The narrator is the daughter of his cousin and best buddy Dennis. The story is structured around a wake held for Billy after he had basically drunk himself to death, made up of the recollections of the folks present, a bit of their individual stories. Oops.Īlice McDermott - image from Johns Hopkins University Later in life, Billy goes to Ireland, intending to visit her grave, and finds her alive and feeling guilty. His cousin Dennis knew the truth and lied to Billy, telling him she had died. She returned to the old country and he expected her to come back when he sent for her. Charming Billy tells of a New York Mic who, as a young man, had a great passion for an Irish lass. In the arc of an unremarkable life, a life whose triumphs are small and personal, whose trials are ordinary enough, as tempered in their pain as in their resolution of pain, the claim of exclusivity in love requires both a certain kind of courage and a good dose of delusion.Those of us who claim exclusivity in love do so with a liar's courage: there are a hundred opportunities, thousands over the years, for a sense of falsehood to seep in, for all that we imagine as inevitable to become arbitrary, for our history together to reveal itself as only a matter of chance and happenstance, nothing irrepeatable, or irreplaceable, the circumstantial mingling of just one of the so many millions with just one more.
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