Yesterday my book club discussed Alice McDermott's Someone. The story takes place in Brooklyn beginning in the 1920's. I am not Catholic, Irish, or really familiar with Brooklyn, but I was home from the first page. Her unerring understanding of the human heart is breathtaking, but so is her attention to detail.
Two details transported me back to my childhood with such a rush it was astonishing. She talked about the girls sitting on the stoop gossipping, pulling their skirts down over their bent knees and tucking them modestly in place!
And the second detail was that she crawled up into her father's lap behind the newspaper he was reading - and that hit me like a sledgehammer because, probably for the first time in a half of century I remembered vividly doing the same thing to my father in the front room of our house in Hinkletown. And could there have been a greater haven for a little child?! I felt his heartbeat and was surrounded by newsprint and love!
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