![]() ![]() What followed was a lifelong alcoholism that causes the narrator to say of him: “Billy had drunk himself to death. The story dips into the past to chart a tragic love story - Billy loved Eva, and when she returned home to Ireland and married another man, Billy’s cousin Dennis told Billy she had died. ![]() Redemption is actually a favorite topic of the title character, Billy, whose funeral takes place at the beginning of the novel. These are people who would not know how to give language to their experience, who would not know how to say, ‘There’s got to be something more than this,’ or ‘I’ve found something more than this,’ if they couldn’t also say ‘redemption’ or ‘ascension.'” “I have used Catholicism simply to give my characters a vocabulary that they might not otherwise have. It becomes a way of thinking about the world.” For the characters that populate her 1998 novel, “Charming Billy,” Catholicism provides a way of translating the world they occupy: In a 2007 interview with the journal Image, author Alice McDermott shared her view on the sacramental in her work: “The idea of sacrament - an outward sign elevated into something else, the ordinary made into occasions of grace - is essential. ![]() Lindsay Weishar | Section: Worship & Faith ![]()
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