going to get the reader to pause here. I think of it was just a relentless
attempt to tell the story, to be true to the story,
not to manipulate the story, not to pass the story through a
kind of presentism, will it be okay if I point this out, or even
pass it through your own work. Oh, my God, here I am
writing about Catholics again. Maybe I shouldn't do this. Maybe I should go back
to the Civil War. All that you put aside,
and it's a sort of relentless determined attempt to
see the world that you're recreating and to be true to the
characters within it. And then you hope that the silence
at the end of the story will speak. >> Thank you very much. Go ahead. >> Hi. I just finished
reading After This. And my parents and I and a lot
of people were in that book, and it was tremendous to read that. >> Alice McDermott: Thank you. >> A passage, and I don't
remember the exact words. So help me out here. John Keene mentions. And this is the part of
you that I love so much. He just a little short remark
about how his children, I believe you wrote,
feel like stones. And I almost fell out of my chair
when I read that, because revealing that was just amazing for that
character and for those of us that feel that way or know
somebody who probably did. And I'm going to sit down
as soon as I ask you this, because I don't want anyone
to remember what I look like and think I'm weird. The title. I need you to help me out. >> Alice McDermott: After This? >> Understanding where
that came from. [Laughter] >> Alice McDermott: I got to haul
out the whole Catholic thing again. So I apologize to those
of you who are bored. There's a prayer called The Solve
Regina in the Catholic tradition. And one of the lines, I
guess you can call it a line. I think of it as poetry,
is, "After this, our exile, show unto us the blessed
fruit of thy womb." So it's our exile. After this, our exile, show unto
us the blessed fruit of thy womb. So that's a novel that's
sort of paused as well, in that maybe similarly in
that waiting period to find out is faith justified or
should it be disposed of. >> Well, first of all I want to say
that I find your writing to be lush and not restrained,
and that I feel often as if the words are just
tumbling out and very emotional. But my question is
about the writing today. It feels as if I read an
inordinate number of reviews of apocalyptic and dystopian books. And can you tell us a little
bit about what you're finding in the writing of your students? >> Alice McDermott: Ah, thank you. Very interesting. Yes, there are a lot
of books like that. And maybe there's good
reason for it. To be honest, I don't see it
as much in my young writers. Maybe these are the
people who drift toward me when they're looking for a mentor. I see great variety. I see tremendous emotional depth. And, you know, in some ways
maybe this is counterintuitive. I think about my students,
my MFA students now in their late 20s, early 30s. They're all so bright. And they are talented
in so many ways. And I know what their
GRE scores are. So I know they could
go to law school or medical school, or get MBAs. And in the 21st Century,
they want to be poets and writers of literary fiction. I am amazed by that. You know, when I was coming
up, we didn't know any better. We thought, yeah, you can
all be Virginia Wolfe. There's plenty of room for
Virginia Wolfes in the world. They know that's not true, and
yet this is what they choose to do because they love language, because
they're readers who want to do. Thomas Lynch calls it a
little bit of karaoke, when you're a reader
who becomes a writer. So I see tremendous sincerity and a tremendous effort
to say something real. Maybe that's why they're
not getting published. Maybe they should be more
on the surface of things. But I'm always very encouraged when
I read the work of young writers who I know will all be reading
in the next 20 years or so. So, yeah, dystopia
is fun and it's easy. You know, it's a big tent
for reading and writing. We should welcome all voices. It's just nice we still have books. >> Lynn Neary: Have you
ever said to one of them, you're a writer kid and
you can't escape it? >> Alice McDermott: In many ways. In many ways. It's been very nice, and also
to know when you see the look on their faces when you
say, yeah, you're right. This thing that you want to do,
you're right to be pursuing it. And no one else in your
life may ever tell you that, but I'm telling you that. And, yeah, that's really. I haven't gotten any
nasty letters from them for ruining their lives yet. That may come. But it's a great opportunity. We all need that little push when
we're choosing something that is so against logic and sense, that
is the pursuit of any of the arts. >> Lynn Neary: Go ahead, sir. >> Yeah, I just want to
start by thanking you for all these wonderful books you've
shared with us over the years. My specific question though,
comes from a comment you made. And that is you talk about
how meticulous you are when you create those
beautiful sentences. Having then finished that first
draft with that kind of effort, how much writing do you
feel actually gets done after that in your revisions? How complete is your novel at
the end of your first draft as compared to the revision process? >> Alice McDermott: Thanks. Spoken like a writer. I never know what draft I'm on. I rewrite constantly. I rewrite every day. What I wrote the day before,
I rewrite before I add to it. So, I mean, I've heard writers and
I think, oh, they're so organized. Some day I'll be like this, you
know, print out their first drafts on yellow paper and then they print out their second drafts
on blue paper. I never know what draft I'm on. As a result, when I get to
the end I've been revising and revising and revising. So once I have the whole thing
before me, I don't do much revising because I'm revising
on and on and on. But I also talk about
the still moment. When something is finished,
I have no idea. I have absolutely no idea. I've been working with Jonathan
Glassy [assumed spelling], has been my editor since I
was 27 and I think he was 30. It's one of those rare long
marriages in publishing. And he had only seen the
first chapter of this book because it was published as
an excerpt in The New Yorker. He hadn't read anything else. And so I sent him the manuscript. It was just last December. And had no idea. I had no idea what I had. I had no idea if he was going
to call me and say, oh, nuns? Oh, Alice. [Laughter] Do you have
anything else? [Laughter] Which is why I always
work on two books at the same time. So I always have something else. [Laughter] And when he called
to say it was my reader and when he called
to say, I exhaled. And I said to him, honestly, if you had said toss this,
I would have done it. And he still doesn't believe me. He thinks I just say that. But so that's the disadvantage of
not knowing what draft you're on. But for me it's that I have to hear. And I think a lot of it is
sound, and rhythm and sound. I have to hear the sentence,
the paragraph, the scene, the chapter before I know
how to balance the next. So for me it's a constant revision. >> Lynn Neary: Wait. Are you telling me that this is
what you sent to Jonathan Glassy and you were willing to throw it out and you didn't change
it much since then? Wow. >> Alice McDermott:
Yeah, well, you know. >> Lynn Neary: You
didn't know what you had? >> Alice McDermott: I didn't know. You never know. Who knows? You know, who knows? >> Lynn Neary: Well, from interviewing writers I think
everybody approaches the work very differently. >> Alice McDermott: That's true. >> Lynn Neary: And there are
some who say I don't know where my book is going,
and I just follow it. And there are others who know
exactly where they want it to go. So I guess you're one of those. Do you follow your characters? >> Alice McDermott: With
this book I really was going to have one nun, and that was it. And then the nuns came
bursting through the door. [Laughter] They organized my life. They took over. They do exactly what they did
for the poor in Brooklyn in 1920. They clean things up. And they said this is not about
The Civil War, sweetheart. You don't want to write
about The Civil War. You want to write about us. And so there was that sense. And I hate to make this
sound, you know, too far out. This is just working. This is not like they came in and
sat on my desk and dictated to me. This is working through
lots and lots of scenes that did not feel right. I really did start out
with the contemporary story and have it turn all the way
around in the contemporary story. The substitute in The Civil
War does show up, but, oh, he has a very small roll. And in some ways there's
pleasure in that, because then you become
your own first reader. You know, it's, gee, I wonder what's
going to happen today when you sit at your desk rather than,
oh, now I have to write that scene that's going
to be the underpinning for the explosion that's
going to bring us to the revelation that
he's the murderer. You know, what fun would that be? So but this in particular
was a book. This is why I had no
idea what I had, because it was not what I
started out to get hold of. >> Lynn Neary: How long did it take? >> Alice McDermott: Hard to say. This was a book that I was working on in one form while I was
working on Someone, my last. And as I say, it just
sort of switched around. It's been four years between books. Probably I've been actually
working on this book seven or eight. >> Lynn Neary: Wow. I have one last question. We just have a couple of minutes,
unless somebody has a question. I just noticed during the course of our conversation you're a
little self-conscious about writing about nuns, writing
about Catholicism. >> Alice McDermott: Did you notice? Right. >> Lynn Neary: Everything
about the Irish. Just, why? Because it's kind of worked for you. [Laughter] And you
do a good job of it. >> Alice McDermott: You
know, I guess I resist. You know, there's a
difference between. And this is true of literary
fiction, not all fiction. There's a difference between what a
book is about and what a book means. And I think maybe just because
of promotional aspects of it, we don't talk enough about what
books mean, what the story means, why this story is being told, what
this story invites us to consider. I think we talk too much about
what's happening in the story. So not that it needs to
be a moral, you know, but you know when you tell a kid
a story about the Big Bad Wolf, they take it literally, you know. It's like, well, where does he live? If I go there, is there
a wolf on our block? But as you get a little
older you understand, oh, you're telling me this because you
want me to think about what I say and I shouldn't lie, and I shouldn't
make up over- emotional scenes. Oh, I understand. And I think somehow we've
gotten to be a reading public that talks an awful lot about
what happens in the book and who the characters are, and
who got killed when and why. And I think we don't
spend enough time. Book clubs do this,
which is why I love them. What do you think? Why do you think this
story's being told? Why do you think these
things happened? If every detail counts, which
I think it should in fiction because we're making
all this stuff up, every detail is a conscious
choice that a fiction writer makes to keep it, to put it on the page. And I love a reader who
looks at those details and says I wonder why
this is in here. I wonder what it means. >> Lynn Neary: Thank you
so much, Alice McDermott. >> Alice McDermott: Thank you. [ Applause ] >> This has been a presentation
of The Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov.
