Alice McDermott, our beloved and bestselling chronicler of women's lives, returns with a sparkling new novel about a writer's life, told in three remarkable acts set many years apart.

It is 1980 in New York City and a young woman is perched uncomfortably on a radiator cover in a spacious loft. A famous photographer snaps pictures for a full-page review of her debut novel. She turns and tilts her head, responding to the camera.

Alice McDermott's tripartite Herself, of Course is the story of Victoria (or V., or later, Vicky) at the start of her career, then in middle age, and finally in later life. In the days before V.'s first novel is released, she meets the reclusive and mysterious Mary Alfyorov, one of her favorite writers. "Good luck to you," Mary says. "It's a terrible life."

We move from V.'s days in grimy New York City in the 1980s, to a family health crisis in Florida after twenty years of teaching, squirreled away in New Hampshire between on-and-off love affairs, to the near present day, when a relationship with a scholar of poetry opens up her world once again. Throughout, McDermott's heroine is confronted with and dogged by the essential questions of her calling: How do you turn life into art? How can a writer portray real people with honesty without betraying them? Can you ever capture a whole life? And where does the self come in?

Herself, of Course is a crisp, clearheaded, deeply affecting portrait of an artist as a self-knowing woman over the course of a lifetime, from one of our most observant and beloved American writers.