I really wanted the entire novel to have the sense of a story being told. I'm always pleased when people can't tell early on whether it's a female narrator or a male narrator. If you look at contemporary fiction and first-person female narrators, they're almost always on the verge of a nervous breakdown, or recovering from a nervous breakdown, getting things wrong and over the course of the novel must have their eyes opened. I wanted a smart, first-person narrator, because that's what women do. In families, it's the women who sit around the kitchen table telling stories while the men watch the football game, talking about who dated who 20 years ago.
Women are the keepers of emotional history.
What's nice, too, is there are times you slip beyond her into an almost omniscient role. Some of the fatalism has almost another narrative voice entirely. And while she's perhaps not a completely reliable narrator, she's more reliable than Dennis would have been. And if Billy had told it, it would have been totally unreliable. I don't want to impose any didactic element on your work, but one point of the book seems to be that anyone can fall prey to problem drinking.