Reading engages 2 minds, Go Read author believes
Colleen Curran/Richmond Times-Dispatch Special Correspondent
November 27, 2005

What does faith mean? How do the stories we tell change our lives? What's the relationship among truth, memory and lies?

These are just a few questions raised by Alice McDermott's powerful and affecting novel, "Charming Billy." And that's exactly why it was chosen for this year's Go Read program, the city's community reading program.

McDermott will visit Richmond this week (see Calendar, page K3). Earlier, she spoke by phone about "Charming Billy," which won the National Book Award in 1998.

Where did you get the idea for "Charming Billy"?

My initial interest was in the character of Billy himself. He's the kind of character you find in every extended family, most often in an extended Irish-American family. Someone who is the life of the party, lovable, great to be around and slowly drinking himself to death.

The interesting thing to me was that the character was familiar. He was a cliché. The challenge was to write a story about him that wouldn't deny the cliché but, in spite of the cliché, would make him an individual.

The novel opens after Billy's funeral at a bar in the Bronx, where the large, sprawling members of his extended family have gathered to tell stories about Billy's life. Why is it important that they tell stories?

Billy's life would not be what it was without his family around him. They provide the audience for Billy. Even though they've seen Billy suffer, there is this romantic story behind the suffering.

They have to tell this story. For many of the people around Billy, if they were to reduce him to the outline of his life it would be: a guy who never made a lot of money, who never held an important position, who doesn't have much to show of his life, a guy who collapsed and died on the street an alcoholic. This was a man they loved. This was a man who wrote little postcards and letters to them that they saved. This was someone who was always fun to be around. They have to reconcile that résumé of a life that seems pretty bleak with this great affection. Were they wrong to love him the way they did? Now that he's gone, what is that love worth? The stories that they tell about him: It's the redemption of love. It's faith as a form of storytelling.

The story goes that the great tragedy of Billy's life is that he fell in love with a young Irish woman named Eva who died of pneumonia before she could move to the States and marry Billy. But it turns out that Billy's cousin Dennis has lied to him. Eva is not dead. The lie is the crux of the novel. Why did Dennis choose to lie?

When you're talking about storytelling and memory, truth and lying immediately follow. Whenever you tell a story, the question is how much is the truth? Are you lying? Do you even realize that you're lying? All those questions come into play.

There is one version of Billy's story and another version. Dennis lied to make it better for Billy. It is a better story. He gives Billy what he thinks will be a better, more powerful vision of the truth.

It's the equal and opposite journey for Dennis. For Dennis, he's gone through his life, he's lost his wife, we see him suffer, but he has the sense that he's glimpsed the truth about life and it's not knowable. Yet he goes back to church and he marries again, he proceeds with his life. He makes the choice to believe in light of all the contradictions he's seen otherwise. It's an informed faith because he's not blinded by anything.

What do you hope can be accomplished when communities come together to read one book?

The pleasure of literature is two-fold. The first is that when you're reading, it's two minds engaged: the writer and the reader. That's all there is. I don't think there's anything else like it in our contemporary lives. There are no commercial breaks. It's about: Here we are as human beings, finding ourselves in the state we're in, just the two of us, reader and writer. It reminds us of the beauty of our minds and our lives. It restores us.

And then what's wonderful about a community project like this is to finish reading and it's like getting off a roller coaster. You get off and say, "Wow!" We get to come back and share that as a community. It's a starting point. We read this story and how did we react to it? We do so because we've fallen in love with books.

Colleen Curran is executive director of James River Writers in Richmond and the author of "Whores on the Hill."