Besides being an award-winning author, Alice McDermott has been active in teaching creative writing in many settings. This book is subtitled “Some Thoughts on the Art of Fiction.” Though I don’t aspire to write, as a reader, I have appreciated authors’ reflections on what makes fiction work. I loved George Saunders’ A Swim in the Pond in the Rain, a 400-page recounting of his MFA course in short story writing.
The chapter that has the same title as the book is poignant in various ways. She begins it by recounting several books that were a part of her casual reading in the first decade of the 2000s that included rape scenes, dead little girls and mutilated women. She decided that she would stop reading any book with those scenes in them, immediately wondering if she was being too prudish or intolerant.
She then remembered the story of a friend who led a discussion with senior women about the movie Julia, based on Lillian Hellman’s memoir Pentimento. Julia was a childhood friend of Hellman’s who became a member of the Resistance in Nazi Germany. The movie tells the story of Julia’s work and their encounter before the war when Julia tells Lillian about her baby daughter who was safely out of Germany. Julia is killed and Lillian searches for her daughter until the war intervenes, but must leave without finding her. Alice’s friend expected the senior women to speak of the looking back at events, but their angry first question was “What about the baby?” Their view was, as the author puts it, the women had “been given a story with a baby in it, and they damn well wanted that baby accounted for. And until you accounted for that baby, you could take your lovely metaphors, and your dramatic suspense and your complex profundities about war and memory and go straight to hell with them. There was a baby missing, for Christ’s sake.”
She goes on to wonder if her outrage at the stories with the ugliness toward women was because she, like the senior women, believed in the lives of the discarded women more fully than the authors did. McDermott says writers must “clear their desks” so they can write what their stories and what their characters demand. She quotes Virginia Woolf criticizing Charlotte Brontë whose anger guided her too much. Woolf says, “She will write of herself where she should write of her characters.” McDermott says she was offended, discouraged, and really angry about the graphic ugliness toward women in so many books. She never wrote about the phenomenon in her fiction, but did save it for an essay.
Though the book loaned to me by Laura is bristling with sticky notes, I’m going to stop here. I believe you can tell that I think she writes with passion, caring, and brilliance about writing fiction. I loved her insights.
Alice McDermott, What About the Baby? Picador, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2021, 242 pages.