You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed.

Or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

Hello and welcome to Bookworm.

My name is Michael Silverblad, and today my guest is Alice McDermott.

She's the author most recently of Charming Billy.

Her previous books are in order of bigamist daughter that night and at weddings and wakes.

I wanted to begin by asking you a question that I never ask anyone. Where

were you born? Uh-oh. I was born in Brooklyn, New York. Wasn't everybody? I was. See? And then where

did you move? I grew up on Long Island in Elmunt, which is just sort of over the Queens border into Nassau County.

Now I'm going to jump almost immediately from the practical or concrete to the theoretical.

It seems to me that although these books very carefully consider the world of such a move from Brooklyn to the island

and the communities around it that at times, particularly in the two most recent books at

weddings and wigs and charming billy, an almost abstract structure emerges that seems to have to do

with crossing boundaries and barriers, boundaries of one person's memory against another,

pitting a lie against a truth. And I wondered to what extent

the books are more than merely factual.

To what extent are they for you structural?

Oh, I think, you know, the structure of a novel for me is the fun of it.

The characters and the language and the plot, as much plot as I ever managed to get into any of my novels. That's the work. But the structure,

the way it comes together, that's the challenge. And when I say fun, I mean, that's where I set the

...