Before I met Alice McDermott, I’d heard a story: when her students became distracted with excitement after she won the National Book Award for Charming Billy (1998), she settled the class down by offering a hundred dollars to anyone who remembered the last winner. As the rumor went, she kept her money. Not one M.F.A. student of fiction could recall the winner or the book (Charles Frazier, for Cold Mountain).

This is a revealing wager from a writer as recognized by awards committees as McDermott; her novel That Night (1987) was a finalist for the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and the Pulitzer Prize; At Weddings and Wakes (1992) was also a finalist for the Pulitzer. Charming Billy won an American Book Award as well as the National Book Award. Child of My Heart (2002) was nominated for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. After This (2006) was yet another finalist for the Pulitzer. Someone (2013) was long-listed for the National Book Award and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. The French translation of her most recent novel, The Ninth Hour (2017), received the Prix Femina étranger.

“I only became a novelist because I thought I had missed my chance to become a historian.”

“I hate endings. Just detest them. Beginnings are definitely the most exciting, middles are perplexing and endings are a disaster.”

“Any story that’s going to be any good is usually going to change.”

“You have to beat your own problematic imagination to discover what it is you're saying and how to say it and move forward into the unknown.”

On having his testimony discounted in court: “How can a poet or fiction writer tell the truth in court if he or she can't present the events in a meaningful sequence, which is what a story is? The message is, Stay out of court.”

“. . . I used to think I lacked confidence. Now I think I knew I had nothing much yet to write about. Or not perspective enough to know what was there.”

On teaching at the Iowa Writer’s Conference: “The entire time [John Cheever and I] were there . . . I don't think either of us ever took the covers off our typewriters. We made trips to a liquor store twice a week in my car.”

Used to be, I was always saying, This doesn’t count. I lived my life in secret, like if nobody saw, I didn’t really have it. I was barely there. I wouldn’t admit to a thing. Now I know that what humans observe

I wonder what we looked like then, that day we drove over into California. My mother could probably still tell you what we wore.

I was almost fifteen. I was working at my first real job at a place called the Spudnut Shop, a doughnut store, in Union Gap, Washington, June of 1955. This very good looking young man walked in with

The Paris Review lost a dear friend when Susannah Hunnewell, the publisher of the magazine, passed away on June 15.

Susannah and I were once invited to a party. We met in the park at sunset and she decided, on a lark, that we should take a horse-drawn carriage. She kept asking the driver to make another turn, go farther uptown, east, then south and back, it was so beautiful, the buildings in the gold light towering around us. I’d lived in New York for twelve years but never ridden in a carriage.