Alice McDermott: Writing beyond fear, with a whiff of Catholicism

In this edition of HoCoPoLitSo’s The Writing Life, fiction writer Jane Delury speaks with National Book Award-winning novelist Alice McDermott about the early origins of her writing, the challenge of writing beyond fear, the value of research, and her inescapable whiff of Catholicism. McDermott talks about one of the characters her 2019 novel, The Ninth Hour. McDermott had trouble writing about nuns. “Nuns never travel singly, and two more came in before I could kill off Sister St. Savior. One of them I recognized, no nonsense. But the very young nun, I thought, ‘This is pure faith.’ And I don’t get it. I don’t understand her faith. This is a young woman who has given up her life to tend to the suffering poor because she believes. That was the biggest challenge for me, to figure out the young nun and how she figured in the story.” McDermott then reads a section of The Ninth Hour describing Sister Jean. Delury, once a student of McDermott’s, asks her for advice for young or struggling writers. McDermott laughs and then says she always has to acknowledge that writing is difficult: “This is hard. I had a professor in undergraduate who would say this, and we would all roll our eyes: ‘Easy reading is hard writing.’ There’s something to that, even for an on-her-ninth-and-tenth novel novelist.” Recorded Feb. 21, 2020, just before a sold-out Irish Evening of Music and Poetry. For more information on HoCoPoLitSo’s live or recorded programs, visit www.hocopolitso.org.

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Her family life would not allow her to complete a sentence but her writing would. Fascinating.