Memory is not pure. Memories told are not pure memories; memories told are stories. The storyteller will change them. I've always been interested in that.
— Alice McDermott
Being Irish-American myself, Irish-American material is readily at hand to me.
Read everything. Write all the time. And if you can do anything else that gives you equal pleasure and allows you to sleep soundly at night, do that instead. The writing life is an odd one, to say the least.
The thing that fiction can do is look from the inside out rather than from the outside in. Even memoir leaves me somewhat frustrated. I think now we need a poet to uncover what isn't on the surface.
I'm always telling my students, don't - don't worry so much third person, first person. It doesn't make that much difference.
I was born in Brooklyn, but I never lived there.
I think place and time for me is often a matter of convenience, something I can use to another end rather than something I'm trying to define because it's somehow fascinating to me in itself. It's more what the place can do for the larger goals I have for the work.
I think 'Charming Billy' ultimately is a novel about faith and what we believe in and, above all, what we choose to believe in.
Publishing a short story can sometimes feel like shouting into the dark... your words come out, and then nothing... but I don't think that's why I tend to write novels rather than stories.
I read a little bit of nonfiction and a lot of poetry. I think of poetry as my shot of whiskey when I don't have time to savor a whole bottle of wine.
My parents were both first-generation Irish Catholics raised in Brooklyn.
I know Irish-American people. I know what their homes look like. I know what they have for dinner. I know how they turn a phrase.
My own 'sentimental favorite' is always the novel I haven't yet written - I suppose that's the one I consider my 'masterpiece' as well.
It worries me that undergrads and high school students are forced into books they aren't ready for, like Faulkner's, and then they are afraid of putting their toes in the water again.
At the beginning of every semester, I ask my graduate students whether there is something I should read that will help me understand their work.
I have a great fondness for the liars in my stories.
