The narrator

I thought the choice of narrator was really interesting in this book — someone who was at some distance from the heart of the story but near enough to have it told to her from someone closely involved and then to retell it. What did you think of this?

Here's what McDermott herself said about her narrative choice in an interview she did after the novel won the National Book Award in 1998.

INTERVIEWER: And the book is almost an elegy, the voice that one of the judges referred to that tells the story, which is a young woman, actually, has a kind of delicate elegiac tone. How did you decide to do that, to make her the storyteller?

ALICE McDERMOTT: Do you know I resisted that voice, that first person narrative, but it seemed to me if you're telling a story about faith, you're also telling a story about telling stories, the things that we believe in — our stories that we hear and are told. And so it seemed to me that the entire novel needed to be told to someone, and that was where - the inevitability of that first person voice telling a story that's not necessarily her own, but putting together, as women do, the various stories in her family and making something of it.

Here's the whole interview.