Hell, Heaven & In-between: One Woman's Journey to Finding Love
Kathryn Hurn, 2016
Mattsamkat Publishing
604 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780692773802
Summary
HELL IS THE WASTELAND. The point when you have stopped being yourself…
This is the personal history, the loves and losses of Lucy Bell, whose life as a young woman was blown off course and her attempts to right her way seemed a labyrinth of griefs and disappointments. But life isn’t just what happens to you. And heaven is there in the blue sky for all to see.
"For most people, their wedding day seemed like heaven on earth, to me it was hell, H, E, double toothpicks."
Darkly funny and uncommonly frank, Lucy recounts an unforgettable emotional and spiritual journey from darkness and error to light and knowledge, her sense of isolation, unfulfilled longing and struggle for personal fulfillment, to finally arrive at love’s threshold feeling the joy and peace of having discovered her proper place in the world.
"…marrying a man whose one-dimensional, good-ole-boy persona couldn’t possibly guess the depths of my raging passions nor ever wish to know of their existence."
Healing, like the gaining of wisdom, is not a power outside your self. A young woman breaks up her sham of a marriage to a husband whose less-than-honest dealings do more harm than he will ever admit, embarks on a journey to independence and authenticity, then in a poetic vision falls madly in love with an erudite mountaineer who proposes from the top of a 8,000-meter peak only to disappear in the glint of an ice storm. Between the explained and the unexplained a mystery lies.
"Leaving for Annapurna on 4/5, Snow Leopard baby…I love you in so many ways…"
Author Bio
• Birth—May 9, 1960
• Where—Tucson, Arizona, USA
• Education—B.A., University of North Texas
• Currently—lives in Salt Lake City, Utah
Kathryn Hurn is an American writer, best known as the creator of the fictional character Lucy Bell, a semi-autobiographical story chronicling her life from a twenty-something retailer married to the wrong man, to a thirty-something single mother vying for independence, authenticity, passion and love and finally at fifty wins the man worthy of her love.
Born into a middle-class military family, Kathryn is the eldest of Mary Catherine and Lt. Col. William P. Hurn’s five children. She credits both her parents for exemplifying and encouraging lifelong learning, creativity and fearless pursuit of dreams. She spent her early life following her father’s Air Force transfers from one end of the United States to the other. Girls Scouts and family trips to Yosemite sparked a romance with Nature and mountains that continues to this day. Educated in parochial schools in California and Nebraska until attending high school in Limestone, Maine, (where she was Maine's Junior Miss), Kathryn went on to study Fashion Marketing at the Universities of Maine and North Texas.
An avid traveler, backpacker, artist and literary enthusiast, Kathryn is also a 30-plus-year fitness professional and yoga teacher. She has two grown sons and lives in Salt Lake City where they have the world’s best snow. (From the author.)
Visit the author's website.
Discussion Questions
1. How does the title set up readers’ expectations of the main themes the author intends to explore? What symbols reinforce those themes?
2. How do the chapter headings help structure the novel?
3. Volume One shifts back and forth in time from the present to the past allowing Lucy to tell of her early childhood and then skips to the time when she is in high school. Why tell of her childhood at all? Why not just begin with her marriage to John?
4. All through her child and girlhood Lucy felt what D. H. Lawrence called, "a oneness with the infinite." What evidence is there for this? What caused her to lose that connection? In what ways does she regain it?
5. What for Lucy represented the Dark Wood?
6. What symbols foreshadow Lucy’s doomed marriage?
7. What do the funny and fanciful dreams and imaginings tell us about Lucy?
8. Why does Lucy seem easily manipulated by people in authority?
9. What does it mean to be true to your self?
10. How did the Teenage Miss pageant damage Lucy?
11. Beauty contests claim to have changed in response to the growing role of feminism in America. For example, contestants are not called beauty queens but scholars. But contestants still epitomize the roles women are forced to play and reinforce the standard that men are judged by their actions, women by their appearance. Do you believe beauty contests are an affront to women and men who care about women?
12. How does Lucy decide to think about physical beauty and its importance to her happiness? Is this significant in her attraction for Ralph and his attraction for her?
13. As far as women may have come, in what ways did Lucy suffer from conventional ideas about the place and nature of women?
14. From the bra-burning emergence of women’s liberation in the 1960s to the selfie-obsessed narcissism of today, do you believe women find it easier or harder to be true to their own vision of their lives?
15. Lucy was conflicted about having had sex before marriage as prescribed by the Catholic Church and her desire to experience love and passion. Bad girls are sexual and good girls are virgins. What do you think about women’s split identity as Naomi Wolf calls it, "virgin and whore"?
16. Society approves of a man who has sex calling him: a ladies’ man, player, stud, Casanova, Romeo. His behavior is usually met with a smile and a pat on the back. It is acceptable for women to have sex within the confines of marriage or a monogamous commitment otherwise a sexually active woman may be called a slut, a whore, dirty. Can you think of any positive terms to describe a normal, healthy, sexually-active, independent woman?
17. Lucy sees her sexless marriage as poetic justice for having pre-marital sex and experiences guilt caused by the conflict between what most religions teach young girls: to be good, chaste and obedient, and what’s seen as the darker biological, sensual pressures of love and the body and what women, just like men, want. For those of us who want neither to be a saint or a demon, how do we reintegrate the light and dark sides of ourselves and lay claim to our rightful humanity, which is sexual and equal?
18. Religion plays a large role in this story. What characterizations and experiences alter Lucy’s feelings about religion? As her story goes on is it religion or virtue that guides her?
- Why doesn’t Lucy just live with John? Should "living in sin" be universally accepted as the best means of establishing compatibility?
- Do you believe Lucy exhibited strength or weakness in leaving her marriage? Or did she get her just desserts for marrying without love?
- How do you forgive yourself for major life mistakes?
- Which kind of love, romantic love or self-love is placed on an equal or higher footing than religion?
19. What was Lucy’s sin?
20. Do you mark Lucy’s struggles and triumphs as conventional or heroic? She makes some mistakes. Her refusal to lead a false life is noble, but should she be let off the hook for her sin? What would you have done in her situation?
21. What importance does eye contact or lack thereof mean in the novel?
22. What significance does money have on Lucy’s relationships? In what ways do the main characters’ financial security shape their personal freedom?
23. Though possessing an inner strength that sustains her during the most difficult times, what means does Lucy turn to for wisdom and support, intellectual stimulation and inspiration?
24. On the quest toward full womanhood, Naomi Wolf in her book, Fire With Fire calls the monsters that must be slain "the Dragons of Niceness." Lucy calls her ailment "the Nice Lady Syndrome." What does she mean?
25. Lucy describes dissatisfaction with her career. Is it simply another manifestation of her original sin and Nice Lady Syndrome or is it something more?
26. Describe Lucy’s views of marriage, using as evidence all the marriages that are described even briefly in the story. (There are at least 15 to consider.)
27. Do you feel any sympathy for Lucy’s husband, John?
28. The French writer Albert Camus began his philosophical essay "The Myth of Sisyphus" with the famous line "There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide." Is suicide a crime, a sin or an act of heroic proportions?
29. Which of the book’s themes is held up as more important: self-love or romantic love? Can romantic love exist outside the framework of self-love?
30. Bell, of course, is Lucy’s last name, but it’s more than that. What significance do you attribute to the author’s use of bells?
Literary Echoes
MADAME BOVARY
31. In Volume One what comparisons can you make between Lucy and Emma Bovary? Between John and Charles Bovary?
THE DIVINE COMEDY
32. Like Dante in The Divine Comedy, Lucy makes herself the heroine and commentator of her story. He was condemned to perpetual exile from his home Florence. Is Lucy’s story also one of exile? From what? Would she have written her story if she hadn’t believed herself in exile?
33. Lucy attempts to recover from her mistakes, what circle of Hell would she have been sent if she had died unrepentant?
34. In The Divine Comedy, sinners’ punishments either resemble or contrast their sin. For instance, the Lustful in Circle Two are perpetually blown about by a violent storm, they can never rest, mirroring life when one acts purely from emotions: aimless and fruitless. How do you see sins punished in HHIB? Who seems to suffer most?
35. Is making yourself the center of the universe a sin?
36. What is the author saying by not providing Lucy a pagan or otherwise guide to help her navigate the physical and spiritual landscape of Hell and Purgatory?
37. Like Dante, Lucy encounters three animal vehicles, who were they, what sins do they represent and how do they impede Lucy’s progress?
38. What does Lucy have to abandon in order to advance? Talk about a time when you faced difficulties and how you overcame them.
39. After returning from Pakistan, Ralph says he feels like he’s on the Seven-Storey Mountain. Can climbing Everest and the Gasherbrum parallel climbing Mount Purgatory? What accounts for the sense of powerlessness that fuels Ralph’s desperation and spurs his restless travels?
40. In Purgatory souls who were used to acting independently must learn how to work together, do you believe Ralph and Lucy can reconcile and enter into the happiness of heaven?
41. Lucy discovers that life can change on a dime for the worse but also for the better if she chooses what?
JANE EYRE
42. Do you see any parallels and contrasts with Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre?
Supernatural events?
Doubles?
Name play?
Tone?
Themes?
Plot?
43. How do you perceive Ralph’s secret? Do you see his near maiming as punishment for his attempted bigamy? Does his shroud of mystery make him even more attractive to Lucy? Is his dishonesty justifiable? Forgivable? What role does forgiveness play in HHIB?
44. Do the novel’s main characters: Lucy, John, and Ralph grow over the course of the novel? And if so, how?
45. One aspect of the novel is its insistence on uncertainty and suspense and the primacy of suffering. People die, commit crimes, and don’t love you when you need their love most. What is the novel saying?
46. What kind of love did Lucy find in the end?
47. Why is the end the end? Are you happy with the ending? Would you have preferred it end differently?
Like Jane Eyre, Lucy comes to the self-knowledge:
I can live alone, if self-respect and circumstance require me so to do… I have an inward treasure, born with me, which can keep me alive if all extraneous delights should be withheld; or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give.
Do you think Lucy will marry Ralph?
After coming into her newfound power, do you think she’ll be happier with Ralph or on her own?
48. What choice would you have made in Lucy’s place? Would that choice have been difficult? Why?
49. What passages strike you as insightful, even profound? Has this novel changed you?
50. What is the novel’s goal? How well did HHIB achieve its goal?
(Questions courtesy of the publisher.)