What ignites a novel? Alice McDermott’s new “Someone” was sparked by four words: “parlor floor and basement.”
That’s a familiar phrase for anyone of a certain age who knows Brooklyn, McDermott tells The Post, “but that suddenly struck me as antique and enchanting. Who says ‘parlor’ anymore?”
From that, she wove a moving story of an Irish-American Brooklyn woman who sees life through thick glasses. And no, McDermott says, she’s yet to be censured, as others have, for saying to much: “Edna O’Brien once told me how her mother buried her first novel in the garden, and after drawing black lines through the scene she didn’t like. All i could think of was, ‘How nice to be ready so carefully.’
Here are your books this prizewinner loves.
The Habit of Being
by Flannery O’Connor
These letters span O’Connor’s career, up to the last note left on her bedside table when she died, in 1964, at 39. They are by turns witty, profound, eloquent, wise and wry: “In our house, the liquor is kept in the bathroom closet, between Drano and the plunger, and you don’t get any unless you are about dead.”
The Boy Detective
by Roger Rosenblatt
I’m not usually drawn to memoir — many run the risk of self-aggrandizement, or score settling. But this is more an extended personal essay than autobiography. It’s a walk through Manhattan with a delightful companion speaking sotto voce in your ear. It’s a riff on the enchantments of the city, on childhood, on reading and writing, love . . . and yes, memory.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
by Tom Stoppard
I first saw a production of this play when I was 20 and crazy about Shakespeare, wordplay and anything that smacked of the irreverent. I was knocked out by this “behind the scenes” take on Hamlet’s doomed school buddies.
The Collected Poems
by W.B. Yeats
This was the Christmas gift my father gave me in 1982, the year I published my first novel. The dust jacket disintegrated long ago, so I don’t know how much it cost him. My father was not a college graduate himself and the few bits of Yeats he knew, he knew by heart. Still, he bought this outlandish gift for me, his literary daughter. And I have looked into it almost daily ever since.