fsgbooks:

“I was born in Brooklyn, but I never lived there. All my life, however, I’ve been regaled with stories of the glory that was pre-war Brooklyn, and since these tales seemed to have very little to do with my own experience of the place, the Brooklyn of that era has always appeared to me as something of an enchanted isle—a fiction, really. Setting a story there—not in the literal, geographical Brooklyn but in the one of memory, of romanticized recollection—is my way of visiting a place that I suspect never really existed.”

Alice McDermott, interviewed in The New Yorker about her short story “Someone.”