Although Hamill is careful to note that Snow in August is entirely fictional, the setting, both place and time, is very much like that of his own boyhood, recounted in A Drinking Life (1994). A somewhat older Michael Devlin is also the hero of Loving Women (1989; see separate entry), and their backgrounds are clearly similar, although some details are different—the first Michael Devlin has siblings, a father yet alive and very different from the expressive, heroic Tommy Devlin, and a mother from the Bronx, and not Irish Kate.