Alice McDermott Books in Order

If you want a great first book: Someone → Charming Billy → The Ninth Hour
If you like family stories shaped by faith: At Weddings and Wakes → After This → Someone
If you want something darker and more intense: That Night → Charming Billy → Absolution
If you want to start with her later work: The Ninth Hour → Someone → Absolution

Alice McDermott was born in Brooklyn on June 27, 1953, and grew up in Elmont on Long Island in an Irish Catholic family. That setting, Brooklyn streets, Long Island neighborhoods, parish life, family rituals, and the strange mix of tenderness and pressure inside close communities, would become the ground she returned to again and again in fiction. Her books are often interested in people who do not look dramatic from the outside, but whose inner lives are anything but small.

That world never really left her.

McDermott has said that, growing up with two older brothers, she started writing partly so she could finally get a full sentence in. Later, a collection of stories by Vladimir Nabokov that she picked up at the Elmont Public Library made her want to be a writer for real. She studied at SUNY Oswego, earned an MA from the University of New Hampshire, and taught before and alongside her life as a novelist. Writing and teaching grew up together for her.

Her first novel, A Bigamist's Daughter, arrived in 1982. It was followed by That Night, a love story and neighborhood memory piece set on Long Island, and then At Weddings and Wakes, which watches an extended family through the eyes of children who are always seeing more than adults think. Those early books already show what McDermott does so well: she takes domestic life, family talk, old grief, and the habits of faith, and lets their hidden force rise slowly to the surface.

She has always had a gift for making ordinary life feel momentous without making it loud.

A wider audience found her with Charming Billy, the 1998 novel that won the National Book Award. Built around a funeral gathering in the Bronx, it follows the stories people tell about Billy Lynch, a charming drinker who has become a local legend in death as well as in life. Later books kept widening her range. Child of My Heart gives us a sharp, unsettling summer on Long Island through the voice of a teenage babysitter. After This, one of three McDermott novels named a Pulitzer finalist, follows the Keane family across the postwar decades as the culture around them shifts faster than they can manage.

Then came Someone, one of her warmest and quietest books, a life story made from the scattered memories of Marie, a Brooklyn woman whose days might look ordinary until you sit with them. In The Ninth Hour, McDermott moved back to early 20th-century Brooklyn and into the lives of nursing sisters, widows, laborers, and children, tracing how one man's suicide keeps echoing through a whole community. Her recent novel Absolution carries some of her long-running concerns, faith, guilt, duty, women doing the work no one names, into 1963 Saigon. In What About the Baby?, a collection of essays, lectures, and reflections, she writes directly about fiction itself, which is useful if you want to see how carefully she thinks about stories from the inside.

Her fiction is often tied to Irish American and Catholic experience, but the real subject is usually broader: family loyalty, loneliness, marriage, class, memory, mercy, and the gap between what people feel and what they can say out loud. Her short stories and essays have appeared in major magazines and newspapers, and for many years she taught in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins, where she became a steady presence for younger writers.

She has long lived with her family outside Washington, D.C. That mix of home life, teaching, faith, doubt, and close attention to the visible world seems to suit her. McDermott's novels are rarely huge in size, but they carry a lot of life.