It’s the birthday of Alice McDermott (b. 1953), known for her beautifully rendered novels exploring Irish Catholic families in New York, one of which novels, Charming Billy (1998), won the National Book Award.

The annoyingly gifted and lovely McDermott comes by her material honestly: a second generation Irish American, McDermott grew up on Long Island and went through 12 years of Catholic school. She received her B.A. from the State University of New York at Oswego in 1975, worked for a year at Vantage Press, and then entered an M.A. writing program at the University of New Hampshire in order to get some writing done. While in that program, she wrote her first stories that got published, and while celebrating her first published story, she met her future husband at a singles bar. (He was a graduate student in neuroscience.) She got her M.A. in 1978 and married him in 1979.

The story of the publication of her first novel, The Bigamist’s Daughter (1982), reads like a fairy tale: McDermott gave a chunk of the manuscript to a former professor, who passed her on to his agent, who almost immediately got her an offer from Houghton Mifflin. (See. It’s just not that hard.) Her next two novels, That Night (1987) and At Weddings and Wakes (1992), were both finalists for the Pulitzer, Charming Billy as we already know won the National Book Award, Child of my Heart (2002) was nominated for the International Dublin Literary Award, After This (2006) was another finalist for the Pulitzer, and Someone (2013) was nominated for a National Book Award. Her latest book, The Ninth Hour (2017), opens with a suicide and tells the story of the nuns who help his widow and her baby.

So there’s your reading list for summer.

McDermott has been with the same spouse, David Armstrong, and the same editor, Jonathan Galassi, from the beginning. (This has got to set some kind of record.)

Have a unusually productive Wednesday and stay scrupulously honest to the data.