Beth Gutcheon
Book Discussion Questions

Book Discussion Questions for Author Beth Gutcheon

Where did your inspiration for this cast of characters come from? Are any of them based on yourself, your family, or people you know?

None of the characters are based on me or my family –novelists' families are too easily upset as it is. But I try to have a real person in mind for most of my characters as a way of keeping the psychology of each one grounded in reality. The trickiest character in the lot was, of course, Norman. If you'd visited my office while I was working on him you'd have thought I was studying for holy orders. I read a lot of books called things like "Help! I'm a Pastor!" about what can go wrong in parishes, but probably most important, I read everything I could find on James Pike, the famous Bishop of California, including a fascinating Philip K. Dick novel based on Pike called The Transmigration of Timothy Archer.

Book Discussion Questions for Author Beth Gutcheon

Book Discussion Questions for Author Beth Gutcheon

The format of the novel is interesting and unique. What effect were you looking for by writing short blurbs from each character rather than full chapters from different points of view?

The novel uses a non-fiction form invented (I think) by George Plimpton, called oral biography, that has no over-arching narrative, just gives you straight quotes from people who knew the subject. The first book I read that used it was Edie, by Jean Stein and George Plimpton, a biography of the Andy Warhol Factory girl, Edie Sedgwick. It was positively addictive. Plimpton also used the form for a "biography" of Truman Capote, Steven Aronson used it for a fascinating book called Savage Grace about the matricide Tony Bakelund, and Fran Kiernan partly used it in her biography of Mary McCarthy. I decided to try the technique in fiction because the whole point about siblings is they are familiar to each other, but that's not the same as understanding each other. I wanted to let all the parties involved contradict each other and see the same event in different ways, without a narrator intervening and guiding the reader as to who is right and who is wrong. They are all right, they are all wrong.

In a real oral history or biography, the author is obviously asking questions of the people who speak. In this novel, the idea is that someone like the reader is asking questions, including, at the end, asking each speaker how he or she would like to be described.

Book Discussion Questions for Author Beth Gutcheon

Book Discussion Questions for Author Beth Gutcheon

There are quite a few characters in the novel, both primary and secondary. I would have to say that my favorite primary character is Jimmy and my favorite secondary character is Sylvie. Which two, if you had to choose, are closest to your heart?

Jimmy is my hands-down favorite, and you guessed it, I'd have to say Sylvie is the runner-up. But it's funny, I've had readers say that their favorite is Norman and they assume I most identify with Eleanor. Which is as it should be, everyone sees the same story differently.

Book Discussion Questions for Author Beth Gutcheon

Book Discussion Questions for Author Beth Gutcheon

An underlying theme in this novel is the relationship between mothers and their children. Eleanor, Monica, and Josslyn all had such different ways of raising their families but they all do it well. If you take Eleanor's acceptance, Monica's sweetness, and Josslyn's spirited fun, you have one perfect mom! The anti-Sydney if you will. How did two of Sydney's offspring become such wonderful mothers themselves with a terrible role model?

I think that children, especially daughters, of mothers like Sydney have one of two choices. They can either examine nothing about their own behavior as mothers and do to their children what was done to them, or they become hyper-vigilant to avoid the mistakes they grew up with. Eleanor has the easiest time doing the latter because she had the easiest time as a daughter. Also, she got out early and got really lucky in her husband, a man with many of the good qualities of her best parent, her kind, moderate father, and she got a surrogate good mother in the deal, in her mother-in-law.

For Monica it's much harder because she accidentally married a man with the bad qualities of her worst parent, her mother. Consciously it was the last thing she wanted, yet she was drawn helplessly to Norman, whose first contact with her was to attack her (and unfairly). She is a genuinely lovely person, I think, but she is not as good as either Eleanor or Jimmy at managing her own emotions, partly because she is under constant stress in that untrustworthy marriage. When she says "you're never too old to keep failing your children," she knows because she's done plenty of it, and suffers for it.

Book Discussion Questions for Author Beth Gutcheon

Book Discussion Questions for Author Beth Gutcheon

The main family unit, the Moss clan, is very tight-knit but also emotionally estranged. Which of the three children are closest? Seems to me it was Jimmy and Monica because Eleanor played the role of mother when theirs just wasn't up to it.

I agree, Jimmy and Monica are closest. Eleanor is a sunnier person than either of them, and whether cause or effect, she is less reflective. Monica, a typical middle child, tries to offset the feeling her mother always gave her, that she was a disappointment and a trial, by taking care of others. She worried about Jimmy when he was at his least lovable, and he has been forever grateful for that (and at the end of the book he finds his way to say so.) One of the things I like about both Eleanor and Monica is that they don't resent Jimmy for being the favorite, even when it means he gets the lion's share of the inheritance. They resent their mother for so obviously having a favorite, but they recognize that being the beloved of a mother like Sydney is a damaging thing, and it was nothing Jimmy asked for.

Book Discussion Questions for Author Beth Gutcheon

Book Discussion Questions for Author Beth Gutcheon

Did each of Sydney's children have a little bit of her meanness in them? I felt like it reared its ugly head from time to time, especially when Monica left the letter for Charlesie.

I don't think either Eleanor or Jimmy is mean. Eleanor is naturally cheerful, maybe to the point of being complacent. It is easier to be kind when things go so well for you. Jimmy's serenity is very hard-won. I think he came to realize that his own anger was going to eat him alive unless he found a way to deal with it, which he did, through years of pursuing a genuine spirituality, and that pursuit has taken him far beyond meanness. Monica occasionally finds herself guilty of the behavior she most wants to avoid – maybe it's an example of Stockholm syndrome, in which powerless people come to identify with their captors or abusers. Leaving the letter for Charlesie was a mean trick she'd learned from a master, but I think it upset her far more lastingly than it did him, when she realized exactly what she'd done. Whether that means she can keep from ever doing such a thing again, I don't know, but she is very different from Sydney in that when she has been mean, she learns from it, and she apologizes.

Book Discussion Questions for Author Beth Gutcheon

Book Discussion Questions for Author Beth Gutcheon

It's an odd trait to me that children of an unfit parent like Eleanor, Monica, and Jimmy become so attached to the memories of their childhood. Whether it was the boat, the ivory elephant, or their mothers ashes, they seemed very unwilling to let go. Why is this?

Ah. Interesting question. They are the product of a marriage between two very dissimilar people. Their father was steady, calm, dryly funny and loving, though undemonstrative. He had himself come from a happy family and knew what that felt like and how it worked, and he was half of their equation, growing up. Also, Sydney, who must have known on some level that she was a monster, like all of us wanted to see herself as delightful and lovable, so she did plenty of creating fun when outsiders were watching, or when nothing was upsetting her. And especially when it came to Leeway Cottage, they loved the house and the place for reasons that had nothing to do with what went on inside the family. They care about their childhood memories of Leeway in a way that they don't, at all, care about the place in Connecticut. In Connecticut they were isolated in the family; in Dundee, they felt much safer, connected to the whole community, known and watched over.

Book Discussion Questions for Author Beth Gutcheon

Book Discussion Questions for Author Beth Gutcheon

How and why did Laurus stay with Sydney for so long if she was such a hateful woman when he was such a thoughtful man?

My previous novel, Leeway Cottage, tells the story of their marriage; and your question was the very one I wanted to answer, because I think it was very often the case that dissimilar people of that generation just shut up and kept their bargains. How they managed it is harder to say. They belonged to the last generation that didn't speak Freud at all. They didn't understand their own emotions, they understood manners and proper behavior. They were separated by the war very soon after their marriage, and by the time that was over and they began to understand how very different they were, they had Eleanor, and Monica was on the way, and they made the best of it. (Of course there is more to it than that, but...)

Book Discussion Questions for Author Beth Gutcheon

Who is the mystery narrator of the italic paragraphs, caught in the "in-between" world?

Ah. Well. Laurus Moss was a Dane, and he had a great, if idiosyncratic, interest in the beliefs of the Swedish Christian mystic, Emanual Swedenborg. In Leeway Cottage, Laurus is always saying that Heaven is where you get to see the movie of your own life, and finally understand all the things that were incomprehensible before, like where your missing socks went, and why your little sister was never the same after the war. His children worry that he is wrong, there is no heaven and no movie. Even though he's gone, (good-bye and amen to him) his children still live in a world according to Laurus Moss, and so does this book. In Swedenborg's cosmology, the first thing that happens after life is you arrive at a place where caregiver spirits help you to adjust to the fact that you are dead. That voice in italics belongs to one of them. I had intended him to have no particular personality (or sex) but novels are all about personalities, so gradually he became the spirit of a specific character from Leeway Cottage called Bernard Christie, who married Sydney's dread mother Candace after Sydney's father's death. That is, he became the step-grandfather of Eleanor, Monica and Jimmy.

Book Discussion Questions for Author Beth Gutcheon

Is this the last we'll see of these characters? Have they been in any of your other books?

One never can be sure, but I believe this is the last of them. As you now know, we saw them growing up in my previous novel, Leeway Cottage. Also Franny Ober, the girl who broke Jimmy's heart, is the daughter of Hannah, the protagonist of my novel More Than You Know, a love story/ghost story which also takes place in Dundee, Maine. And Eleanor and Monica went to the same boarding school, at the same time, as in my long ago first novel The New Girls, but there is no actual overlap of characters with that book. When I began Leeway Cottage I thought there might be, but the new girls never appeared.