Off Season
Anne Rivers Siddons
Grand Central Publishing
368 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780446698290
Summary
For as long as she can remember, they were Cam and Lilly—happily married, totally in love with each other, parents of a beautiful family, and partners in life.
Then, after decades of marriage, it ended as every great love story does...in loss. After Cam's death, Lilly takes a lone road trip to her and Cam's favorite spot on the remote coast of Maine, the place where they fell in love over and over again, where their ghosts still dance. There, she looks hard to her past—to a first love that ended in tragedy; to falling in love with Cam; to a marriage filled with exuberance, sheer life, and safety—to try to figure out her future.
It is a journey begun with tender memories and culminating in a revelation that will make Lilly re-evaluate everything she thought was true about her husband and her marriage. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—January 9, 1936
• Where—Atlanta, Georgia, USA
• Education—B.A., Auburn University; Atlanta School of Art
• Currently—lives in Charleston, South Carolina and Maine
Born in 1936 in a small town near Atlanta, Anne Rivers Siddons was raised to be a dutiful daughter of the South — popular, well-mannered, studious, and observant of all the cultural mores of time and place. She attended Alabama's Auburn University in the mid-1950s, just as the Civil Rights Movement was gathering steam. Siddons worked on the staff of Auburn's student newspaper and wrote an editorial in favor of integration. When the administration asked her to pull the piece, she refused. The column ran with an official disclaimer from the university, attracting national attention and giving young Siddons her first taste of the power of the written word.
After a brief stint in the advertising department of a bank, Siddons took a position with the up and coming regional magazine Atlanta, where she worked her way up to senior editor. Impressed by her writing ability, an editor at Doubleday offered her a two-book contract. She debuted in 1975 with a collection of nonfiction essays; the following year, she published Heartbreak Hotel, a semi-autobiographical novel about a privileged Southern coed who comes of age during the summer of 1956.
With the notable exception of 1978's The House Next Door, a chilling contemporary gothic compared by Stephen King to Shirley Jackson's classic horror novel The Haunting of Hill House, Siddons has produced a string of well-written, imaginative, and emotionally resonant stories of love and loss —all firmly rooted in the culture of the modern South. Her books are consistent bestsellers, with 1988's Peachtree Road (1988) arguably her biggest commercial success. Described by her friend and peer, Pat Conroy, as "the Southern novel for our generation," the book sheds illuminating light on the changing landscape of mid-20th-century Atlanta society.
Although her status as a "regional" writer accounts partially for Siddons' appeal, ultimately fans love her books because they portray with compassion and truth the real lives of women who transcend the difficulties of love and marriage, family, friendship, and growing up.
Extras
• Although she is often compared with another Atlanta author, Margaret Mitchel, Siddons insists that the South she writes about is not the romanticized version found in Gone With the Wind. Instead, her relationship with the region is loving, but realistic. "It's like an old marriage or a long marriage. The commitment is absolute, but the romance has long since worn off...I want to write about it as it really is: I don't want to romanticize it."
• Siddons' debut novel Heartberak Hotel was turned into the 1989 movie Heart of Dixie, starry Ally Sheedy, Virginia Madsen, and Phoebe Cates. (From Barnes & Noble.)
Book Reviews
(Audio version.) In Siddons's stirring novel, the recently widowed Lily Constable returns to her childhood summer home in Maine to sift through formative memories of her parents and her first love. It's difficult to imagine a more marvelous performance than Jane Alexander's. Alexander captures the strength and vulnerability of Lily from childhood to late middle age, and perfectly renders the physical weight of Lily's grief at her losses. She skillfully navigates the novel's cast of characters, from the slow, deep and thoughtful drawl of Lily's father to the high-pitched, false charm of the vicious young neighbor whose poison darts put tragic events in motion. Alexander also brings to life the great unnamed character in the book—the natural world, giving voice to birds and even a talking cat, and intuitively understanding the life-giving power of the sea. This is an example of how a good novel can become magnificent when it is beautifully told.
Publishers Weekly
Returning to her beloved Maine home to scatter her husband's ashes, Lilly reconstructs her past and makes peace with her future. Fourtime OscarA Award nominee Jane Alexander uses her acting chops to keep New York Times bestselling author Siddons's sweetly sentimental story from toppling into sappiness. She imbues Lilly's childhood voice with selfabsorbed innocence, gradually morphing it into that of an adult. When Lilly's husband arrives, her father's importance dwindles-a good thing, since their voices were indistinguishable. While this isn't Siddons's best, her descriptions will have listeners hearing the birds and smelling the ocean.
Library Journal
Her family’s cottage on the coast of Maine is haunted, and that suits Lilly Constable just fine. Returning to Edgewater after the death of her beloved husband, Cam, Lilly takes comfort in carrying on detailed conversations with the spirit that she feels pervades the site of so much joy, and yet so much tragedy, in her life. Revisiting the happy times of her marriage and their unconventional courtship also propels Lilly further down memory lane, however, forcing her to recall the years spent living in isolation with her widowed father after her mother’s death from breast cancer, and the summer she turned 11 and her first love, Jon, died in a tragic boating accident. As Lilly works through her grief for her husband, mother, and old friend, she uncovers startling revelations about the very people she thought she knew best. With a powerhouse ending dazzling in its stealth and ambiguity, master storyteller Siddons delivers a dramatically evocative tale that magically summons a bygone time of innocence and intrigue. —Carol Haggas
Booklist
A widow returns to her family cottage in Maine, her late husband's ashes and ornery cat in tow, and ponders her first experience of love and loss. Siddons frames the story around the sudden death of Cam McCall, Virginia architect, while at his wife Lilly's Maine seashore cottage, Edgewater. Though portrayed as eminently trustworthy, Cam has, unbeknownst to Lilly, visited the unheated cottage many times during the Off Season while supposedly traveling elsewhere on business. After wrangling about the disposition of Cam's cremains with her spoiled yuppie daughters, Lilly heads north with Silas, Cam's cranky, subliminally conversational cat, and the urn. In her cottage, Lilly revisits the pivotal summer of 1962, when, a wiry 11-year-old tomboy, she led a gang of other kids on a spate of mostly wholesome outdoor activities, occasionally ruffling feathers in this WASP-ruled vacation enclave. Lilly's preadolescence is thorny. She's overshadowed by her charismatic painter mother, who yearns to enter Jackie Kennedy's social circle, and her father, a professor at George Washington University, is too supportive to rebel against. On a lonely ramble to a nearby cliff, Lilly encounters a boy named Jon and is immediately smitten. The two are inseparable until a prissy, meddlesome neighbor child, Peaches, exposes the fact that Jon's father is Jewish, a secret his father had kept from him and his mother. Shocked by the deception, Jon sails into a fog in Lilly's sailboat, and drowns. Lilly retreats into a cocoon of denial and becomes obsessed with underwater swimming. Her isolation is exacerbated when her mother dies of breast cancer and her father keeps her cloistered in benevolent but stifling domesticity as the turbulent '60s unfold. In contrast to Siddons's usual heroine, who struggles to achieve self-sufficiency, Lilly is overcome by passivity, which deepens as she's repeatedly blindsided by loss. The inadequately foreshadowed surprise ending involves an ultimate betrayal that will dismay readers almost as much as it does Lilly.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. What is your first impression of Elizabeth, Lilly’s mother? Does your opinion of her change throughout the course of the novel? How so? Discuss how Lilly’s discovery of her mother and Brooks Burns during the summer of 1962 changes Lilly’s view of her mother? How does it change Lilly?
2. The epigraph that opens the book quotes Dylan Thomas: “After the first death, there is no other.” How do you understand this quote? Does this quote apply in any way to your own life?
3. Lilly narrates the book as an adult, looking back at her life. The novel is, in part, about adolescence and the ways in which that period of our lives is so defining. How does Lily change and grow as a character throughout the book? How does she stay the same?
4. Siddons writes, “It was the full flowering of Camelot, the New Frontier, and the glamour and rigor of the young Kennedy administration brought with it strong feelings...It was, too, a time of exploration and flaming new cultural concepts, and the sound of tumbling mores was loud in the land.” How does the historical and social context manifest itself throughout the novel? Is it meaningful that Siddons chose to set this book during the 1960s? Why or why not?
5. Lilly’s mother believes that “magic is just as necessary for human beings as food and shelter, but most of us have forgotten it.” It can be said that there are moments of magic in this book, and Edgewater, in particular, seems to be a magical place for many of the characters. Do you agree that magic is a ‘necessary’ part of life? What do you think Siddons means by this?
6. Midway through the novel Lilly says, “Never think that the very young cannot love. Never think that. They love with a fierce, direct love.” Jon and Lilly have a very mature relationship for such young people. Do you think it’s possible for the ‘very young’ to experience mature and enduring love?
7. What do you make of Peaches? Is Lilly too hard on her when they are younger?
8. It can be said that Edgewater is its own "character" in Off Season and early in the novel Lilly tells Cam that she was a different person at Edgewater, “a creature of water and wind and tides and rock.” What role does Edgewater play in Lilly’s life? Do you agree with Lilly that certain places have the power to completely change a person?
9. Is Lilly’s father too protective of Lilly after her mother dies? Do you think he is a good parent to Lilly? How does Lilly’s relationship with her father affect her relationship with Cam?
10. Lilly falls in love with Cam instantly. Is their love believable? Do you believe that love at first sight is possible?
11. Why doesn’t Lilly tell Cam about Jon? Why doesn’t Cam tell Lilly about his sister? Do you think it’s sometimes necessary keep childhood secrets even from those closest to you in adulthood?
12. The characters in this novel love very deeply. What price do they pay for this love? Does the novel suggest that it is important to love this deeply despite the risks involved in doing so?
13. When Lilly begins dating Cam she thinks, “Love and safety. Love and safety forever. I had never dreamed I could find both outside [my father’s] house.” What role does ‘safety’ play in Lilly’s marriage to Cam? Why does Lilly place so much value on safety?
14. The novel has a surprising ending. Discuss what happens in the final chapters and what the ending means for Lilly, her life, and her marriage.
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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