Alice McDermott | Absolution

Recorded November 7, 2023
In conversation with Nomi Eve
“Filled with so much universal experience, such haunting imagery, such urgent matters of life and death” (The New York Times), Alice McDermott’s bestselling novels include Someone; Charming Billy, winner of the 1998 National Book Award; That Night; At Weddings and Wakes; and After This, all of which were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. She is also the author of What About the Baby? Some Thoughts on the Art of Fiction, a collection of essays inspired from a lifetime of reading, writing, and teaching literature. For more than 20 years, McDermott was the Richard A. Macksey Professor of the Humanities at Johns Hopkins University and on the Sewanee Writers Conference faculty. She has contributed writing to The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, and The New York Times, among many other periodicals. A meditative novel about grace, sacrifice, and forgiveness, Absolution is a decades-spanning account of two women’s peripheral experience with the Vietnam War and its permanent consequences.
The director of the creative writing MFA program at Drexel University, Nomi Eve is the author of the novels Henna House and the National Jewish Book Award-nominated The Family Orchard. Her stories and essays have appeared in The New York Times, Conjunctions, and Glimmer Train, and she has published book reviews in The Village Voice and Newsday.
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[@joansutton]

I just saw her interviewed at a bookstore. She's as interesting in person as she is as a writer. So generous with her answers, and so open to people's questions. And this novel Absolution I found just stunning. She's so likable, like a close friend. Her literary voice is generous and sharing too, so good at describing people's feelings, that the reader also feels them.

[@brienfarrell6892]

This is an extraordinary interview. Highly recommended.