Note: This is an extended excerpt from Alice McDermott's Herself, of Course, read by Julia Whelan.

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.