TY - JOUR
AU - Moynihan, Sinad
AB - “None of us will always be here”: . Whiteness, Loss, and Alice McDermott’s At Weddings and Wakes . SINEAD MOYNIHAN “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 dead man. When he realizes that he is wrong, Dennis is not only perturbed by the fact that his cousin is dead, but by his . confrontation with the contingent and 
TI - None of us will always be here: Whiteness, Loss, and Alice McDermott's At Weddings and Wakes
JF - Contemporary Women's Writing
DO - 10.1093/cww/vpp007
DA - 2010-03-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/none-of-us-will-always-be-here-whiteness-loss-and-alice-mcdermott-s-at-T5Ubugw5nK
SP - 40
EP - 54
VL - 4
IS - 1
DP - DeepDyve
ER -