Alice McDermott

McDermott grew up in an Irish-American Catholic family on Long Island, New York, material she has returned to across nearly all her fiction, and later taught for decades at Johns Hopkins University.

Charming Billy (1998) gathers the friends and family of Billy Lynch at his funeral to reconstruct the sentimental fiction at the center of his alcoholic, beloved life (that a lost first love died young, when she had in fact simply married someone else) and how the lie sustained him anyway; it won the National Book Award in 1998.

Her earlier novel That Night had already been a Pulitzer finalist, and she has continued writing spare, closely observed novels of Irish-American Catholic family life, including The Ninth Hour and Absolution.