Alice McDermott on Memory as a Mode of Storytelling

First Draft: A Dialogue of Writing is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with fiction, nonfiction, essay writers, and poets, highlighting the voices of writers as they discuss their work, their craft, and the literary arts. Hosted by Mitzi Rapkin, First Draft celebrates creative writing and the individuals who are dedicated to bringing their carefully chosen words to print as well as the impact writers have on the world we live in.

In this episode, Mitzi talks to Alice McDermott about her new novel, Absolution.

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From the episode:

Mitzi Rapkin: Writing in this epistolary type of style, how did that change the voice for you when you’re writing that way? Like, if you had not chosen it, do you think it would have been more difficult to write, or your character would have been revealed in a certain way? How did that then guide the actual storytelling?

Alice McDermott: You know, I think if I had attempted to tell this story more in The Quiet American mode, sort of only looking back only over a couple of months, or even as it happens historical novel mode, if I had begun not with the voice — Let me tell you about what it was like in those days, but rather, I woke up one morning in 1963 and I did this and I did that, then I would have lost interest in it. What really intrigues me and interests me is – and I think this has appeared in all my work –  is that looking back through time, is that the way memory is a mode of storytelling, and that the story we tell two days after an event is an entirely different story that we tell 20 years after the event, because the lens changes with all subsequent events. And that’s what interests me.  I’m not interested in this innocent 23-year-old wandering through the streets of Saigon and wondering what her husband’s doing. I’m interested in the 80-year-old who looks back at herself as a 23-year-old and said, I didn’t even know he was in the CIA. All the things I didn’t know, and I didn’t know I was going to end up childless and I didn’t know all the events, some of them that I think she ends up telling inadvertently almost, that’s what interests me as a storyteller.

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Alice McDermott is the author of nine novels, including Charming Billy, winner of the National Book Award, and That Night, At Weddings and Wakes, and After This, which were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. She is also the author of the essay collection What About the Baby?: Some Thoughts on the Art of Fiction. Her stories and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, and other publications. She lives outside Washington, DC.  Her new novel is called Absolution.