The great Alice McDermott returns with a sparkling, powerful new novel of one woman’s life, told in three remarkable acts.

It is 1980 in New York City, and a young woman is perched on a radiator cover in a spacious SoHo loft. A famous photographer snaps her portrait for a full-page review of her debut novel. Blithely, he predicts her future: “Eventually, no one will really distinguish one book from another—that’s when they’ll start calling you ‘beloved.’”

Victoria Gannon—Vicky to her family, V. to her readers—is a middle-class woman from Rochester, New York, blessed—and cursed—with an unrelenting ambition to write. Through love affairs and professional upheavals, bouts of happiness and loss, love and rage, we follow her from her early days in the grimy city, to a family crisis in Florida, to a charged and surprising encounter at a California college when a charming visitor from her past offers to rewrite the story of her life, far better than she has lived it.

Across four decades—three acts—V. Gannon is dogged by the essential questions of her calling: How do you turn experience into art—and keep from losing yourself? Can you portray real people with honesty—without betrayal? And is it ever possible to capture the truth, in fiction or in life?

Herself, of Course is a witty, sensual, profoundly affecting portrait of the artist as a self-knowing woman—the kind of novel that takes in all of what, and who, we are—from one of our most observant and, yes, beloved American writers.

Alice McDermott is the author of ten novels, including Absolution, The Ninth Hour, Someone, After This, At Weddings and Wakes, and That Night—all published by FSG. That Night, At Weddings and Wakes, and After This were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. She is also the author of the essay collection What About the Baby?: Some Thoughts on the Art of Fiction. Her stories and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, and other publications. For more than two decades, she was the Richard A. Macksey Professor for Distinguished Teaching in the Humanities at Johns Hopkins University and a member of the faculty at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. McDermott lives with her family outside Washington, DC.