About Charming Billy

Author: Alice McDermott

Published: 1998

Honors: Charming Billy was the winner of the 1998 National Book Award.

This thoughtful depiction of Irish American family life focuses on the dreams and demise of alcoholic, Billy Lynch. The book’s themes—memory and loss, love and family, and the strength and endurance of ordinary men and women—will resonate with almost everyone.

About the Author:
Like many of her characters, McDermott grew up in a middle-class Irish Catholic family on suburban Long Island. She was born on June 27, 1953, the third child and only daughter of Mildred Lynch McDermott, a secretary and homemaker, and William J. McDermott, who worked for Con Edison. Both her parents were first-generation Irish Americans and both were orphaned in their youth.

McDermott grew up as part of a large Catholic community and attended Catholic elementary and high schools. McDermott remembers filling up notebooks with stories as a young girl. Her two older brothers, who both became lawyers, dominated dinner conversation, and writing became a way of expressing herself privately. "Writing was a way for me to make my own world and work out my thoughts," she recalls.

During her undergraduate years at the State University of New York at Oswego, she decided to pursue her interest in writing. At Oswego, McDermott took her first writing class with Paul Briand, who became her mentor. The teachers in Oswego's writing program offered encouragement, helping her to think of herself as a writer and teaching her to analyze her own writing carefully and closely on the sentence level.

After graduating from Oswego with a B.A. in 1975, she moved to New York as a clerk-typist at Vantage Press, a vanity publishing house that supplied much of the inspiration for the fictional Vista Books of her first novel, A Bigamist's Daughter (1982).

McDermott enrolled in the master's program in fiction writing at the University of New Hampshire (UNH), where she met a second mentor, Mark Smith. He was key in persuading McDermott to start sending out manuscripts for publication by telling her, “Look, you've got the talent but you've got to take yourself seriously. Is this a career, or just something that you're doing?” His encouragement gave her the confidence to begin sending stories to publishers. Her first short story, "Simple Truth," was published in Ms. magazine in July 1978. In the next several years, she published stories in Ms., Seventeen, Redbook, and Mademoiselle.

The University of New Hampshire hired McDermott as a lecturer after she completed her M.A. degree in 1978. She taught English at UNH during the 1978-1979 academic year and during this time met her future husband, David Armstrong. The couple married on June 16, 1979, and they have three children, sons Will and Patrick, and a daughter, Eames.

McDermott decided to write a novel based on her success with the publication of her short stories. A Bigamist’s Daughter was well received and considered unusually accomplished for a first novel.

Her second novel, That Night, received glowing reviews and was named a finalist for the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and the Los Angeles Times Book Award.

The recipient of a Whiting Writers Award and the National Book Award, McDermott is currently writer-in-residence at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. She lives in Bethesda, Maryland, with her husband and their three children.