SOURCE: A review of A Bigamist's Daughter, in West Coast Review of Books, Vol. 8, No. 2, April, 1982, p. 35.

In the following review, Wood praises McDermott's matter-of-fact depiction of love in A Bigamist's Daughter, but maintains that her secondary characters are underdeveloped.

[In A Bigamist's Daughter] Elizabeth Connelly, editor-in chief of Vista Books, a vanity press, is the bigamist's daughter. Her interest in her father's bigamy becomes agitated by the appearance of Tupper Daniels, a southern novelist who has written a book about a bigamist in his hometown. Daniels' book has no ending, without which Elizabeth has no sales contract. Sensing their mutual needs and concerns, they become lovers; his interest in her father, a deceased travelling salesman, piques her own untapped curiosity and together they return to her roots on Long Island to discover more.

Daniels believes his book will be successful because "almost every woman has had a...