![]() ![]() Elizabeth Connelly, a twenty-something, cynical vanity press editor in New York meets Tupper, a wealthy southern writer with an unfinished novel about a bigamist. In writing her first novel, McDermott's approach was "to learn to write a novel." Storytelling, therefore, is the basis of A Bigamist's Daughter. Their storytelling, and by extension ours, closely imitates the way memory works one event spinning off another, not necessarily chronologically, but revealing much about the characters' inner lives. ![]() Thus, her characters tell or embellish their stories using hindsight refracted through new experiences. ![]() Her fiction aims not just to narrate the events, but to validate what one says about events. Alice McDermott approaches each novel as if she were a novice writer since each, she says, is "a new story and you have to find a new way to tell it and it makes its own demands." Nevertheless, her first novel, A Bigamist's Daughter, hints at topics and nascent stories which spill into future novels as well as introduces her characteristic style which critics describe as "prismatic." Interested in seeing "ordinary things, ordinary moments, in a variety of ways," McDermott achieves this variety by manipulating time and chronology. ![]()
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