The Goodness of Bookgroups

Child of My Heart

by Alice McDermott

FSG 2002, Picador, 2023

reviewed by Seana Graham

“Thank goodness for book groups!” is the line Alice McDermott’s interview at BookPage ends with, and I’ll second that. Without my book group I likely would never have happened on this beautiful novel. (Although I did eventually realize that I had read an earlier and very different work of hers, That Night, and thought it was very good.)

Our narrator Teresa is looking back on a summer in her youth, an only child who has been brought out to live on Long Island because her parents realize early on that as a beautiful girl she may end up with an upper-class husband if she happens to live where such people dwell. I thought this an unusually calculated view for parents to have until I recalled how important many people find it to make sure their kids live in the “right” school district when buying a home. Nevertheless, what this means in practice is that both of her parents commute long hours to their work, leaving her virtually alone over the summer, with, I might add, no potential marriage partners in sight—although perhaps a few too many errant husbands.

What Teresa does have, however, is an abundance of creatures to mind. As she says right at the start:

I had in my care that summer four dogs, three cats, the Moran kids, Daisy my eight-year-old cousin, and Flora, the toddler child of a local artist. There was also, for a while, a litter of wild rabbits, three of them, that had been left under our back steps.

If I had been the narrator of this tale, this would have been the preface to a complaint about being put upon, overworked, run ragged. But Teresa takes this all in good stride and simply sets up her day to accommodate them all. No, more than accommodate—to nurture. She sees herself as “Titania among the fairies,” and is a very benevolent ruler indeed.

Much of the tale centers around her cousin Daisy, who has been brought out for a solo visit from New York City, extracted not only from the urban scene but from her large family of mostly brothers but also one sister. A deep connection forms between these two cousins, despite their age difference—Teresa is fifteen, Daisy eight—and despite the difference in backgrounds, a deep bond forms between them. There are worrying signs that all is not well with Daisy from early on in the story, and Teresa’s actions and decisions around this situation elicited different responses from different members of our group. But the deeper question it prompts, I think, is “what does it mean to act responsibly?”

I benefited greatly from listening to the Michael Silverblatt interview with the author, which I will link to below. In that interview, McDermott speaks of St. Thérèse of Lisieux, famous for her path known as ‘The Little Way’, in which the practitioner focuses on doing little things with great love. She is mentioned as Teresa’s patron saint in the book and I would say that Teresa has taken to heart the saint’s teaching, although there are only occasional references to the Irish-Catholic background of the family in the story, which is also the author’s own. Teresa’s devotion to her charges takes many forms, but one of which is the way she casually brings in references to the world of literature that she is already well steeped in, Shakespeare being only one example. Another is the way she is perfectly capable of making things up out of whole cloth if it will ease or entertain Daisy or Flora in some way. For example, she tells Daisy that her beloved pink shoes will turn blue, and by the end of the novel they do, though how exactly this happens is left to the reader to speculate about.

Another facet of the novel that my book group was interested in was Teresa’s interaction and growing involvement with an older artist, an aging “genius.” It is hard not to see his behavior towards her as irresponsible, especially in the era of the Epstein files, but it’s not clear that she herself feels this way, and I would argue that none of the adults in the novel behave very responsibly, and even the better ones, like Teresa’s parents, seem fairly self-absorbed, or absorbed in each other, rather than the young lives they have brought into the world.

I will not spoil the book for you by giving away more of the plot, but I will say that the book ends with rabbits, the same rabbits as it begins with, “the hopeless little things,” which, I now see, stand in for all of us.

Seana Graham is the book review editor at Escape Into Life. She has also reviewed for the biography website Simply Charly. She attempts to keep up with her various blogs, including Confessions of Ignorance, where she tries to learn a little bit more about the many things she does not know. She has published stories in a variety of literary journals. Her latest story appears in the new Substack Voices of Santa Cruz. The recent anthology Annihilation Radiation  from Storgy Press, includes another. Santa Cruz Noir, a title from Akashic Press, features a story of hers about the city in which she currently resides. 

Get Child of My Heart at MacMillan Publishers

Interview with Alice McDermott by Alice Cary at Bookpage

Radio interview by Michael Silversblatt with Alice McDermott on Bookworm