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Contemporary Women's Writing Advance Access published online on July 31, 2009
Contemporary Women's Writing, doi:10.1093/cww/vpp007
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© The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

"None of us will always be here": Whiteness, Loss, and Alice McDermott's At Weddings and Wakes

Sinéad Moynihan

University of Nottingham, UK sinead.moynihan@nottingham.ac.uk

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

"None of us will always be here," Aunt May said.

Their mother stood and leaned out the window to feel the white sheets on the line. "You don't have to tell me," she said. "These are long dry." (Weddings 26)

In Alice McDermott's National Book Award-winning Charming Billy (1998), Dennis Lynch travels to a Veterans Affairs clinic in the early 1980s to identify the body of his dead cousin and best friend, the eponymous Billy. Seeing his face bloated from years of alcohol abuse and his once pale skin darkened to brown, Dennis is momentarily relieved of the fact that Billy is dead and mistakes his cousin for "a colored man" (6). Dennis's blunder is revealing: Billy cannot be dead, because Billy is white and this dead man is black. What reassures Dennis, if only fleetingly, is his assumption of Billy's racial difference from the . . . [Full Text of this Article]


   Making Whiteness Visible
 

   White Flight
 

   White (S)Kin
 

   Whited Sepulchres
 

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