Poured Over: Alice McDermott on Absolution

By Jenna Seery / November 2, 2023 at 6:00 am

“It does come down to that moment, when as a reader or as a writer entering into a story we say — it’s not about me, it’s about you.”

Alice McDermott’s Absolution shines a light on the dynamic lives of American women as they navigate the tumultuous era of the Vietnam War. McDermott joins us to talk about the untold pieces of American history, the evolution of her career as a writer, the power and impact of language in fiction and more with Miwa Messer, host of Poured Over.

This episode of Poured Over was hosted by Executive Producer Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang.        

New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional Saturdays) here and on your favorite podcast app.      

Featured Books (episode):
Absolution by Alice McDermott
The Quiet American by Graham Greene
The Ninth Hour by Alice McDermott
A Flag for Sunrise by Robert Stone
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard
Family Meal by Bryan Washington
The Bee Sting by Paul Murray

Full Episode Transcript
Miwa Messer
I’m Miwa Messer, I’m the producer and host of Poured Over and Alice McDermott is a three time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She’s the winner of the National Book Award. Someone if you haven’t read Someone, I’m going to say please go get that now it is one of my favorite, favorite, favorite Alice McDermott books. Absolution is the new novel. And I’m gonna ask Alice to do something we don’t always do on the show, which is have her read the few opening sentences from this book, because I think it’s just going to set up this conversation in a really good way. So Alice, it’s great to see you. Thank you for joining us. But would you please read the opening sentences of Absolution for us?

Alice McDermott
I will do that. Thank you. It’s wonderful to be with you. “There were so many cocktail parties in those days. And when they were held in the afternoon, we called them Garden Parties. But they were cocktail parties nonetheless. You have no idea what it was like, for us, the women, I mean, the wives.”

MM
And here’s the thing. We’re not in Maryland, yet. We’re not in Brooklyn, we’re not on Long Island. We are not in the Bronx, we’re not in the States. We’re in Vietnam, in the 60s as the war is starting to escalate. And you’re writing about American wives. And I have to ask, how, where did this idea come from, how did we get to Vietnam?

AM
Testing way back the seeds for this novel, were in my first very first reading of Graham Greene’s The Quiet American. That puts me as an undergrad even at that time. You know, when Vietnam was the war of my generation, it struck me that, you know, Greene was so prescient, the book coming out in the mid 50s. And what he saw for America’s path, and its interference in this country is really remarkable. And at the same time, the women he depicts are just straight out of the 50s. It is interior. So he saw what was coming politically, but he sure as hell didn’t see what was coming for women in the next decade, so years go by and you know, I went back to the book, because it is beautifully written and it’s deep and complex. And I would say amazingly prescient, but that always sort of snagged me. And there were two American characters, very, very minor characters, they only appear briefly, two young women who were finishing their ice cream at a milk bar in Saigon, just before a bomb goes off, and all the action comes together. And Fowler, who’s the narrator, you know, this hardened British journalist looks at these two and sort of envies how clean they are, and how uncomplicated their lives are compared to the mind of the journalist. And over the years, especially, since I’ve lived here inside the beltway, I have encountered in real life, at cocktail parties at my kids school in, you know, in the carpool line, just as you do, chatting in the grocery encountered so many women who have thought they could have been those two American girls. And lives are not uncomplicated, and they were never passionless. So Absolution sort of became my chance to let these women have their say, and to hear their voices, which I think have been ignored, certainly coming out of that era.

MM
Oh, without a doubt, I have to say when I first heard that the book was coming, and where it was set in what you were doing, and of course, it’s you. My first thought actually was Graham Greene, and I was curious to see how Absolutionwas going to be in conversation. So I went back, actually had to go buy a new copy, because I couldn’t find my copy. So this is when I’m referencing The Quiet American. And it has an introduction by Robert Stone, who’s a writer I love, but also haven’t really read recently. But reading Stone’s analysis, and if you haven’t read A Flag for Sunrise, if you haven’t read Outerbridge Reach, certainly Dog Soldiers, you know, he’s Robert Stone, you should go read these things. It was wild to see his introduction, which honestly, I don’t even know when exactly it was written. And having Tricia and Charlene, and Rainey in the back of my brain, as I’m also I mean, you know, Robert, wrote very sort of macho fiction. He was writing of a certain idea, most of his stuff came out in the 60s and 70s. And there were later works, I mean, certainly Damascus Gate and whatnot. But when I think of Robert Stone and the body of work that makes him Robert Stone, for me as a reader, it’s all the stuff from the 60s and 70s. And it all comes back to Vietnam. And you and green sort of have a sense similar sensibility, I feel like you’re sort of writing with a raised eyebrow, even when you’re talking about these women and letting them do their thing, there’s some moments and obviously, we’re going spoiler free in this conversation. But there are some moments where I feel like you’re saying, Okay, I see who you are. But do you? I mean, do Trisha and Charlene. I mean, we meet Rainey as a child. So obviously, we’ll cut her some slack early on. But, you know, do these women really see their paths? I mean, the way you have Trisha and Charlene sort of collide literally with baby vomit. Sorry, it’s a great touch. I, actually years ago, when I was doing events for B&N, someone did actually hand me their baby at an event as she was going through the signing line, and yes, the baby was covered in vomit. And I just sort of stood there said, okay, okay, I’m not entirely sure what to do. But please come take your child back from me as soon as you can. But did you start with these two particular women? Or was it really just being in conversation with Greene and sort of this bigger idea of the American world?

Yeah, no, it I knew it was it had to be the woman’s story. And it had to be precisely their story. You know, the last thing any of us needs is any novelist or probably at this point, any journalist pontificating about our failures in Southeast Asia. You’ve heard it, we know. So there was the important thing of this, this is that’s the raised eyebrows. This is a woman looking back. It’s not, as it happens, historical novels, more of a faux memoir, I also knew right away that this, this woman, a creature of her times, as a young woman, then also subsequent years, she got to live through what Greene didn’t see coming. And that is finding their own voices. So I think that’s where the narrative raised eyebrows. She would not she wouldn’t sound like the same character if she had been writing at 24, 25. She’s looking back.

Yeah, without a doubt. I mean, I would say, there were echoes, though, of, you know, Marie from Someone or Sally from The Ninth Hour or even Lucy, if I go really back to At Weddings and Wakes. It’s very Virginia Woolf of you, you understand where I’m going with this. But you know, this idea that all of these tiny moments add up to life. And there were some people who would look at their stories and say, Well, you you’ve led a very quiet life. You know, you only do these things, you have a very circumscribed experience. And, you know, in a way, we could say the same thing about Tricia and Charlene, because they’re living within the American, you know, sort of, in this American expat community. I mean, there are some women who, even though they’re living in Vietnam have instructed the household staff to make sure that they only eat Western food, because they will not eat Vietnamese food, etc. And this idea that you can make your world as small as you would like, even if you’re 1000s and 1000s of miles away.

Yeah, I mean life is made up of those small moments for the movers and shakers, and certainly, these characters are not movers and shakers, but I’ve always been — one of my favorite plays, and this goes back to, you know, something I saw as an undergraduate and go back to is Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. That whole sense of okay, yeah, we know what’s going on onstage. But what’s going on when the characters exit? That’s always fascinated me the, yeah. Okay. You know, yeah, you’re doing all these important things, but we’re living the life. And we’re having the children. And we’re ensuring the next generation, that sense of these small dramas are not small as you’re leaving them. It’s really essential. And I think it very much is that sense of these women on the periphery of these, and it really isn’t them. I mean, this is 1963, that Trisha is reporting. So it’s really on the periphery of great change, right? There at the time, if you go back and look at contemporary news reports, news reporters had to put a map of the world this is where a place you’ve never heard of. It’s that sense of now, I know the great events. But my life was also just as important to me as I was living through it. That’s Tricia’s memoir. But the other thing I also understood, somehow, I suppose, maybe intuitively about Tricia is that she must be invited to tell her story. Somebody had asked her for her story. She is not a memoirist. She’s not someone who would be telling her story unbidden. That was one of the very first things I understood about the story that she must be invited to tell it. And when you’ve been invited to tell a story, there’s a certain self-consciousness that I think, plays in her voice.

I think, too, with Tricia, one of the reasons I like her as a character is, it’s exactly as you say, like she needs to be invited to do things. She’s breaking so many barriers for her. I mean, here she is, she’s a kid who grew up and raised by her dad, her mother has died. She’s an only child. She’s grown up in a very specific way, with very specific sort of, let’s call them guardrails, right? Not necessarily rules. But you know, the one time she tries to head to a different direction with a classmate in college, actually, the classmates aren’t, looks at her and says, Oh, and the idea that Trisha is, it’s not necessarily that she’s naive, I don’t want to dismiss her as being naive. But she is just trying to figure out what it all means she’s been told she needs, she wants to aspire to be a wife, and a mother and all of these things. And she doesn’t quite know how she actually feels about these things. She just knows she’s supposed to hit these certain beats. And watching her figure this out, and sort of seeing how she interacts certainly with Charlene, but also her husband, and just the other, whether they’re Vietnamese or Americans, and there’s a French doctor who sort of rolls in later, but watching her figure out how she feels about people. And where she wants to be, it’s, it’s a really interesting way to handle a coming-of-age story, because also you’ve got this narrator looking backwards. It’s a good puzzle. Like, if you like, puzzles, and literary fiction may not be the first thing you’ve turned to this would be a great place to start. But can we talk about the structure for a second, it’s told in three sections, you do bounce between the present day, and Vietnam in 1963. And the transitions are really nicely done, obviously, because it’s you. But when you’re sitting down to tell a story like this, because also you do tend to write very short novels. But we’re covering a lot of ground. I mean, we’re covering decades. And we’re crossing oceans, and a lot is happening. And how are you mapping that out? Because I do know, you’re right at the sentence level. I know it’s all about the sentence. But you also have a really great sense of story, and narrative propulsion. So I’m wondering how it all balances out for you.

Yeah, I think I’ve spent… I mean, I’ve hit writing students over the head with this any number of times and then I find myself in this novel actually trying to do it. And that is the notion of putting yourself as the writer, totally in service of character, totally at the service of voice, character and, you know, if we can get a little highfalutin— truth and authenticity, I find myself more and more sort of recoiling from too much planning, even too much “hope this novel achieves this” more that listening to a character getting out of the way so that the character can tell her tale without an author’s intervention and without an author’s judgment, which is even harder, because, you know, we all have our own egos, you want readers to think you know things you want readers to think you’re in control. So, so this was very much Who is this? Who is she? And let her tell me the in moving around the space that she finds herself in and encountering it, who she is and what she wants. And I think the thing that tugs her. And it’s both a part of that background in that culture that she was raised in that you talked about. And it’s also out of it, outside of it for women in that era, and that is this tremendous sense that I want a bigger life. I want to do good in the world. And even her excursion to Birmingham as a college student, it’s not so much you’re not up for this so that her that the aunt of her friend tells her and sends her home, if you have to make a choice, right? You put your life at risk for the greater good. Or you take care of the people who depend on you, even if it’s only one person, in her case, your father who needs you. And those in many ways were the choices that that so many women were given.

It’s really binary. If you look back on American history, and up until very recently to like, if you think about it, like, women couldn’t have credit cards in their own names, and bank accounts, were all of it like, it was just so binary, you were a wife and mother or you weren’t. And if you were going to go into the workforce, you were either a teacher or a nurse or a secretary, that was basically you know, and I’m not saying that women didn’t do these other things, but in sort of mainstream culture and the mainstream culture that a woman like Tricia, or a woman, like Charlene would have been exposed to, I mean, they’re living these extraordinarily exotic lives. But it’s also driven by who their husbands are, and what their husbands do.

Yes. And it’s also the, the little circle of domesticity. Right? It’s, they’re far away, but they’re hanging on to, you know, the, the same life that they once had, and not letting where they find themselves intervene. But I’m so glad that you said binary because one of the things you know, when you get to the end of composing a novel, and it’s Is that too much? Is that too obvious? Is that too subtle, and the repeated references to twinning in this novel, this novel is all about duality. It’s angels and two women trying to accomplish what one single woman can’t and there twins everywhere —their cousins and sisters and spouse. And I think ultimately, it’s what the story brought me to that the impulse to condemn or to say you did that wrong can very swiftly become, well, you did your best. And it does come down to that moment, when, as a reader or as a writer entering into a story we say it’s not about me, it’s about you, your experience, your justifications, your limits. It’s about that. And that’s what we have to look at, clearly not through the filter of well, we know better. well, you shouldn’t have been such a wimp. No.

Yeah. I mean, you and I are taping this conversation, 60 years after the events that kickoff the novel. I mean, certainly we get up into the 80s and 90s in the present, but 1963. And you and I are taping this in 2023. And I was talking to a couple of younger colleagues in the office, when I was prepping for the show. And, you know, there is this sort of moment, culturally, right where age sort of defines how you see Vietnam. And you know, as you said, at the top of the show, we know that American policy was a complete failure in Southeast Asia, like we’ve heard it a million times. But also, I have younger colleagues who are like, well, it’s the music and the protest lyrics and the protest poetry. And it’s a different it’s 1968 in Chicago, it’s a different kind of experience of that early moment. And I honestly, and you know, for a couple of different reasons, but when I think of America and Vietnam, you know, I’m thinking McGeorge Bundy. So to have this piece, and, you know, I’ve read The Quiet American multiple times and possibly have given my old original penguin away, I couldn’t find it. So I’m off, you know, but the idea that The Quiet American is still in print and still resonates the way it does, and the way that Graham Greene you know, this rather sort of sarcastic, gimlet eyed Brit is still relevant, almost 70 years, is it? It’s close to 70 years since Quiet American first came out, and that we find these echoes right that everyone brings their own experience to reading this book, which is why I asked you to start with those opening one because I really liked the opening. No one thinks about the wives. And that’s true. Like we could have been in Baltimore, we could have been in Brooklyn, we could have been on Long Island, we could have been any of those places because it’s 1963.

Right? Yeah. The fact that that is the periphery of things going on. ’63, and I’m not the person to notice this, was an amazing thing, historically pivotal year. Of course, you know, for those of us of a certain age right away, we think of JFK’s assassination. But it was seeded by Diem’s assassination, which, you know, is the beginning of the catastrophes of US involvement in that year, but Medgar Evers was assassinated ’63, The March on Washington, the Vatican II started in the 1960s. It’s amazing. When you look at the how pivotal it is, and it is even that it is 60 years later, there’s so much that’s unbelievable about what was accepted, having copy editors when we were going through the book, young copy editors — now women didn’t wear stockings in Saigon when it was 100 degrees, did they? Silk stockings? Are you kidding? Yes.

And the hair and the makeup and the girdles, I mean girdles. I, when I think of girdle and the way women had to dress and comport themselves, no matter where they were, I mean, those women were wearing girdles and in 100-degree humidity.

It was just in a column about Dianne Feinstein that had a quote, again, it was just from the mid 60s, from a newspaper account about how she was so articulate and so smart, that it kept all the reporters from sort of leering over her beautiful legs and gorgeous eyes. This was in the mid 60s, late 60s, I think it was and how her clothing was described, being that she was the mayor, you know, she was a politician, she was a woman in politics, who was saying important things and, and nobody even knew enough, and this goes back to Graham to that’s a failing on our part, right? Men who are in charge, who are telling the story, who are recording the history.

There are a couple of very nice moments too, in Absolution, where you’re making fun of men for mansplaining Buddhism, there are men with feelings about Buddhism. Oh, and I mean, I’m sorry, I’ve been in some of those conversations not that long ago. Well, I mean, there is a little bit of a ripple effect. I mean, that’s part of the fun for me of reading something that isn’t set necessarily in a current moment. You know, and again, part of the narrative does bring us into the present day. But the bulk of this book really is not last Tuesday. And I do, I love connecting the dots between where we’ve been and who we were and sort of where we are now and what that means for where we go, right. Like, that’s why I read and it’s like that EM Forster line, and I think you’ve written or delivered a lecture on this. Only connect, right that Forster line. It’s like, you’ve got to connect the words and the passion and everything and bring it together. And I feel like I get that when I read you. Whether we’re on Long Island, or we’re in Brooklyn, or we’re in the Bronx or whatever. I did not know, though, that you aspired at one point to be more like a Russian novelist than the writer you’ve become. Can we just take a minute and talk about the evolution because your books are really beautiful and consistent. And I know when I’m reading you, and the sentences are like cut glass, and the characters and the women. But I was not thinking that you had wanted to do something sort of dramatically different. And yes, you could argue that Nabokov and Chekov are much closer to what you do. But when I hear Russian novelists, I’m thinking, you know, door stoppers. So can we talk about the evolution of you as a writer for a second?

Sure. Yeah. I don’t know that it was so much that I was out to write doorstoppers, more aiming for the big themes. And I suppose it’s a belief I’ve held since the time I started reading and falling into books, that books should never be about what they’re about. That the subject should always be beside the point, that the setting and the particulars of the history should always be beside the point, that it should be about something that all of us share forever. And so I guess that’s the Russian part of it, to read those great, sweeping historic and I think Nabokov said this to read those great sweeping historical novels just to find out what life was like in gay Paris.

Actually, you sent me looking for his set of lectures on literature, and of course, I couldn’t find my copy so I had to go buy a new one. This frequently happens actually, when I’m working on a show. It’s been a really long time since I’ve read those pieces. And it’s like, oh, because again, I love the idea that you can be in conversation — you, Alice McDermott, can be in conversation with Virginia Woolf or you could be in conversation with Chekhov or Nabokov or you know, whoever and I like or even the fact that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead is one of your favorite plays. Like I mean, Stoppard is fun, man. He is. But all of these inputs, right. Get us to Vietnam in 1963, with Tricia and Charlene. I love seeing that. And I love sort of thinking about how all of these pieces connect the structure to classic sort of three acts. But there’s a lot in this book. It seems a little looser, maybe than The Ninth Hour? And I don’t know if that’s me as a reader, but it does feel like you’re a little looser on the page than The Ninth Hour, am I right about that?

Yeah, I think probably. The Ninth Hour has sort of a collective voice. And, you know, a reach for imagining what hasn’t been lived through a collective voice. And here, it is very much the specific voice. It very much that story. This is what’s so wonderful, and how blessed we are by the world’s literature. Let’s be honest.

Yeah, it’s true.

Yeah, that we can be in dialogue and that the time that, you know, there’s really no expiration date, on the great themes, on what we’re looking for, what we go to story for, what we go to literature, you know, that, you know, tell me why tell me? What’s it all about? Tell me, you know, let me and I think what happens is for each of us individually who take on this vocation for our lives, it’s all right, well, then I’ll find what, I’ll reach for those things we’re all talking about, and we’re all striving for, but I’ll but I’ll find as my subject, what it seems to me hasn’t been treated yet. The shallow level, it’s just well, yeah, we haven’t really heard from the wives and the little girls in Saigon in 1963, and what their lives were like, but I think it’s also that excitement of saying, through this that hasn’t been looked at before I can get at what we’re all looking at constantly, every all of us who write and all of us who read. I’m always sort of dismayed when I hear young writers talk about oh, well, you know, I’m so frustrated, because I’m not seeing myself or my experience in any of the fiction that I’m reading. I always want to say, Aren’t you lucky? Isn’t that great? That’s wonderful. Because now, you know what you need to do? Yes, you’re calling, you’re hearing the call? Because you’re not seeing or you’re, you’re not finding who you’re most curious about. There you go. That’s your obligation.

Do it, make the art. Yeah, I was just thinking of Bryan Washington, actually, the author of Memorial, and there’s a story collection called Lot and the new novel is Family Meal. But that’s exactly, he was just like, I have to make this thing because no one else has written the thing and, you know, it’s become sort of accepted wisdom, you know, right. Was it Toni Morrison who did say it? Or is that become apocryphal write the book that you haven’t seen yet or that you want to read? I feel like so many of these things become apocryphal.

That’s the door you choose to go through to enter into what we’ve all been talking about. And I think that if you’re only writing because nobody’s gone through that door, that’s not enough. This is my way into the larger questions. This is my way into what we all share, no matter what door or window, we come in through. That’s what’s exciting. And that’s why I say, hold this just stubborn belief. And again, when I was teaching, I could see my students always their eyes crossed, when I would say, you know, this story is really too much about what it’s about, Oh, what the hell do I do with but you know, but there is that sense we’re all trying to get at what this human experience is and what we do it as mortal creatures who make mistakes and fail and do terrible things and do wonderful things and love one another and hate one another. How do we make sense of this time? It’s marvelous that there are so many ways into that. But I think what keeps literature alive for all of us is that eventually it gets to that thing and it goes back to Nabokov. You know, when I can look at Humbert Humbert and say, that’s me, I could I understand this guy. And not only that, I feel what he feels my own humanity is expanded, awfully.

But that is an example of that. We need to think about, I’m also just as you were speaking, again, I’m sort of rolling around this idea from Forster, right, who’s a huge influence also on Zadie Smith, and all of these pieces that we pulled, right, only connect, and obviously I’m paraphrasing that piece as well. But this idea that reading, it’s not passive, right, like, you bring your own experience, not just of the world, but of text. And, you know, Michael Cunningham has this line about how he feels like writing his own work is an act of translation before he even hands it off, to his translators to turn whatever novel into whatever language it’s going to be. And I love this idea of translating the bigger idea, right? You’re talking about the bigger themes, and how do you translate those ideas into language? That gets you to a point where someone connects with what has been rolling around in the back of your head since you read The Quiet American in college, right? Like this giant, you can just see this giant continuum of words and ideas.

Right. And it’s also the great gift of the imagined, and how language brings us, I write so called realistic fiction, but realism is full of magic. That is the fact alone, that someone can put a few words together and you can feel the heat when you’re wearing silk stockings and a girl at a garden party right inside, in a time you’ve never lived. And you can be there, that a writer can make us be there and live the experience. And once we’ve lived the experience, then we can have these wonderful conversations. And I do think you’ve got the best job in the world. It’s like, I want to talk to the writer. I just finished the book; I want to talk to the writer. Holden Caulfield’s whole thing, that I want to call up the writer. But first we’ve lived it, you know, and when literature allows us to live to be there, there’s something sort of miraculous about that. And, and that has to happen first. You know, a piece of fiction has to do that to us first, then we can talk about what, what that experience meant. We can talk about the language; we can talk about the sentences that brought us there. Oh, boy, if you don’t, one of my favorite things and it’s, I suppose it’s a way I still a very elemental way of judging fiction. I love it when something I’ve read, usually in a novel or short story comes back to me when I’m doing something else. And to think, where did I see that it, has a kind of it has the truth of lived experience, but it wasn’t. Yeah, but it comes back to you. And it’s sort of like a memory and it’s sort of like, somebody puts something in a really wonderful way. That’s such a great way. I don’t think we talk about that enough with young readers like, like, just store it up. Because really, it’ll come back to you in marvelous, marvelous ways, and sometimes when you need it. Not always.

I think too, part of the joy is reading widely. And I know that I genuinely believe there’s a book for every person. I do think when you find your thing, you know that’s great. But I am in the position of being able to read very widely, and I sort of need to also read very widely for what I do. But I love it because it pushes me to change the way I think, and it pushes me to take language in in different ways. And also, I love a semicolon. I’m just going to own it right now I believe in Oxford commas, and I like semicolons so but when you can see where language can go and it’s exactly what you were just talking about, like you have this recall and this idea pops up or this piece pops up or this memory that isn’t actually yours pops up. It’s because of the language. It’s because of what you read and the way you connected with words. And ultimately, the authors through their words or the character through these words in the voice through whichever piece you’re genuinely… But it does come back to the words, it comes to the prose. And I, you know, I like a pretty sentence. I like a pretty sentence that does stuff. I like a pretty sentence. It’s concise, like many people experience the sentence that goes on for quite some time. And sometimes it’s great and it’s not a stunt. And sometimes you’re like, okay, yeah, yeah, but when you can connect with the character and the voice and the writer, it’s just it’s such a great, it’s such a delight to be able to do that.

Yeah. And the language is, is sort of the invocation, the language is casting the spell. I know, because I’ve had this conversation with so many writers, young and old and in between, you know, it’s striking that fine balance, right language, right words, right rhythm, right music, and not stepping over into operatic and inflated verbal prose. You know, not putting too much of a burden on the language, but, but paying attention to it in in a very primary way.

Now that you’re not teaching, I don’t know, if you have more time to read. I’m sure you have all of these plans or things. Have you had a chance, though, yet to read Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting?

No, everybody’s telling me about it.

If you have a chance, he does a thing where a character sort of is revisiting her life. And there’s no punctuation and it’s glorious. Oh, it works it really, but it works in a way that, you know, sometimes you think, okay, and it just, it actually it worked so well that I had a moment of thinking there was no punctuation anywhere in this 500 plus page novel. And it really, so if you have a chance as a storytelling tool, it absolutely, absolutely works. And it represents who this character is, and where she’s come from, and, and everything else and didn’t want to bother me that I honestly, it took me a minute probably to notice that there was no punctuation because the flow and the rhythm was just there, the cadence was there.

There has to be the truth. I mean, this goes back to that big capital T Truth. If it’s authentic, and it’s talent we know, readers know, you and I know when we’re being scammed. It’s, this is a little bit more about the author’s ego and the author’s juggling, and I’m being asked to admire the author’s juggling, then it is about character, story. And when it’s about character, and story, there’s all kinds of crazy things you can get away with.

There is a piece though of your work that I do want to sort of get to. Because it underpins everything you just said, but faith seems to be the sort of undercurrent, right, that you have, not just… Catholicism is a big piece of it, yes, but the sort of faith and our humanity and our ability, like you have faith in your characters, that they’re going to get to the other side, somehow, now we’re gonna find out how they get to the other side. But part of it I do think is organized belief in Catholicism, but faith as a concept, like faith in the story, faith in the voice, faith in the characters. I mean, it’s kind of what you’ve been talking about, through this entire conversation, is that there’s this undercurrent of faith. And it sounds to me and it seems to me that you don’t even have to think about it. It’s just there.

Well, I don’t know why I would write if it weren’t. If it we’re not, there’s that sense of no, I probably, I’ll probably fail, will probably fail, my characters will probably fail. It’s impossible to make sense of this existence of ours, it’s impossible to make sense of any relationship. It’s impossible to make perfect sense of any past or any history or any politics. It’s important. And yet, something spurs us to try. Something spurs us to say, but no, I think this really matters. Even when everything around us is saying, and by next year, we won’t even be thinking about that, or, you know, get that, that they were they failed, they were stupid. They didn’t see what they were doing move on. There’s something there. I think that has to be that state of any artist. Really, it’s the thing we haven’t seen yet that is somehow real and exists in the material at hand. Right? I just have to. And I know I won’t get there. I know, I will. I know it won’t be perfect. I know. And the characters know it too, I think, at the heart of Absolution is that, I don’t know how to be good. Charlene sets s, prepares the world and she laughs and says, The Buddhists say heal yourself. You know, which is connected, obviously, to what we were talking about before that I’m gonna go to Birmingham, and I’m going to fight for social justice and civil rights. And no, no, no, you’re going to take care of this one person who loves you above everything else in his life. And without you his life is meaningless. I’m trying to get they’re trying to do the right thing. But I don’t know which what the right thing is. And I think that’s where I mean, that’s where our need for absolution, the need to forgive one another. No, because we’re not going to get it right.

I also think that good, like the concept of good is oftentimes thrust at us. I mean, obviously, as human beings we aspire to be good, we aspire to do the right thing. But sometimes good, gets warped. It gets twisted. And I think, you know, we certainly see that. I mean, that’s part of the fun of reading, right? Like you can dip into terrible things. Well, now I can put the book down, and I can go have dinner and come back to but this idea that good is not it’s not necessarily tangible. Sometimes it’s just an idea that someone throws at you. And it may or may not work. And watching these women sort of process what is good like, how do you help people, helping people as is good, but there are going to be readers who have feelings about some of the things they encounter in Absolution and I loved it. I mean, I loved Charlene as character. I was like, who are you, lady? This is great. But I think there are going to be folks who are sort of sitting with Tricia and saying, Well, what? And I really, I can’t wait to hear those responses. And I really can’t wait to see how people connect to these women because they’re so alive. And they’re so vibrant on the page. And yeah, they kind of have been, they represent a group that has been forgotten.

Yeah, but I think what you say that struggle not only to do good, but to define it is never ending and that whole duality thing there. There are two doctors in this novel, only connect right, one at a leper colony in 1963. And he’s either the devil himself, or he’s an incredible angel going around on his own, trying to do good. He might also be CIA, who knows, doing terrible things. And he tells terrible stories and sort of brings Tricia to a moment of in some ways, complete despair, not knowing what’s good, is life even worth living. Later in the novel, and it’s very brief, but Dominic the Vietnam vet who also was there in 1960s, and now is an older man tells Rainey, the little girl from the 63 section that his adopted son’s life was saved by an itinerant doctor and he says, he says, this doctor is proof of a benevolent universe because he saved the life of this abandoned Down Syndrome child, came along and did the heart surgery that saved his life. And everybody in the years since was like this guy was amazing. But then there’s also this doctor who also says he’s out to do good, doing what good he can. And he talks about I should have just put a pillow over the head of that infant because put him out of his misery. What’s the purpose of that child living? It’s not just that that impulse to do good. But the confusion we run into when we try to define good and how much good is done inadvertently, just as how much evil can be done in the name of good inadvertently, you know, the best of intentions.

Context is slippery, especially when you’re talking about people. And when you’re talking about people in this kind of… you put your people in a fishbowl even when we’re not in Vietnam. I mean, Rainey’s life is a little bit of a fishbowl. Certainly, Tricia’s life before she’s, everyone’s in their own little fish bowls. And the question is, where do they go from there? And it’s really, I have to say it was quite — this book was a trip, in the ways that you want literature to be a trip. I mean, I’m assuming you also could surprise yourself too, though, while you’re writing. I mean, if you’re letting character and voice drive, what you’re doing, then there’s an opportunity for you to be surprised by Tricia and Charlene. I never felt like I knew. Especially with Tricia, Tricia was… Charlene, I got Charlene’s rhythms pretty quickly, because she’s Charlene. But watching Tricia evolve was really? Yeah, it was nice. It was really nice. Can I ask what’s next?

My pre-publication way, I think it would be used to this by now. But the way I deal with life in pre-publication is, I keep my nose very close to the next novel, and don’t look up. So I am well along in a novel that I was writing for a long time in parallel with Absolution and now has my full focus, but a little bit of and I love what you said earlier, a little bit of it is, you know, we do fall into, as readers, we do fall into these traps, this is the these are the writers, I read these kind of books, like, and I have always told students, especially undergrads, you know, read indiscriminately for as long as you can. Eventually, you’ll be set in your ways, and you won’t have the patience for this stuff that’s not working or that you don’t want to finish. But at this, you know, early in your career, read everything, at this stage of my life not wanting to get stuck in my ways. I’m trying to write things that I normally wouldn’t read them in genres approaches. One thing that I haven’t done yet, but I see it on the shelf is a possibility. I have no patience for novels, written by writers by novelist characters. It’s a terrible flaw because there are so many wonderful novels, but I always find myself recoil as soon as someone said, well, I was writing a short story, I thought, well, I don’t want to know about your life. So maybe that’s, that’s, that’s a challenge. It might be terribly introspective and boring, or. But I think that’s that sense of, for all of us, of pushing yourself. I don’t know anyone who writes who doesn’t want to be surprised by their own writing, because that’s what you want as a reader. And we’re all readers first, first way readers, then we do the karaoke of trying our own hands. If I’m not being surprised and challenged and dismayed often when I’m composing, and I’ve got a lot of other things that could be doing.

I am going to mention that you do have a craft book from a couple of years ago called What About the Baby? And I really liked saying that title. So sorry, I have to say it again, What About the Baby? which, you know, if you’re figuring out whether or not you’re going to end up writing, it’s not a bad place to start, I had a really good time with that. That is a book that I hold quite close and partially because it surprised me so much. I was so invested in Marie’s life and very quickly. And again, it was that just line after line of a woman’s life and I have zero, very little in common, I should say with this particular character. And I just, I really, I still think so fondly and I dip back and every now and again. And I’m just, I’m so fond of that book. So thank you and Absolution — I cannot wait, I cannot wait for other readers to get their hands on this book because it’s special. And it’s a little different for you but not I mean, anyway, I’m really looking forward to it being out in the world. Alice McDermott, thank you. B&N Book Club. We’re going to do that in December too and then we can do the spoilers there. We danced around so much of this book, because we can’t do spoilers. But Alice, thank you so much. I really appreciate it.

I so appreciate meeting you. Thank you so much and safe travels.