The Burning Girl
Claire Messud, 2017
W.W. Norton
256 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780393635027
Summary
A bracing, hypnotic coming-of-age story about the bond of best friends, from the New York Times best-selling author of The Emperor’s Children.
Julia and Cassie have been friends since nursery school. They have shared everything, including their desire to escape the stifling limitations of their birthplace, the quiet town of Royston, Massachusetts.
But as the two girls enter adolescence, their paths diverge and Cassie sets out on a journey that will put her life in danger and shatter her oldest friendship.
The Burning Girl is a complex examination of the stories we tell ourselves about youth and friendship, and straddles, expertly, childhood’s imaginary worlds and painful adult reality—crafting a true, immediate portrait of female adolescence.
Claire Messud, one of our finest novelists, is as accomplished at weaving a compelling fictional world as she is at asking the big questions: To what extent can we know ourselves and others? What are the stories we create to comprehend our lives and relationships?
Brilliantly mixing fable and coming-of-age tale, The Burning Girl gets to the heart of these matters in an absolutely irresistible way. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1966
• Where—Greenwich, Connecticut, USA
• Education—BA, Yale University; M.A. Cambridge University
• Awards—Addison Metcalf Award and Strauss Living Award,
both from the American Academy of Arts & Letters
• Currently—lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts
Claire Messud is an American novelist and literature and creative writing professor. She is best known as the author of the 2006 novel The Emperor's Children. She lives with her husband and family in Cambridge, Massachuesetts.
Born in Greenwich, Connecticut, Messud grew up in the United States, Australia, and Canada, returning to the US as a teenager. Messud's mother is Canadian, and her father is French from French Algeria (Algeria was a French colony until 1962). She was educated at Milton Academy, Yale University, and Cambridge University, where she met her spouse, the British literary critic James Wood. Messud also briefly attended the MFA program at Syracuse University.
Writing
Messud's debut novel, When The World Was Steady (1995), was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award. In 1999, she published her second book, The Last Life, about three generations of a French-Algerian family. Her 2001 work, The Hunters, consists of two novellas.
Her 2006 novel, The Emperor’s Children, was longlisted for the 2006 Man Booker Prize. Messud wrote the novel while a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study in 2004–2005. The Woman Upstairs came out in 2014 and her most recent, The Burning Girl, in 2017.
Teaching
Messud has taught creative writing at Kenyon College, University of Maryland, Amherst College, in the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers in North Carolina, and in the Graduate Writing program at The Johns Hopkins University. Messud also taught at the Sewanee: The University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. Each spring semester, beginning 2009, Messud teaches a literary traditions course as a part of CUNY Hunter College's MFA Program in Creative Writing.
She is on the editorial board of the literary magazine The Common, based at Amherst College. She has contributed articles to publications such as The New York Review of Books.
Honors
The American Academy of Arts and Letters has recognized Messud's talent with both an Addison Metcalf Award and a Strauss Living Award. She was considered for the 2003 Granta Best of Young British Novelists list, although none of the three passports she holds is British. As of 2010–2011, she is a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin / Institute of Advanced Study. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
Messud writes with insight about how female friendships dissolve, and about things like how terrifying certain stray fThe Burning Girl is an oddly distant novel. Its tone is formal and ultimtel unconvincing.… This is the first of Messud's novels that didn't, on a regular basis, flood my veins with leawsure. Its the first Messud novel I might have, if I could have, put down before the end.
Dwight Garner - New York Times
Julia voices the novel’s leitmotif: that everyone’s life is essentially a mysterious story, distorted by myths. Although it reverberates with astute insights, in some ways this simple tale is less ambitious but more heartfelt than Messud’s previous work.… [H]aunting and emotionally gripping.
Publishers Weekly
In giving the sole narration to Julia, Messud somewhat paints herself into a corner, as the accounts of Cassie's experiences told to Julia through Peter include a level of observational detail that defies plausibility.… [B]road appeal for teens and adults alike. —Christine DeZelar-Tiedman, Univ. of Minnesota Libs., Minneapolis
Library Journal
(Starred review.) Messud’s entrancing, gorgeously incisive coming-of-age drama astutely tracks the sharpening perceptions of an exceptionally eloquent young woman navigating heartbreak and regret and realizing that one can never fathom "the wild, unknowable interior lives" of others, not even someone you love.
Booklist
(Starred review.) Messud…suggests that we never truly know another, not even those we love best. That stark worldview…seems more overwrought than events call for…but by the novel's closing pages it packs an emotional wallop. Emotionally intense and quietly haunting.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, consider using our LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for The Burning Girl … then take off on your own:
1. Start a discussion by parsing the personalities and characters of the two girls in this story, Julia and Cassie. How are the two similar and how are they dissimilar?
2. Follow-up to Question 1: Consider also the status cues between the two households which delineate socio/economic class.
3. Trace the steps which begin to undo the girls' friendship, starting with Cassie's mother's move-in boyfriend. How does it unravel? Does the split seem inevitable to you?
4. Julia's mother tries to console her daughter by telling her that "Everyone loses a best friend at some point." Is that true? Is it true in your life?
5. What does the statement mean that "being a girl is learning to be afraid? Do you agree?
6. Ultimately, the novel poses the perennial question: can we ever truly know someone, even those who are close to us? Is there a satisfactory answer to that question?
7. How does Elizabeth Bishop's epigraph on the opening pages relate to the novel? You might consider, for starters, the burning deck as the friendship between Julia and Cassie … also, that the boy seems powerless: he stammers.
(We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available.)