First published 2013
Marie sits on her Brooklyn stoop in glasses, watching for her beloved father to return from work. A chance meeting with Pegeen, a young woman who calls herself a fool, sets something in motion when Pegeen falls down her basement stairs soon after their talk. Marie navigates her Irish-American neighborhood through childhood and adolescence, experiencing her first heartbreak before finding marriage. Her brother enters the Catholic priesthood only to lose his faith and suffer a breakdown. The Second World War reshapes their world. Marie's parents die. She raises children of her own. The Brooklyn enclave around her transforms with time. Through scattered memories that span from girlhood to old age, Marie's story reveals how ordinary moments contain both sharp pain and unexpected joy. McDermott weaves these fragments of recollection into a portrait of one woman's life as it unfolds day by day, showing how everyone becomes a fool for something.
Genres: literary-fiction, family-life, american-fiction, 20th-century, american, 21st-century
Vibes: emotional, intimate, lyrical
Tropes: found-family, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Brooklyn
Period: Childhood, Adolescence, Old Age
232 pages · Hardcover · Farrar, Straus and Giroux