CSPAN - America's Book Club Alice McDermott
Aired: 2026-04-19
Duration: 59:59


=== High School Playwriting Dreams (14:38) ===

[00:00:00]  And they're almost perfectly balanced.
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[00:00:27]  C SPAN's America's Book Club programming is brought to you by the cable satellite.
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[00:00:43]  From the nation's iconic libraries and institutions, America's Book Club takes you on a powerful journey of ideas, exploring the lives and inspiration of writers who have defined the country in conversation with civic leader and author David Rubenstein.
[00:01:00]  As a young boy growing up in Baltimore, I went to my local library.
[00:01:03]  And I was inspired to read as many books as I could.
[00:01:06]  Hopefully, people will enjoy hearing from these authors, and hopefully, they'll want to read more.
[00:01:10]  Now, from the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., a three time Pulitzer Prize finalist who has written several novels, stories, and essays.
[00:01:21]  Her novel, Absolution, was a New York Times instant bestseller and named by many publications as one of the best books of 2023.
[00:01:30]  For two decades, she was a humanities professor at Johns Hopkins University.
[00:01:35]  Alice McDermott.
[00:01:39]  Hello, I'm with Alice McDermott, one of our nation's leading fiction writers, and I'm very pleased to be with her at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington.
[00:01:48]  Thank you very much for being here.
[00:01:49]  My pleasure.
[00:01:50]  So, is Shakespeare somebody that ever influenced you in your writing?
[00:01:55]  Oh my gosh, how much time do you have?
[00:01:58]  Shakespeare is foundational for me.
[00:02:02]  I can go back to my childhood.
[00:02:04]  My father was born in 1909.
[00:02:08]  Got his education at a time when kids were made to memorize big swaths of Shakespeare.
[00:02:16]  So, all his life, he was very proud that he retained that.
[00:02:20]  So, I grew up with a father pontificating about the seven ages of man and tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.
[00:02:29]  So, Shakespeare was there in my household.
[00:02:34]  When I was in high school, I thought it would be very romantic to be a playwright.
[00:02:40]  So, once I got to college, I was very fortunate to have great teachers and to study Shakespeare with really wonderful professors, which is what you really need to do.
[00:02:54]  And I recall having a moment in a Shakespeare class where our professor, Professor Hardy, said, Every word in Shakespeare is intentional and matters.
[00:03:09]  And I remember my classmates.
[00:03:11]  Sort of rebelling and saying that's ridiculous.
[00:03:14]  Of course not.
[00:03:15]  You can't expect a writer to know every word is intentional or every word has meaning.
[00:03:21]  And she said, if you're just a storyteller, then every word doesn't have to be precise and meaningful.
[00:03:28]  But if it's a work of art, every word means something and is chosen with intention.
[00:03:36]  And I thought, there's a challenge.
[00:03:40]  Some people that review your books say that every word in your books.
[00:03:44]  Has meaning and you don't waste a lot of words, so maybe that by osmosis it seeped into your writing.
[00:03:51]  Ever thought about that?
[00:03:52]  Well, yeah, I mean, I was like, do I want to be a storyteller or I'd want to be a great artist?
[00:03:58]  And of course, at 18, you say great artist.
[00:04:01]  So, your father was Irish?
[00:04:04]  Yes, first generation.
[00:04:06]  And despite that, he liked the British writer William Shakespeare, right?
[00:04:10]  Absolutely.
[00:04:10]  There was no animosity, right?
[00:04:12]  Absolutely.
[00:04:14]  He was one of those wasp aspiring.
[00:04:17]  Irishman.
[00:04:19]  He was also a Republican, a Goldwater Republican.
[00:04:23]  How many Irish people are supposed to be Goldwater Republicans?
[00:04:26]  So, as a young girl, where did you grow up?
[00:04:29]  Elmont, New York, on Long Island.
[00:04:31]  And did you say from an early age, I want to be a writer, or what did you want to be when you were a young girl?
[00:04:38]  I mean, I always wrote, but the idea of writing as a career seemed very strange.
[00:04:46]  And I think by the time I began to sort of Delicately mentioned to my parents that maybe writing was something I wanted to do.
[00:04:58]  Their very good advice was to go to secretarial school.
[00:05:03]  Catherine Gibbs in New York was the place you go and get my shorthand up there and type really fast.
[00:05:11]  And then I could work at a publishing house.
[00:05:14]  And then I would have health insurance.
[00:05:16]  And I would not, as they would eventually say, starve in a garret.
[00:05:21]  So, did you have siblings?
[00:05:24]  Two older brothers.
[00:05:25]  And did they want to be writers too?
[00:05:27]  Or did they want you to be a writer?
[00:05:28]  Or did they say go to Catherine Gibbs?
[00:05:31]  No, yeah, they were very happy to see me go to Catherine Gibbs.
[00:05:35]  They both were engineers and attorneys.
[00:05:40]  So I assume you were a reasonably good student in high school?
[00:05:44]  Not really.
[00:05:45]  No, it was sort of a goof off.
[00:05:48]  The thing that I love to do, and this is why I thought maybe I would be a playwright, I became, I went to an all girl Catholic school on Long Island.
[00:05:57]  And in those days, Catholic schools, for some reason, especially the girls' Catholic schools, had a skit, had the girls perform a skit for every occasion.
[00:06:09]  Teacher Appreciation Day, you had to have a skit.
[00:06:11]  Sports night, you had to have a skit.
[00:06:14]  And I became the go to skit writer for my class and had the first experience of writing something and then have someone perform it and an audience laughs.
[00:06:26]  That was very rewarding.
[00:06:28]  So I read that when you were ready to go to college, you were looking for the best party school that you could find.
[00:06:33]  And what party school did you actually go to?
[00:06:36]  The State University of New York, College at Oswego, the coldest place on earth, right on the edge of Lake Ontario, with nothing between Canada but Lake Ontario and the country.
[00:06:49]  Did it live up to its reputation as a party school?
[00:06:51]  It certainly did, and the coldest place on earth.
[00:06:55]  And did you do writing there?
[00:06:56]  Were you an English major?
[00:06:58]  I went there with the idea that I would major in sociology because I didn't quite know what sociology.
[00:07:05]  Minch, but it sounded like something you studied in college.
[00:07:11]  But I always loved to read and write, and I said I had this sort of romantic idea of being a playwright.
[00:07:18]  I had read in high school Moss Hart's Act One, his autobiography, which is probably the most romantic vision of being a writer.
[00:07:30]  He describes going out while he's working as a waiter in the Catskills, and on his lunch hour, he goes out.
[00:07:38]  With a legal pad and a pen, and he writes a play, and then it seems instantly he's celebrated on Broadway.
[00:07:46]  Very romantic.
[00:07:47]  So, when you graduated from college, what did you do?
[00:07:50]  You didn't go to Catherine Gibbs, right?
[00:07:52]  I never got my shorthand up to snuff.
[00:07:57]  No, I took a class my second year at Oswego that was called The Nature of Nonfiction, and it was taught by a retired Air Force colonel.
[00:08:08]  Dr. Paul Briand, who had written a biography of Amelia Earhart and a few other works of journalism.
[00:08:18]  And the first assignment that he gave our class was to go out and write an autobiographical essay.
[00:08:25]  So I went back to the dorm and I wrote a three page story with a first person narrator, someone of my age and ilk, but it was entirely made up.
[00:08:38]  None of it had actually happened to me.
[00:08:40]  I made up a story and I presented it.
[00:08:43]  As a piece of nonfiction.
[00:08:45]  And after he had discussed it in the class, this was in the days of audiovisual aids, so he would take your writing and put it on an overhead projector on a screen behind him.
[00:08:59]  So all your words were this high, and it was in an auditorium where there was no hiding.
[00:09:06]  And after he had gone through what I had written and corrected my spelling and my grammar and my terrible use of commas, he said, McDermott, I want to talk to you after class.
[00:09:17]  And you thought he was going to tell you this is not for you.
[00:09:20]  Exactly, exactly.
[00:09:21]  Or you can't make stuff up.
[00:09:25]  These days, he probably would have suggested I go and get counseling because it was a traumatic story that just hadn't actually happened.
[00:09:34]  But the opposite happened.
[00:09:35]  He said to me when I sheepishly went down at the end of class I got bad news for you, kid.
[00:09:42]  You're a writer and you'll never shake it.
[00:09:46]  So, did you tell your parents that you were a writer?
[00:09:49]  And what did you decide to do upon graduation?
[00:09:52]  Well, they were still pushing to get a nice job in publishing and write your stories at night because you need health insurance, which is what I did for a year.
[00:10:02]  I went and worked in publishing in New York for a year and then realized I did not want to be the person behind the desk.
[00:10:10]  I didn't want to be an editor.
[00:10:11]  I certainly didn't want to be a receptionist in a publishing.
[00:10:14]  I wanted to be the writers who were coming in.
[00:10:16]  So, when did you start writing?
[00:10:17]  Did you do it on the side when you weren't telling anybody you were writing, or just quit your job and say, I'm going to write full time?
[00:10:23]  I always wrote.
[00:10:24]  I mean, I always wrote since I was a kid.
[00:10:28]  I wrote a novel in longhand, you know, when I was probably about 12.
[00:10:33]  It was just something I always did.
[00:10:36]  It was translating that into a career or something that was valid as a profession was the difficult part.
[00:10:47]  So you were writing in your first year as working in a publishing firm.
[00:10:52]  You did some writing, but when did you get up the courage to submit it to a publisher, or did you submit?
[00:10:58]  Articles as opposed to books initially?
[00:11:01]  I went off to the University of New Hampshire after my year of trying to work in publishing and write at night, and went off to a writing program to get an MA in English and to study with writers at the University of New Hampshire.
[00:11:16]  Really, the first time I had ever been around real writers, writers who were publishing and well known, and my fellow students who were also writing.
[00:11:29]  And I was there through the first year and never had the courage to submit any of the.
[00:11:34]  I was writing short stories.
[00:11:37]  And finally, a wonderful novelist named Mark Smith, who I was studying with, said to me, How many of these stories you've written have you sent out to magazines?
[00:11:45]  And I said, None, they're not ready yet, they're not good enough yet.
[00:11:51]  And he said this wonderful thing He said, I'm taking you seriously as a writer in our class.
[00:11:58]  Now you need to take yourself seriously.
[00:12:01]  As a writer.
[00:12:04]  So, what did you do?
[00:12:04]  Did you submit something?
[00:12:05]  So, I submitted and right away published a story in Ms. Magazine.
[00:12:10]  It was my first.
[00:12:12]  Fiction or nonfiction?
[00:12:13]  Fiction, yep, short stories, yep.
[00:12:15]  So, after they accepted your article, did you write other ones?
[00:12:19]  Or you say, now I'm ready for a book?
[00:12:21]  Oh, no.
[00:12:22]  I thought I was a short story writer.
[00:12:24]  I had sort of given up the idea of being a playwright because I realized being a playwright meant collaborating.
[00:12:31]  I had the nature to collaborate.
[00:12:33]  I didn't like anybody messing with my ideas or my sentences.
[00:12:38]  But then I thought, well, okay, if I were a really great writer, I would try to be a poet.
[00:12:44]  But I'm not that good.
[00:12:46]  But so maybe short stories.
[00:12:50]  So, I was mostly writing short stories.
[00:12:52]  But then, after I got my degree, and I stayed at UNH and taught, and then got married, and my husband was at Cornell Medical in Manhattan.
[00:13:03]  So, I moved back to Manhattan.
[00:13:06]  And I was doing part time work reading Slush Pile for Red Book Magazine and for reading YA novels for Walt Disney.
[00:13:16]  And I thought, well, I've got this time.
[00:13:18]  Everybody has to write their first novel sooner or later.
[00:13:22]  So, you did.
[00:13:23]  So, I did.
[00:13:24]  And the first novel was called A Bigamous Daughter.
[00:13:28]  A bigamist daughter, and what does that refer to?
[00:13:34]  It was, so I sat down and I thought, I was actually at the time writing in the medical library at Cornell on the Upper East Side at the same time the Shah of Iran, this is how long ago this was, was in New York Hospital.
[00:13:51]  So I sat down honestly thinking, what do I know anything about that I can fill 200 to 300 pages with?
[00:14:01]  And in that one year I'd worked in publishing, I worked for a while at a vanity publisher, a place where people pay to get their books published.
[00:14:11]  And so I thought, you know, I know a lot about that.
[00:14:15]  So that became the subject of my first novel.
[00:14:19]  That whole scent, and really writing about writers, the wanting to write, the ambition, the heartache, how sad and pathetic some of us are in our ambition and heartache.
[00:14:33]  To write a great American novel.
[00:14:34]  So, you submitted this to a lot of publishers?
[00:14:37]  Did you have an agent or not?

=== Treating Writing Like A Job (15:41) ===

[00:14:39]  Yes.
[00:14:39]  So, the same Mark Smith, who was a wonderful teacher, came to visit me in New York.
[00:14:45]  And I said, I've started a novel.
[00:14:47]  And he said, Well, you need an agent.
[00:14:50]  And I said, How do I do that?
[00:14:52]  And he said, I'm going to write to my agent's partner, Harriet Wasserman, who is Saul Bellow's agent, and I'm going to tell her she should look at your work.
[00:15:06]  And you said, Sal Bellows agent, that's good enough for me?
[00:15:09]  Yeah.
[00:15:10]  I was so terrified.
[00:15:12]  I actually walked down to 43rd and 5th, where her office was, with the 50 pages of the 100 pages I had written.
[00:15:25]  That's all I had.
[00:15:26]  And I was so embarrassed, I slipped it under the door of her office and ran away.
[00:15:32]  So that if it was really terrible, she wouldn't be so embarrassed to have met me.
[00:15:38]  So, what happened?
[00:15:39]  She called me.
[00:15:41]  And said, Do you have more pages?
[00:15:43]  And I said, I have 50 more.
[00:15:44]  And she said, I want to see them.
[00:15:46]  Who would you like to be published by?
[00:15:49]  Does it matter to you if you work with a male editor or a female editor?
[00:15:52]  Do you have a publishing house you've always wanted to be published by?
[00:15:57]  You said, just publish it by anybody.
[00:16:00]  Exactly, like literate, illiterate, I don't care.
[00:16:04]  And she said, there's a young editor named Jonathan Galassi who right now is at Houghton Mifflin.
[00:16:10]  He's brilliant.
[00:16:11]  He's going to love this.
[00:16:13]  A few days later, I got a phone call from Jonathan Galassi, and he said, Would you come down to my office?
[00:16:20]  And I really, I had 100 pages, I didn't have any more than that.
[00:16:25]  And I went to his office, and we talked about, well, what Is the rest of the novel going to be about?
[00:16:30]  And I may have spoken to him as if I had written most of it, but I hadn't.
[00:16:36]  And he said, We're buying it.
[00:16:38]  And so I had a contract.
[00:16:40]  Wow.
[00:16:40]  Okay.
[00:16:41]  So did you call your parents and say, Guess what?
[00:16:43]  Yes.
[00:16:44]  I certainly did.
[00:16:46]  So when did you have time to finish the rest of the book?
[00:16:50]  Well, then I had a legitimate reason to stop reading Slushpile at 40 cents a manuscript for a Red Book or writing synopsis.
[00:17:00]  You quit your job.
[00:17:01]  So, I quit my part time jobs because I had an advance and I finished the novel.
[00:17:06]  All right, and how was it received?
[00:17:09]  For a first novel, it was wonderful.
[00:17:10]  It was reviewed with two other novels on the front page of the New York Times Book Review, which was a very, you know, at the time, the New York Times Book Review was the be all and end all of the life of a novel.
[00:17:25]  So, today, how many novels have you now written?
[00:17:28]  I've just finished the 10th.
[00:17:30]  When you write a novel, explain to me how you do it.
[00:17:33]  Do you come up with an idea?
[00:17:35]  And then noodle it a bit on your head, and then you write an outline, and then do you start writing it, or do you write it without knowing how it's going to come out?
[00:17:44]  How do you do that?
[00:17:46]  Sort of a little bit of both.
[00:17:48]  It's different every time.
[00:17:51]  You know, sometimes it begins with a sense of a character, a character I haven't seen before, or a character who intrigues me.
[00:17:58]  Sometimes it's a situation.
[00:18:01]  You know, what was it like at this time and place for the people who didn't know what was about to happen?
[00:18:10]  It's really, and often I think I know when I start out where I'm going, but I never get there.
[00:18:20]  It's always in the writing, story is discovered.
[00:18:25]  I think it's the hardest thing for young writers to learn that in the process itself, you really are tapping into your own unconscious just by trying to write a scene.
[00:18:41]  Or a paragraph, or to describe a character.
[00:18:44]  The way you use language is unique to each of us, whatever words we choose.
[00:18:49]  And so, story often evolves.
[00:18:52]  And actually, if it didn't evolve, I think I would stop writing.
[00:18:56]  I like the sense of being my own first reader and being surprised.
[00:19:01]  Some novelists would say they don't write a novel until they know how it's going to end.
[00:19:07]  Yes.
[00:19:07]  Do you always know how it's going to end before you actually start writing?
[00:19:11]  I think I do, and I'm always wrong.
[00:19:14]  Can you change it?
[00:19:15]  It evolves, it changes.
[00:19:18]  But I've never had the sense of, I wonder how I should end this.
[00:19:23]  When I reach the end, I always know it's the end.
[00:19:26]  And sometimes it surprises me.
[00:19:28]  Sometimes, you know, I might take notes or think, this is going to go this many years into the future, or it's going to end with a scene like this.
[00:19:38]  But then I write an ending and I see it.
[00:19:42]  So there it is.
[00:19:44]  Today, 10 novels.
[00:19:45]  And you've written one nonfiction?
[00:19:47]  Yes.
[00:19:48]  All right, so 10 novels.
[00:19:49]  How long does it take to write a novel the way you do it?
[00:19:53]  I suppose I kind of average about five years between each book, more or less.
[00:20:02]  I have a terrible habit of always working on two novels at the same time.
[00:20:08]  It's a terrible thing to do.
[00:20:10]  I discourage any writer from doing it, but it's a habit I've fallen into.
[00:20:16]  Mark Twain used to do that, so it's a good habit.
[00:20:19]  Yeah, well, see, for some people it works.
[00:20:23]  So let's suppose you're working on two novels.
[00:20:26]  Do you get up in the morning at 6 in the morning and start writing, as some writers do, and they say, when I get to 12 o'clock in the noon, I'm not going to do anymore?
[00:20:33]  Or do you say, I have to write so many pages a day, when I get to those pages, I'm done?
[00:20:37]  And do you do it in longhand or by computer?
[00:20:41]  For probably the first half of my novels, I did the first drafts in longhand.
[00:20:46]  My handwriting got so bad that I could look at what I wrote yesterday and not really be sure what the words were.
[00:20:54]  So then I started composing on the computer, which is what I do now.
[00:20:58]  Okay, so when you compose on a computer, do you write a certain amount every day and you feel that you've got to do a certain amount every day or you just keep writing until you're tired?
[00:21:07]  You know, I have this sort of middle class sense from the very beginning of my career that if I don't treat Being a writer as if it were a regular job, no one around me will treat it that way.
[00:21:22]  So, you know, I've had the experience of having friends call in the middle of the day, and if I answer the phone, they say, Are you busy?
[00:21:30]  And I say, I'm writing.
[00:21:32]  And they say, Oh, good, because I want to talk to you.
[00:21:35]  You know, that means I don't have to do anything.
[00:21:37]  I'm not really working, I'm writing.
[00:21:40]  So I have always treated it, even when my kids were growing up, as a nine to five job.
[00:21:46]  Be there in the morning, even when things are not going well.
[00:21:50]  Stay at your desk till five o'clock.
[00:21:52]  Some writers say they don't want to be disturbed at all.
[00:21:55]  They don't want to take any emails, no calls, nothing.
[00:21:58]  Are you in that category?
[00:21:59]  You take the calls and just write after the calls are over.
[00:22:03]  I guess I don't want to be disturbed, but I am used to being disturbed.
[00:22:08]  I have three kids growing up while I was writing many of my novels.
[00:22:15]  There's a preciousness about not letting the world in that I worry about.
[00:22:21]  You know, I don't want to be so encased in my own head that I don't let the world come in.
[00:22:32]  So now that you're an accomplished novelist, when you submit something to your editor, does the editor edit a lot or they say, well, we don't want to edit you because you're so accomplished already?
[00:22:44]  And do you take the criticism if you get any from the editor?
[00:22:47]  Or do you say, look, I know what I'm doing, leave me alone?
[00:22:50]  Well, my editor has been my same editor since I was 27 when he bought those first 100 pages.
[00:22:59]  So it's like a long marriage.
[00:23:04]  He almost doesn't have to say it.
[00:23:05]  I know what he's going to say.
[00:23:09]  So, usually, Jonathan is a wonderful, close reader.
[00:23:15]  But the delightful thing is, our taste isn't always the same.
[00:23:19]  He loves some books that I don't love, and I love some books that he doesn't love.
[00:23:23]  So, I usually bring him a manuscript with all my doubts and all my questions already formed.
[00:23:33]  And that's often where we begin.
[00:23:35]  I say, does this scene go on too long?
[00:23:37]  Did you get this?
[00:23:38]  Is this clear enough?
[00:23:40]  Should I take this out?
[00:23:42]  And he becomes my sounding board for all my own insecurities.
[00:23:49]  Now, your writings often have, I would say, an Irish Catholic theme to them, which I guess is on purpose because that's what you know very well.
[00:23:58]  That's what you feel most comfortable writing about, Irish Catholic themes.
[00:24:02]  Is that fair?
[00:24:02]  Or you don't write a lot about people who are Jewish, for example, right?
[00:24:06]  No, but I have to tell you, when.
[00:24:09]  When my book Charming Billy came out, which is about an Irish, a stereotypical Irish American alcoholic, and I admit it's a stereotype of ethnicity, the best letter I ever got from a reader was from a guy who wrote to me and said, If you change the surnames in your novel and change the alcohol to high cholesterol food,
[00:24:38]  this is the story of my Jewish family.
[00:24:42]  Wow, okay.
[00:24:44]  So it's universal.
[00:24:46]  So let's talk about a book that you wrote not long ago called Absolution.
[00:24:51]  Now, Absolution is written in Vietnam, but it's really not focused on Vietnam, the war.
[00:24:57]  It's really focused on people who happened to be living there in the early to mid 60s.
[00:25:02]  Why did you pick Vietnam?
[00:25:03]  It's kind of an unusual setting for somebody you didn't live in, right?
[00:25:08]  No.
[00:25:08]  How did you pick that as a setting, and what's the basic theme of that book?
[00:25:13]  Yeah, the book is sort of a call and response, a memoir between a woman who was a young wife in Saigon in 1963, gone there to follow her husband, who she learns later is CIA, but she thinks he's an engineer.
[00:25:36]  And that's one part of the memoir.
[00:25:39]  And then the other part is a woman who was a child, the daughter of an oil executive who was in Saigon.
[00:25:47]  At the same time, and they had known each other.
[00:25:51]  And this is sort of both of them exchanging memories of that time.
[00:25:56]  There were a number of things that inspired that novel.
[00:26:01]  First and foremost was Graham Greene's A Quiet American, which was a novel I probably read early in college and loved, and I've taught and admired.
[00:26:13]  But I was always aware that the female characters were not.
[00:26:19]  Very interesting to Graham Greene or to Fowler, his narrator.
[00:26:25]  And it always seemed to me that they were.
[00:26:28]  He just didn't turn his attention to them.
[00:26:31]  So that was part of it.
[00:26:32]  And then, you know, I've lived in Bethesda inside the Beltway for 30 some years now.
[00:26:40]  And I was always running into women who were diplomats' wives or military wives or young secretaries in the Foreign Service.
[00:26:52]  Who had these fascinating backgrounds in that era, but they would never tell you about them.
[00:26:58]  It would come up in conversation, but you'd have to sort of, it would always be never the point of the conversation.
[00:27:05]  You know, I'd be at my kids' school volunteering in the library, and one of the grandmothers who was also volunteering would help us to set up for a party, and suddenly, you know, she would take all the napkins and make them into little swans and say, oh my gosh, how did you learn to do that?
[00:27:23]  Well, I lived in Burma for three years.
[00:27:26]  Here in Bethesda, you know, wow, what a great story.
[00:27:29]  But these women would always say, I wasn't doing anything interesting.
[00:27:33]  It was my husband who was doing the interesting things.
[00:27:36]  It was my husband who was making history.
[00:27:39]  I was just taking care of the children and making sure they got fed and educated.
[00:27:45]  And so those two things that there's a particular woman's role behind the scenes, behind the great man, that I felt really had not gotten enough attention.
[00:27:59]  Many times, people who write novels write novels about historic figures or people that are going to blow up the world or save the world or something that is going to get attention if it actually was true because it's heroic or it's a spy novel where the world is about to fall apart and this spy doesn't do what he's supposed to do or something like that.
[00:28:21]  Your novels are a little different.
[00:28:23]  They're more about, I would say, everyday people and not people who are great heroes, but in their own lives, you talk about their lives and go through it in great detail.
[00:28:33]  Is that Conscious that you don't want to write about famous people or you don't want to make your heroes or heroines larger than life.
[00:28:43]  Yeah, sure.
[00:28:44]  I think it's, you know, I think many of us who write fiction are contrarians at heart.
[00:28:51]  You know, the world says this is the way the world is, and we say, oh, no, no, we're going to make up our own world, even if it feels like the real world.
[00:28:58]  You know, we're going to correct it.
[00:28:59]  We're going to tell it better.
[00:29:01]  We're going to tell the story of history in a more interesting way.
[00:29:06]  And so, you know, as with Absolution, when these women would say to me, and again, it would just be in casual conversation, not that I was.
[00:29:15]  Journalist interviewing them, you know, oh, I didn't do anything important.
[00:29:19]  I just took care of the kids.
[00:29:21]  We lived in Saigon in 1961 to 1963, and we went to the American school, and I had fundraisers, all the same stuff I do here.
[00:29:31]  The contrarian in me says, no, that's a heroic life.
[00:29:36]  And while your husbands were screwing up the world with their politics and their meddling with history and putting their nose in places they shouldn't have, you were raising the next generation.
[00:29:49]  And the intriguing thing for me about thinking about that pivotal year of 1963 these women were raising the generation that was going to absolutely be the ones to get us out of the war, be the ones who upended all the things that their mothers and fathers believed in.
[00:30:12]  So I see a real heroism in the individual story.
[00:30:16]  Now, you've written about nuns, the ninth hour.

=== Humanizing Flawed Characters (02:01) ===

[00:30:20]  Was about nuns.
[00:30:21]  Can you explain what that was about and how you developed that theme?
[00:30:25]  Yeah, and I think absolution in many ways came out of writing about nuns.
[00:30:32]  These nuns are more turn of the 20th century in the city, again in Brooklyn.
[00:30:39]  But again, the heroism of women who've never asked to be acknowledged.
[00:30:46]  And again, the contrarian in me saying, you know, I'm a little tired of these portraits of.
[00:30:53]  Of nuns.
[00:30:54]  They're either witchy or sound of music, bodiless angels.
[00:31:01]  To think how complex each of these women were and what their backgrounds were and what they sacrificed and for whom, for the poorest of the poor, the work that they did.
[00:31:14]  And fiction, it seems to me, can rather than make these sweeping statements that nobody's really going to accept, these were great women, these were heroines.
[00:31:28]  You can look at the individual character and say, yeah, this character had all kinds of flaws, but also all kinds of virtues individually.
[00:31:38]  And that fascinates me.
[00:31:39]  Now, the book you talked about earlier that's been received a lot of awards, Charming Billy, is a book that begins in an unusual way because it begins with a funeral, more or less.
[00:31:52]  Usually, the funeral is at the end of a book, and you have it at the beginning of the book.
[00:31:56]  So, can you describe what that theme is and why you began a book?
[00:32:00]  On a theme about somebody dying.
[00:32:03]  Yes.
[00:32:03]  Well, there's the Irish in me.
[00:32:08]  You know, as I said earlier, you know, Charming Billy himself is a caricature.
[00:32:13]  He's a caricature of the Irish American who hangs out at the bar and drinks himself to death, and beloved of many.

=== The Irish American Barfly (15:31) ===

[00:32:21]  And again, as the challenge I set for myself, how can you take a character who on paper is a cliche and make him real and individualize him in the way he is real and individualized to the people who loved him?
[00:32:42]  So I thought that would be the challenge.
[00:32:45]  And the easy response would be you know, everybody loved him, but he was really a horrible person, you know, behind closed doors.
[00:32:54]  He beat his wife and, you know, he stole funds from the parish.
[00:32:59]  But what if he really was exactly the cliche?
[00:33:03]  What if he was a lovable, caring, marvelous, poetry filled man who nevertheless drank himself to death?
[00:33:13]  That's what interested me.
[00:33:15]  And I knew right away that if I were to try to tell the story of that character through his own words, he would take over because he's charming.
[00:33:27]  So I had to put him in his grave and let the people who loved him start the story.
[00:33:32]  Now, for about two decades, you taught creative writing at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.
[00:33:38]  Is it harder to teach creative writing to people or to do creative writing?
[00:33:45]  What's harder for you?
[00:33:46]  What's easier for you?
[00:33:48]  Oh, my goodness.
[00:33:50]  Probably easier to teach.
[00:33:53]  Teaching is, yeah, it's always wonderful to have great ideas for how somebody else can write a great novel rather than educate yourself.
[00:34:02]  But when you're teaching yourself, the students, can you say, as somebody said to you, you actually know how to write?
[00:34:08]  Do you find any of those students or do you actually try to be polite to them and say, maybe you should go to law school or something else?
[00:34:16]  Well, at Hopkins, there's a lot of self selection because the writing seminars is very small.
[00:34:22]  I do confess that on occasion I had undergraduate students whose parents thought they were there for pre med, who I convinced to be poets and fiction writers.
[00:34:33]  I'm not sure parents were too happy with me when they went home at winter break and said, Forget neurology.
[00:34:41]  I will write poetry.
[00:34:43]  Well, have any of your students written novels?
[00:34:44]  Oh, many, many.
[00:34:46]  I can barely keep up with them.
[00:34:49]  Doing very well, teaching, running writing programs.
[00:34:54]  And, you know, I have found because it doesn't seem like the great way to make a living, that the students who say, I want to be a writer at a young age, are talented.
[00:35:09]  There is a kind of self selection.
[00:35:12]  And I have to say, I can't ever remember, even for obviously, there are degrees, and there are writers who Who are fully formed when they come to graduate school or even as undergrads.
[00:35:28]  The surest sign for me is that I have a real writer that I'm working with is when they will write a story or be working on a novel.
[00:35:38]  And as the professor, I'll say, Well, you know, John Cheever has a story something like this.
[00:35:44]  You should read it.
[00:35:46]  And because they're good students, they say, Yes, yes, and they write it down.
[00:35:49]  But I can see in their eyes, they're thinking, Nobody has ever written a story like this before.
[00:35:55]  And that's when I know that's a real writer.
[00:35:58]  For somebody who wants to be a writer, a novelist like you, what is a skill set that you think makes somebody a novelist?
[00:36:05]  They have really great command of the English language, assuming they're writing in English.
[00:36:09]  They are creative and they have a lot of creative ideas about plots and things like that.
[00:36:14]  What is it that you see right away in a student that he or she actually has it or doesn't have it?
[00:36:21]  Oh, yeah, there's a kind of intelligence.
[00:36:24]  First, there's the love of language, you know, who gobble up novels and poetry, who appreciate a well-turned sentence.
[00:36:36]  That has to be there.
[00:36:37]  I mean, when you're talking about literary fiction, you know, that has to be there.
[00:36:42]  Just the appreciation for the art of it.
[00:36:47]  Back to my Shakespeare teacher.
[00:36:51]  And everything has layers of meaning as intentional.
[00:36:57]  But then there's also perseverance.
[00:36:59]  It's not an easy career.
[00:37:02]  Nothing is guaranteed.
[00:37:04]  Well, you have three children.
[00:37:06]  Yes.
[00:37:06]  Do any of them want to be novelists?
[00:37:08]  Fortunately, no.
[00:37:10]  Because it's a difficult profession?
[00:37:12]  It's a difficult profession.
[00:37:14]  And it has to be the thing you must do.
[00:37:19]  I think that's probably.
[00:37:21]  The best piece of advice I've ever given students is if there's something else you can do, and you'll be satisfied and happy, and you'll sleep at night and wake up glad in the morning, then you should do that other thing.
[00:37:35]  But if this is the only thing that allows you to have that kind of pleasure in life, that you can sleep and you can feel that your time on earth is well spent, and the only thing that makes you feel that way is that you've been working at words all day, then you're stuck with it.
[00:37:51]  As Dr. Breon said to me, you can't shake it.
[00:37:54]  Now, did your parents live to see your success as a writer?
[00:37:57]  They did.
[00:37:58]  My father lived to see my first novel published.
[00:38:02]  My mother lived much longer, so she saw many of them published.
[00:38:07]  And they told you they always knew you were going to be a great novelist?
[00:38:10]  Well, no, it's very difficult to be the parent of a novelist.
[00:38:14]  My mother said to me at one point, I think it was my third novel at Weddings and Wakes, which was the first novel that I wrote that was really about Irish American families.
[00:38:25]  When she read it, she said, I know this isn't our family, but how will anyone else know this isn't our family?
[00:38:34]  What did you say?
[00:38:36]  They won't, Mom.
[00:38:40]  They're going to think it's autobiographical even if it's not, but you and I know it's not.
[00:38:45]  You're not teaching and you're not writing.
[00:38:48]  What do you do outside of that?
[00:38:50]  Are you an athlete in some areas or what do you do for relaxation?
[00:38:55]  Do you read?
[00:38:56]  Who are your favorite writers?
[00:38:57]  That you like to read?
[00:38:59]  Yes, I mean, I read constantly.
[00:39:01]  And as I was saying, I've sort of come back to the idea of playwriting.
[00:39:09]  Right now, I'm rereading, starting with Death of a Salesman, and rereading plays that I loved back in high school and college when I thought being a playwright was so romantic.
[00:39:27]  To write a play several years ago for the Druid Theatre in Ireland, in Galway.
[00:39:36]  And I told the director who asked me, I'm not a playwright, but she wanted a play about Irish Americans two or three generations in America and couldn't think of any Irish playwrights who could do it, so she asked me to.
[00:39:54]  So, what happened?
[00:39:56]  Well, it was so much fun.
[00:39:59]  It's very different.
[00:40:00]  It's an entirely different way of writing.
[00:40:03]  And we were all set.
[00:40:06]  The Druid Company was supposed to come over, and we were going to workshop the play in Nantucket, and COVID hit.
[00:40:14]  Oh.
[00:40:15]  Yeah, so we did some Zoom readings, and a wonderful Irish actress who's part of the Druid Company named Marie Mullen read the part.
[00:40:27]  Main character in the piece and knocked it out of the ballpark.
[00:40:32]  It was absolutely amazing how she read this play.
[00:40:36]  Just wonderful.
[00:40:39]  So, when the world started coming back again, Gary Hines, who's the director, asked me if I would like to rewrite the play as a monologue that they could give to Marie Mullen and she could take it around Ireland.
[00:40:57]  It would be cheaper and just sort of as a way of opening up theater again.
[00:41:01]  Well, here came the contrarian in me, and I had to tell Gary, I can't rewrite a play that has five characters in it.
[00:41:12]  I can write you a monologue, but it will be an entirely different play.
[00:41:16]  So, what's more exciting to start a new novel day one?
[00:41:19]  You're starting a new novel, you can go anywhere you want, or to finish a novel knowing that you finished it after a year or so, five years actually.
[00:41:27]  Starting.
[00:41:27]  Oh, starting is so much more fun.
[00:41:31]  Finishing is.
[00:41:32]  You're immediately, what could I have done better?
[00:41:36]  It's that, I think it was Faulkner who said, you write the next novel to correct the mistakes of the one you just finished.
[00:41:42]  So, since you started writing novels, the book world has changed a fair bit.
[00:41:48]  Amazon has dominated the sales of books, and it used to be there were bookstores.
[00:41:54]  There still are bookstores, but not as many probably as there once were.
[00:41:58]  Has Amazon been good for writers or not good, would you say?
[00:42:03]  Oh, you know, as all commerce, it's a mixed bag.
[00:42:08]  When I was doing the book tour for Charming Billy, I went, which would have been 98.
[00:42:15]  I was in Seattle and I went by Amazon, this new thing called Amazon's corporate headquarters, which were just nothing in a nondescript building.
[00:42:26]  And they were all former English majors who were working on this online bookstore.
[00:42:32]  And they gave me, I still have it, it looked like something that a kindergartner would have been, they gave me an award because Charming Billy was the best selling.
[00:42:41]  Fiction title that week at Amazon, and they had it was like construction paper and cardboard with a big star on it.
[00:42:49]  I thought, what a cute organization!
[00:42:53]  I love these guys, they are English majors, and they found an interesting way to sell books.
[00:42:59]  I told Jeff Bezos at the beginning this would never work.
[00:43:02]  I told him I didn't think Amazon would ever work.
[00:43:04]  I told him that, and of course, he didn't listen to me.
[00:43:07]  To my regret, I didn't invest in it.
[00:43:10]  So, well, there you go.
[00:43:11]  I thought I should have invested in those.
[00:43:13]  Um, yeah, um, but.
[00:43:15]  Yes, it makes books more accessible.
[00:43:18]  It's certainly easier to order books for people in far flung places.
[00:43:25]  The damage that Amazon did to bookstores, I think, changed the landscape of bookstores, but then bookstores started coming, independent stores started coming back, offering things that people want, places to gather, good recommendations.
[00:43:41]  A little bit of what worries me about Amazon, I think, is Is what worries me about reading public in general.
[00:43:49]  And that is that sense of, if you like this book, then you should read this one because it's just like that one.
[00:43:56]  Rather than, well, now that you've read this book, read this one because it's nothing like that.
[00:44:02]  When you finish, let's say, a book or you finish half of a book, do you ever show it to your husband and say, what do you think?
[00:44:08]  Or he doesn't judge your writing.
[00:44:10]  No one.
[00:44:12]  My very wise first literary agent, Harriet Wasserman, said to me early on, never show David, my husband, Anything because the guy can't win.
[00:44:25]  If he reads it and says, This is wonderful, I love it, you will think, You're a neuroscientist, what do you know about literature?
[00:44:34]  If he says, Well, I think I could make a few changes, you will think, You're a neuroscientist, what do you know about editing?
[00:44:43]  So he can't win.
[00:44:44]  Let's suppose you're going on a vacation for two or three weeks and you're going to be on an island and you just have a couple books you can take with you.
[00:44:52]  What books would you like to take that are novels, let's say?
[00:44:56]  Where you love the author or you like the book, you want to reread it.
[00:44:59]  Are there a couple books that you really either haven't read or you love so much you want to reread?
[00:45:04]  Oh, rereading is a great pleasure of advanced age.
[00:45:09]  You know, you don't have to worry, well, I didn't read this and I didn't read that.
[00:45:14]  You can go back, you're not always adding to the list.
[00:45:19]  Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse is a book that I probably reread every other year, often in the summer.
[00:45:27]  Vladimir Nabokov's Penin, which is a very short novel, delights me every single time I read it.
[00:45:36]  And then I'd probably have to bring Shakespeare, you know, because there's always something you missed in Shakespeare.
[00:45:42]  Do you ever reread your books and say, why did I write that?
[00:45:45]  Or how did I write that?
[00:45:46]  Or why couldn't I have done a better job of that?
[00:45:48]  Or this is a pretty good book.
[00:45:50]  Never reread.
[00:45:51]  You never reread.
[00:45:52]  Exactly for that reason, because it's, oh my gosh, should have, could have.
[00:45:58]  No, it's done.
[00:46:01]  And when you go to book fairs, are people always complimentary?
[00:46:06]  They say, I love your books, please sign my book.
[00:46:09]  They say, You should have done this differently, or people ever give you criticisms, or they don't do that.
[00:46:14]  The wonderful thing about book fairs and being on book tour is people bring you their stories.
[00:46:22]  And I don't know if every writer experiences this, with Absolution especially.
[00:46:27]  People bringing stories about their experiences in Vietnam, their experiences at home during the Vietnam War, their experiences with fathers and even grandfathers who were in Vietnam, and how that affected the family.
[00:46:42]  When I went on tour for Ninth Hour, I heard great nun stories, and they were all positive.
[00:46:48]  No mean nuns who beat up kids, but nuns who were there when a mother got sick, or nuns who gave a book to someone at a pivotal time.
[00:47:02]  That's the best part.
[00:47:03]  People bring stories to you.
[00:47:06]  Do you ever have a nun come up to you and say, You didn't really understand what nuns are about?
[00:47:09]  That's never happened.
[00:47:12]  They'd be too polite to do that, I think.
[00:47:15]  But I did have some nuns who wondered how I knew exactly what the laundry in their convent looked like because they said it was so precisely described.
[00:47:31]  And I had to tell them, Sisters, I imagined it.
[00:47:35]  So, as I said earlier, your writing style is very precise in the sense you don't have a lot of wasted words.
[00:47:41]  Sometimes you think authors Are being paid by the word.
[00:47:44]  And it used to be the case they were paid by the word.
[00:47:47]  That's how Dickens wrote things paid by the word.
[00:47:50]  But your writing is very, very precise.

=== Precision Without Wasted Words (06:08) ===

[00:47:53]  And I would say it's a style that you obviously have perfected.
[00:47:56]  So is this something you think about, not using extra words or verbiage, or you just write relatively simple, Hemingway like kind of sentences?
[00:48:07]  Certainly, if there's one thing I can say I labor over, it's getting the sentences right, getting the right words, the right rhythm.
[00:48:16]  Really important, the kind of musicality of language that makes it to the page.
[00:48:23]  Joseph Conrad, I've beaten this over the heads of many students.
[00:48:28]  Joseph Conrad said that the only obligation of the writer to the reader is to make you see, and it's everything.
[00:48:37]  So I take that very seriously.
[00:48:39]  Are you with me?
[00:48:40]  Can you see this?
[00:48:41]  Are you in this place?
[00:48:42]  Are you having this experience that the character's having?
[00:48:46]  And that all comes through language, the careful use of language.
[00:48:51]  And today, when you look at what you've accomplished, what would you look back and say you're most proud of having accomplished as a writer?
[00:48:59]  Is it written books that critics really like, that people have bought and enjoyed reading, that you've made people very happy by writing novels that they like?
[00:49:07]  What is it that you're most proud of having achieved as a writer?
[00:49:11]  I suppose it's this.
[00:49:17]  I want to be able to say that everything I wrote was honest and authentic.
[00:49:24]  That I never tried to persuade, I never tried to finesse, but that I have offered to the reader a shared experience.
[00:49:39]  As writer, I have said, let's consider this together.
[00:49:45]  I'm not any smarter than you.
[00:49:46]  I'm probably not as smart as you, dear reader.
[00:49:50]  But let's have this experience together and let's together celebrate the gift of language used as well as any of us can use it.
[00:50:01]  Some fiction writers spend an enormous amount of time on research and they want to get every fact right and so forth.
[00:50:09]  Your novels probably don't require that much research relative to some other types of novelists.
[00:50:13]  Is that fair to say?
[00:50:15]  Yeah, I tend to do the research backwards.
[00:50:19]  I do the writing first.
[00:50:21]  I get the voice, the character, the situation.
[00:50:23]  Then you go back and do research.
[00:50:24]  And then I make sure what I need to know.
[00:50:28]  For instance, I never lived in Saigon in 1963.
[00:50:32]  I never even visited Vietnam, which I thought I was going to do.
[00:50:35]  But again, COVID changed that.
[00:50:38]  So I first had to hear the voice of this young woman or this old woman recalling her time as a 23 year old.
[00:50:48]  Newly married girl in Saigon.
[00:50:52]  I had to know her voice.
[00:50:53]  I had to know what her, what would she see?
[00:50:56]  What would she notice?
[00:50:57]  What would be relevant to her?
[00:51:00]  And then when I realized I couldn't get to actual Vietnam, I thought, well, you know what?
[00:51:07]  Nobody can go back to Saigon in 1963.
[00:51:11]  So I don't really need to get on a plane because it's not going to take me to Saigon in 1963, no matter how much I pay.
[00:51:18]  So I went to my bookshelf and I reread the Vietnam novels, war novels certainly, that I loved, that I had read before, just to immerse myself in the fictional life of characters moving around Vietnam.
[00:51:36]  Not the same experience as my character, but a sense of having been there.
[00:51:41]  My experience is that it's very difficult for a parent to convince a child that what the parent is doing is very useful or helpful or interesting.
[00:51:50]  Are you able to convince your children to read your novels and do they give you criticism or they say we don't have time to read them?
[00:51:59]  I think they read them.
[00:52:02]  I'm not sure.
[00:52:05]  I know my daughter does.
[00:52:06]  My daughter's a great reader.
[00:52:08]  And every once in a while something will eke out that I know she has read.
[00:52:15]  As a matter of fact, back to playwriting in Bethesda, Charming Billy was written for the stage, it was put on by By the Roundhouse Theater in Bethesda.
[00:52:26]  And my daughter and I went to the dress rehearsal.
[00:52:30]  I was just there, I didn't write the play version.
[00:52:34]  I was just there, sort of as a technical advisor.
[00:52:39]  And as we were driving home, she said, You know, I'm really sorry they left out this scene that was in the novel that wasn't in the play.
[00:52:46]  And I was like, Oh, so you read it.
[00:52:49]  Wow, that must have made you feel good that she actually read it.
[00:52:52]  Exactly.
[00:52:54]  You enjoy what you're doing.
[00:52:56]  If you could do anything over again in your career, would it be anything different than having been a writer?
[00:53:01]  You're happy you didn't go to law school, business school, medical school?
[00:53:05]  Oh, you know, my notebooks probably for my first four novels were full of should have gone to law school.
[00:53:12]  Two brothers, lawyers.
[00:53:14]  My daughter's now a lawyer.
[00:53:16]  Oh, I went to law school and you didn't miss anything.
[00:53:20]  There are some lawyers who turned out to be pretty good novelists, too.
[00:53:23]  Yes, there are a few like that.
[00:53:24]  Scott Thoreau, among others.
[00:53:26]  Exactly.
[00:53:26]  So, this has been a very interesting conversation.
[00:53:29]  Congratulations on incredible success as a novelist.
[00:53:34]  And can we ever look forward to a non novel and non fiction from you, other than the one you've already done?
[00:53:39]  Any more non fictions in your future?
[00:53:41]  Oh, you know, especially these days, the impulse to rewrite the world and make it better is probably too strong in me forever to ever write something that actually happened.
[00:53:54]  Okay.
[00:53:54]  Well, thank you very much.
[00:53:55]  I enjoyed it.
[00:53:56]  Thank you.
[00:53:56]  Thank you, David.

=== Rare Shakespeare Manuscripts (04:16) ===

[00:54:01]  After the interview, Alice McDermott and David Rubenstein visited the Folger Shakespeare Library's reading room and viewed artifacts from the library's archive.
[00:54:10]  Hi, welcome to the reading room.
[00:54:13]  Thank you.
[00:54:14]  You're really standing here in the beating heart of the Folger Shakespeare Library.
[00:54:19]  And it's a space that really symbolizes the role that the Folgers played in this great American tradition of collecting for civic engagement.
[00:54:31]  Researchers will come and contribute to the ever evolving discourse around Shakespeare and his life.
[00:54:38]  But it also is a space now where we welcome in artists and authors, we welcome in teachers and students, and the general public to engage in all sorts of different multifaceted programming that ties into the many different parts of the Folger.
[00:54:53]  In keeping with the Folger's mission of giving Shakespeare and this collection to the American people, they also were interested in the design process of bringing a little bit of England and particularly Stratford. Upon Avon to the American people.
[00:55:09]  We can see that in a few design elements, and the first one is actually behind us.
[00:55:14]  It's this Seven Ages of Man stained glass window.
[00:55:18]  The tracery designs that you see here are actually modeled after the window that is behind the altar in the Holy Trinity Church where Shakespeare is buried.
[00:55:28]  And it's named the Seven Ages of Man after the famous speech in As You Like It that begins All the World's a Stage and All the Men and Women Merely Players.
[00:55:37]  And each age of man is represented.
[00:55:40]  In one of the lancet windows.
[00:55:43]  So, this was one of the first, perhaps the most striking connections that we have back to England and to Shakespeare's burial.
[00:55:50]  What year was this?
[00:55:52]  So, this is original to the building.
[00:55:55]  So, when we opened in 1932, it was here.
[00:55:58]  And the artist who created this for us also made some of the windows in the National Cathedral as well.
[00:56:05]  Yeah, so it's a little bit of shared DC heritage.
[00:56:11]  Three items related to Henry IV, which I have been told you have taught.
[00:56:15]  Oh my goodness.
[00:56:17]  And quite excitingly, two of the items on the table are two of our rarest items and two of the rarest items related to this play in the world.
[00:56:28]  So let's start here with this one.
[00:56:30]  This has so many lives and stories attached to it, and it's been a real pleasure to get to learn more about.
[00:56:38]  So this is called the Daring Manuscript after Sir Daring.
[00:56:43]  He was a baronet living in Kent around the same time as Shakespeare.
[00:56:47]  And he adapted part one and part two of Henry IV into a single play.
[00:56:54]  Part one ended up faring much better.
[00:56:56]  Only about 11% of the play was cut, but he actually cut 75% of part two, a lot of it Falstaff's part.
[00:57:03]  So unfortunately for Falstaff, he's not in here too much.
[00:57:06]  And then he actually wrote out, so Daring wrote out this first page of the text, and then from records also at the folder, he paid a scribe, Mr. Coddington, four shillings to write out the rest of it.
[00:57:21]  What's funny about this first page is if you look really closely here, you are missing the First letter of each word for the history of King Henry IV.
[00:57:32]  And so this leads us to believe that since space was also left for it, there was an intention to have an artist add in ornamental letters, but we don't know why they were never added in.
[00:57:43]  Who wrote this?
[00:57:45]  So this was written by Sir Daring, the first page, and he prepared the text and then he had a scribe work on the rest, but it's this adaptation or this mashup of the two plays, so you can do the whole story in one instead of having to have two different settings.
[00:58:00]  What's really special about this as well is that it is the first copy of a play of Shakespeare that we know of.
[00:58:08]  It's the first manuscript copy of a complete play.
[00:58:10]  It also is evidence of the first amateur dramatic performance of one of Shakespeare's works.

=== Living With Terminal Cancer (01:42) ===

[00:58:17]  See more with Alice McDermott and the Folger Shakespeare Library's artifacts and watch past episodes of America's Book Club at cspan.org/slash ABC and cspan's YouTube page.
[00:59:06]  Former Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse recently sat for a conversation on politics, society, and his perspective on life following his terminal cancer diagnosis.
[00:59:17]  The interview with Ross Daufett of the New York Times is just over an hour.
[00:59:25]  How would you live if you knew when you were going to die?
[00:59:29]  Former Republican Senator Ben Sass of Nebraska announced today that he has been diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer.
[00:59:37]  And he is not expected to live much longer.
[00:59:39]  Ben Sass served in the United States Senate for eight years, where he was a civic minded and, by his own account, somewhat ineffectual senator.
[00:59:48]  We decided to forget what civics are and allow politics to swallow everything.
[00:59:53]  What we need as a nation more than anything else is more gratitude, not more grievance.
[00:59:59]  He left politics.