In One Person
John Irving, 2012
Simon & Schuster
425 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781451664133
Summary
A New York Times bestselling novel of desire, secrecy, and sexual identity, In One Person is a story of unfulfilled love—tormented, funny, and affecting—and an impassioned embrace of our sexual differences.
Billy, the bisexual narrator and main character of In One Person, tells the tragicomic story (lasting more than half a century) of his life as a “sexual suspect,” a phrase first used by John Irving in 1978 in his landmark novel of “terminal cases."
In One Person is a poignant tribute to Billy’s friends and lovers—a theatrical cast of characters who defy category and convention. Not least, In One Person is an intimate and unforgettable portrait of the solitariness of a bisexual man who is dedicated to making himself “worthwhile.” (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—March 2, 1942
• Where—Exeter, New Hampshire, USA
• Education—B.A., University of New Hampshire; M.F.A., Iowa Writers' Workshop
• Awards—American Book Award (Garp); Academy Award; Best Screenplay (Cider House)
• Currently—lives in Vermont
John Irving is an American novelist and Academy Award-winning screenwriter.
Irving achieved critical and popular acclaim in 1978 after the international success of The World According to Garp in 1978. A number of of his novels, such as The Cider House Rules (1985), A Prayer for Owen Meany (1989), and A Widow for One Year (1998), have been bestsellers. He won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay in 1999 for his script The Cider House Rules.
Early years and career
Irving was born John Wallace Blunt, Jr. in Exeter, New Hampshire, the son of Helen Frances (nee Winslow) and John Wallace Blunt, Sr., a writer and executive recruiter. The couple parted during pregnancy, and Irving grew as the stepson of a Phillips Exeter Academy faculty member, Colin Franklin Newell Irving (as well as the nephew of another faculty member, H. Hamilton "Hammy" Bissell). Irving attended Phillips Exeter and participated in school wrestling program, both as a student athlete and as assistant coach. Wrestling features prominently in his books, stories, and life.
Irving's biological father, a World War II pilot, was shot down over Burma in 1943, although he survived. Irving learned of his father's heroism only in 1981 and incorporated the incident into The Cider House Rules. He never met has father, however, even though on occasion Blunt attended his son's wrestling competitions.
Irving's published his first novel, Setting Free the Bears (1968) when he was only 26. The book was reasonably well reviewed but failed to gain a large readership. In the late 1960s, he studied with Kurt Vonnegut at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. His second and third novels, The Water-Method Man (1972) and The 158-Pound Marriage (1974), were similarly received. In 1975, Irving accepted a position as assistant professor of English at Mount Holyoke College.
World According to Garp
Frustrated at the lack of promotion his novels were receiving from Random House, his first publisher, Irving moved to Dutton. Dutton made a strong commitment to his new novel—The World According to Garp (1978), and the book became an international bestseller and cultural phenomenon. It was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction in 1979 but won the award the following year when the paperback edition was issued.
The film version of Garp came out in 1982 with Robin Williams in the title role and Glenn Close as his mother; it garnered several Academy Award nominations, including nominations for Close and John Lithgow. Irving makes a brief cameo in the film as an official in one of Garp's high school wrestling matches.
After Garp
Garp transformed Irving from an obscure, academic literary writer to a household name, and his subsequent books were bestsellers. The next was The Hotel New Hampshire (1981), which sold well despite mixed reviews from critics. It, too, was adapted to film, starring Jodie Foster, Rob Lowe, and Beau Bridges. Irving also received the 1981 O. Henry Award for "Interior Space," a short story published in Fiction magazine in 1980.
In 1985, Irving published The Cider House Rules. An epic set in a Maine orphanage, the novel's central topic is abortion. Many drew parallels between the novel and Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist (1838). It took Irving nearly 10 years to develop the screenplay for Cider House, and the film—starring Michael Caine, Tobey Maguire, and Charlize Theron—was released in 1998. It was nominated for several Academy Awards, including Best Picture, and earned Irving an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.
In 1989, four years after publishing Cider House, Irving came out with A Prayer for Owen Meany, also set in a New England boarding school (and Toronto). The novel was influenced by Gunter Grass's 1959 The Tin Drum, and contains allusions to Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter and works of Dickens. Owen Meany was Irving's best selling book since Garp and, today, remains on many high school reading lists.
That book, too, was later adapted to film: the 1998 Simon Birch. Irving insisted that the title and character names be changed because the screenplay was "markedly different" from the novel. He is on record, however, as having enjoyed the film.
Other works
In addition to his novels, he has also published nonfiction: The Imaginary Girlfriend (1995), a short memoir focusing on writing and wrestling; Trying to Save Piggy Sneed (1996), a collection of his writings, which includes a brief memoir and short stories; and My Movie Business (1999), an account of the protracted process of bringing The Cider House Rules to the big screen,
In 2004 he published a children's picture book, A Sound Like Someone Trying Not to Make a Sound, illustrated by Tatjana Hauptmann. It had originally been included in his 1998 novel A Widow for One Year.
Life
Since the publication of Garp, which made him independently wealthy, Irving has been able to concentrate solely on fiction writing as a vocation, sporadically accepting short-term teaching positions —including one at his alma mater, the Iowa Writers' Workshop—and serving as an assistant coach on his sons' high school wrestling teams. (Irving was inducted into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame in 1992 as an "Outstanding American.")
Irving's four most highly regarded novels—The World According to Garp, The Cider House Rules, A Prayer for Owen Meany, and the 1998 A Widow for One Year—have been published in Modern Library editions. In 2004, a portion of A Widow for One Year was adapted into The Door in the Floor, starring Jeff Bridges and Kim Basinger.
On June 28, 2005, the New York Times published an article revealing that Until I Find You (2005) contains two elements about his personal life that he had never before discussed publicly: his sexual abuse at age 11 by an older woman, and the recent entrance in his life of his biological father's family.
Works
1968 - Setting Free the Bears
1972 - The Water-Method Man
1974 - The 158-Pound Marriage
1978 - The World According to Garp
1981 - The Hotel New Hampshire
1985 - The Cider House Rules
1989 - A Prayer for Owen Meany
1994 - A Son of the Circus
1995 - The Imaginary Girlfriend (non-fiction)
1996 - Trying to Save Piggy Sneed (collection)
1998 - A Widow for One Year
1999 - My Movie Business (non-fiction)
1999 - The Cider House Rules: A Screenplay
2001 - The Fourth Hand
2004 - A Sound Like Someone Trying Not to Make a Sound (Children's book)
2005 - Until I Find You
2009 - Last Night in Twisted River
2012 - In One Person
2015- Avenue of Mysteries
(Author bio adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 10/12/2015.)
Book Reviews
In One Person gives a lot. It’s funny, as you would expect. It’s risky in what it exposes.…Tolerance, in a John Irving novel, is not about anything goes. It’s what happens when we face our own desires honestly, whether we act on them or not.
Jeanette Winterson - New York Times Book Review
In One Person gives a lot. It’s funny, as you would expect. It’s risky in what it exposes.…Tolerance, in a John Irving novel, is not about anything goes. It’s what happens when we face our own desires honestly, whether we act on them or not.
Ron Charles - Washington Post
It is impossible to imagine the American—or international—literary landscape without John Irving…. He has sold tens of millions of copies of his books, books that have earned descriptions like epic and extraordinary and controversial and sexually brave. And yet, unlike so many writers in the contemporary canon, he manages to write books that are both critically acclaimed and beloved for their sheer readability. He is as close as one gets to a contemporary Dickens in the scope of his celebrity and the level of his achievement.
Time
His most daringly political, sexually transgressive, and moving novel in well over a decade.
Vanity Fair
Prep school. Wrestling. Unconventional sexual practices. Viennese interlude. This bill of particulars could only fit one American author: John Irving. His 13th novel (after Last Night in Twisted River) tells the oftentimes outrageous story of bisexual novelist Billy Abbott, who comes of age in the uptight 1950s and explores his sexuality through two decadent decades into the plague-ridden 1980s and finally to a more positive present day. Sexual confusion sets in early for Billy, simultaneously attracted to both the local female librarian and golden boy wrestler Jacques Kittredge, who treats Billy with the same disdain he shows Billy’s best friend (and occasional lover) Elaine. Faced with an unsympathetic mother and an absent father who might have been gay, Billy travels to Europe, where he has affairs with a transgendered female and an older male poet, an early AIDS activist. Irving’s take on the AIDS epidemic in New York is not totally persuasive (not enough confusion, terror, or anger), and his fractured time and place doesn’t allow him to generate the melodramatic string of incidents that his novels are famous for. In the end, sexual secrets abound in this novel, which intermittently touches the heart as it fitfully illuminates the mutability of human desire.
Publishers Weekly
What is "normal"? Does it really matter? In Irving's latest novel (after Last Night in Twisted River), nearly everyone has a secret, but the characters who embrace and accept their own differences and those of others are the most content. This makes the narrator, Bill, particularly appealing. Bill knows from an early age that he is bisexual, even if he doesn't label himself as such. He has "inappropriate crushes" but doesn't make himself miserable denying that part of himself; he simply acts, for better or for worse. The reader meets Bill at 15, living on the campus of an all-boys school in Vermont where his stepfather is on the faculty. Through the memories of a much older Bill, his life story is revealed, from his teenage years in Vermont to college and life as a writer in New York City. Bill is living in New York during the 1980s, at the height of the AIDS epidemic, and the suffering described is truly heart-wrenching. Irving cares deeply, and the novel is not just Bill's story but a human tale. Verdict: This wonderful blend of thought-provoking, well-constructed, and meaningful writing is what one has come to expect of Irving, and it also makes for an enjoyable page-turner. —Shaunna Hunter, Hampden-Sydney Coll. Lib., VA
Library Journal
Billy Dean (aka Billy Abbott) has a difficult time holding it together in one person, for his bisexuality pulls him in (obviously) two different directions. Billy comes of age in what is frequently, and erroneously, billed as a halcyon and more innocent age, the 1950s.... Billy also starts to have conflicted feelings toward Elaine, daughter of a voice teacher.... We also learn of Billy's homoerotic relationships with Tom, a college friend, and with Larry, a professor Billy had studied with overseas. And all of these sexual attractions and compulsions play out against the background of Billy's unconventional family.... Woody Allen's bon mot about bisexuality is that it doubled one's chances for a date, but in this novel Irving explores in his usual discursive style some of the more serious and exhaustive consequences of Allen's one-liner.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. “Goodness me, what makes a man?” asks Miss Frost. What makes a man, or a woman, in In One Person? Discuss, with reference to as many characters as possible.
2. What are some of the different meanings of the title In One Person?
3. “All children learn to speak in codes.” What are some of the codes people speak in in the book, and how well do the characters master them?
4. What does John Irving’s choice of epigraph to the novel tell you?
5. What is the importance of other works of literature—Madame Bovary, Giovanni’s Room or The Tempest, for example—in this novel? What kind of reading list is it?
6. Who is your favourite character in the novel, and why?
7. Compare and contrast In One Person with other recent works on related themes: you could look at Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides, or the movie Hedwig and the Angry Inch, or The Crying Game, for example. What do all these works have in common, and how do they differ? What are they addressing in our society and in our time?
8. “You’re a solo pilot, aren’t you, Bill… You’re cruising solo—no copilot has any clout with you,” Larry Upton tells Billy. Is this a fair assessment?
9. In what ways is In One Person a book about family?
10. Plays are important to In One Person. What do the performances of Shakespeare and Ibsen add to the book? What other kinds of acting and performance are highlighted in the novel, and why?
11. Sex is notoriously hard to write well about—there’s even a “Bad Sex Award” in Britain for the worst example that comes to light each year. How does John Irving get around the pitfalls of writing about sex?
12. Billy tells us that writers are people who make up stories, and at times he forgets details of his own story. Do you trust him, as a narrator? Why, or why not?
13. “My sexual awakening also marked the fitful birth of my imagination.” What are the links between creativity (specifically writing) and sex in In One Person?
14. Why do so many characters in In One Person have difficulty pronouncing strange, foreign or important words?
15. Do you find this a shocking book? What in particular is challenging or disturbing about it? What is John Irving trying to make his readers confront?
16. As a novel, what does In One Person contribute to society’s ongoing debates about sexuality, gender and identity?
17. How do you feel at the end of the book?
18. Will you recommend In One Person to your friends? Why, or why not?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
The Last Runaway
Tracy Chevalier, 2013
Penguin Group USA
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780525952992
Summary
In New York Times bestselling author Tracy Chevalier’s newest historical saga, she introduces Honor Bright, a modest English Quaker who moves to Ohio in 1850, only to find herself alienated and alone in a strange land. Sick from the moment she leaves England, and fleeing personal disappointment, she is forced by family tragedy to rely on strangers in a harsh, unfamiliar landscape.
Nineteenth-century America is practical, precarious, and unsentimental, and scarred by the continuing injustice of slavery. In her new home Honor discovers that principles count for little, even within a religious community meant to be committed to human equality.
However, drawn into the clandestine activities of the Underground Railroad, a network helping runaway slaves escape to freedom, Honor befriends two surprising women who embody the remarkable power of defiance. Eventually she must decide if she too can act on what she believes in, whatever the personal costs.
A powerful journey brimming with color and drama, The Last Runaway is Tracy Chevalier’s vivid engagement with an iconic part of American history. (From the publisher.)
About the Author
• Birth—October 19, 1962
• Where—Washington, D.C., USA
• Education—B.A., Oberlin College (USA); M.A., University of
East Anglia (UK)
• Currently—lives in London, UK
Raised in Washington D.C., Tracy Chevalier moved to England in 1984 after graduating from Oberlin College in Ohio. Initially intending to attend one semester abroad, she studied for a semester and never returned. After working as a literary editor for several years, Chevalier chose to pursue her own writing career and in 1994, she graduated with a degree in creative writing at the University of East Anglia.
The Virgin Blue (her first novel), was chosen by W. H. Smith for its Fresh Talent promotion in 1997. She lives in London with her husband and son and hopes to see all of Vermeer's thirty-five known paintings in her lifetime (thus far, she's seen twenty-eight of them). Tracy Chevalier first gained attention by imagining the answer to one of art history's small but intriguing questions: Who is the subject of Johannes Vermeer's painting "Girl with a Pearl Earring"?
It was a bold move on Chevalier's part to build a story around the somewhat mysterious 17th-century Dutch painter and his unassuming but luminous subject; but the author's purist approach helped set the tone. In an interview with her college's alumni magazine, she commented:
I decided early on that I wanted [Girl] to be a simple story, simply told, and to imitate with words what Vermeer was doing with paint. That may sound unbelievably pretentious, but I didn't mean it as "I can do Vermeer in words." I wanted to write it in a way that Vermeer would have painted: very simple lines, simple compositions, not a lot of clutter, and not a lot of superfluous characters.
Chevalier achieved her objective expertly, helped by the fact that she employed the famous Girl as narrator of the story. Sixteen-year-old Griet becomes a maid in Vermeer's tumultuous household, developing an apprentice relationship with the painter while drawing attention from other men and jealousy from women. Praise for the novel poured in: "Chevalier's exploration into the soul of this complex but naïve young woman is moving, and her depiction of 17th-century Delft is marvelously evocative," wrote the New York Times Book Review. The Wall Street Journal called it "vibrant and sumptuous."
Girl with a Pearl Earring was not Chevalier's first exploration of the past. In The Virgin Blue, her U.K.-published first novel (U.S. edition, 2003), her modern-day character Ella Turner goes back to 16th-century France in order to revisit her family history. As a result, she finds parallels between herself and a troubled ancestor — a woman whose fate had been unknown until Ella discovers it.
With 2001's Falling Angels, Chevalier—a former reference book editor who began her fiction career by enrolling in the graduate writing program at University of East Anglia — continued to tell stories of women in the past. But she has been open about the fact that compared to writing Girl with a Pearl Earring, the "nightmare" creating of her third novel was difficult and fraught with complications, even tears. The pressure of her previous success, coupled with a first draft that wasn't working out, made Chevalier want to abandon the effort altogether. Then, reading Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible led Chevalier to change her approach. "[Kingsolver] did such a fantastic job using different voices and I thought, with Falling Angels, I've told it in the wrong way," Chevalier told Bookpage magazine. "I wanted it to have lots of perspective."
With that, Chevalier began a rewrite of her tale about two families in the first decade of 20th-century London. With more than ten narrators (some more prominent than others), Falling Angels has perspective in spades and lots to maintain interest over its relatively brief span: a marriage in trouble, a girlhood friendship born at Highgate Cemetery, a woman's introduction to the suffragette movement. A spirited, fast-paced story, Falling Angels again earned critical praise. "This moving, bittersweet book flaunts Chevalier's gift for creating complex characters and an engaging plot," Book magazine concluded.
Chevalier continues to pursue her fascination with art and history in her fourth novel, on which she is currently at work. According to Oberlin Alumni Magazine, she is basing the book on the "Lady and the Unicorn" medieval tapestries that hang in Paris's Cluny Museum.
Extras
From a 2003 Barnes & Noble interview:
• Chevalier's interest in Vermeer extends beyond a fascination with one painting. "I have always loved Vermeer's paintings," Chevalier writes on her Web site. "One of my life goals is to view all thirty-five of them in the flesh. I've seen all but one — ‘Young Girl Reading a Letter' — which hangs in Dresden. There is so much mystery in each painting, in the women he depicts, so many stories suggested but not told. I wanted to tell one of them."
• Chevalier moved from the States to London in 1984. "I intended to stay six months," she writes. "I'm still here." She lives near Highgate Cemetery with her husband and son.
• The film version of Girl with a Pearl Earring was released 2003 with Scarlett Johansson in the role of Griet and Colin Firth playing Vermeer.
• When asked what book most influenced her life as a writer, here is her response:
It's impossible to list just one! I would say more generally— books that I read when I was a girl, that showed me how different worlds can be brought to life for a reader. My aunt likes to quote that when I was young I once said I was never alone when I had a book to read. (I don't remember saying that, but my aunt isn't prone to lying.) Those companions would be books like the Laura Ingalls Wilder series; Anne of Green Gables by L. M. Montgomery; A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle; The Egypt Game by Zylpha Keatley Snyder; "The Dark Is Rising" series by Susan Cooper; The Wolves of Willoughby Chase by Joan Aiken plus subsequent books in that series; and of course The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien.
• Other favorite books include: Pride and Prejudice (Austen), The Sound and the Fury (Faulkner), Anna Karenina (Tolstoy), The Catcher in the Rye (Salinger), Alias Grace (Atwood), and Song of Solomon (Morrison). (Author bio and interview from Barnes & Noble.)
Book Reviews
Chevalier’s (Girl with a Pearl Earring) haunting seventh novel delves into the difference between a theory of belief and its practice. When young Quaker Honor Bright’s fiance breaks off the relationship to marry outside the faith, Honor goes to America in 1850 with her sister, Grace. Grace is engaged to marry Adam Cox, a young man from their hometown who followed his brother to Faithwell, Ohio. Unfortunately, Grace dies en route, and Honor arrives in Ohio to find Adam sharing a house with Abigail, his sister-in-law, made a widow by the death of Adam’s brother. Honor moves into the house, but feels tense and unwelcome. In Belle Mills, a milliner who appreciates Honor’s sewing skills, Honor finds a friend and ally. Honor also draws the attention of Belle’s brother, Donovan, a slave hunter, and Jack Haymaker, a local farmer, a man “like a pulled muscle that Honor sensed every time she moved.” They marry and Honor, drawn by her sympathies into helping the Underground Railroad, is forced to choose between living her beliefs and merely speaking them. The birth of her own child raises the stakes, and she takes a unique stand in her untenable situation. Honor’s aching loneliness, overwhelming kindness, and stubborn convictions are beautifully rendered, as are the complexities of all the supporting characters and the vastness of the harsh landscape. Honor’s quiet determination provides a stark contrast to the roiling emotions of the slave issue, the abolitionist fight, and the often personal consequences. Chevalier’s thought-provoking, lyrical novel doesn’t allow any of her characters an easy way out.
Publishers Weekly
For the first time ever, the American-born, London-based Chevalier is using America as a backdrop. Leaving home after suffering a disappointment, English Quaker Honor Bright ends up in 1850 Ohio, where she finds folks—even Quakers—pragmatically unprincipled and becomes involved in the Underground Railroad.
Library Journal
Discussion Questions
1. "We're all from somewhere else. That's how Ohio is." —Belle Mills
Through Honor's own journey, the existence of the Underground Railroad and the runaways themselves, there is a constant sense of movement in this novel, suggesting home is not a permanent place and can be made and remade. Is Belle right that this is particular to Ohio or do you think this is a characteristic of America in general?
2. Silence in this novel seems to play different roles: communal religious silence at Meeting, individual reflection to which Honor attributes her own fine sewing, and there is also the Quaker community's more unsettling silence towards slavery.
Discuss the importance of its different roles in the novel. Does the Quaker community believe its own survival is dependent on staying quiet about slavery?
3. What are Honor's true feelings towards Donovan, and how do they change? Do you think her relationship with Donovan reveals aspects of her character that we don't see in her relationships with others?
4. When Belle Mills comes to visit Honor while she is sick at the Haymakers' farm, seeing her is, for Honor, like "discovering a sweet plum among a bowl full of unripe fruit." How important are the relationships Honor has with Belle Mills and Mrs. Reed? Is it significant that her strongest female relationships in Ohio lie outside the Quaker community? Would you say that female relationships would have been even more critical to survival in the 19th century than they are today?
5. Why do you think Honor feels she cannot go back to England? Do you think the horror of the journey plays a greater part than the heartbreak she ran away from?
6. When Honor comes across the applique patterns that are so common to quilting in Ohio, she finds them "cheerful" but "unsophisticated" when set against the accuracy and complexity of the patchwork quilts she is used to back home. Can this comparison have significance when considering the differences between England and the US at that time?
7. "As she peered into the dim woods, a raccoon scurried away, its humped back swaying back and forth...Grace would have loved to see a raccoon, Honor thought."
Honor spends much ofthe book learning how to cope with loss - of her intended husband, her sister, her homeland. Many of the other characters have their own losses to contend with. What does Honor learn from Belle, from Mrs. Reed, from Jack about dealing with loss?
8. How did The Last Runaway make you feel after reading it? Is this a hopeful story, both in the context of Honor's path and the path that America takes?
(Questions from author's website.)
And Then There Were None
Agatha Christie, 1939
HarperCollins
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062073488
Summary
The World's Bestselling Mystery
"Ten . . ."
Ten strangers are lured to an isolated island mansion off the Devon coast by a mysterious "U.N. Owen."
"Nine . . ."
At dinner a recorded message accuses each of them in turn of having a guilty secret, and by the end of the night one of the guests is dead.
"Eight . . ."
Stranded by a violent storm, and haunted by a nursery rhyme counting down one by one . . . one by one they begin to die.
"Seven . . ."
Who among them is the killer and will any of them survive? (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—September 15, 1890
• Where—Torquay, Devon, UK
• Death—January 12, 1976
• Where—Wallingford, Oxfordshire, UK
• Education—home schooled and fininshing school
in Paris.
• Awards—Edgar Award and the Grand Master Award
(broth from Mystery Writers of American)
Dame Agatha Mary Clarissa Christie, DBE was a British crime writer of novels, short stories, and plays. She also wrote six romances under the name Mary Westmacott, but she is best remembered for the 66 detective novels and more than 15 short story collections she wrote under her own name, most of which revolve around the investigations of such characters as Hercule Poirot, Miss Jane Marple and Tommy and Tuppence. She also wrote the world's longest-running play The Mousetrap.
According to the Guinness Book of World Records, Christie is the best-selling novelist of all time. Her novels have sold roughly four billion copies, and her estate claims that her works rank third, after those of William Shakespeare and the Bible, as the world's most widely published books. According to Index Translationum, Christie is the most translated individual author, and her books have been translated into at least 103 languages. And Then There Were None is Christie's best-selling novel with 100 million sales to date, making it the world's best-selling mystery ever, and one of the best-selling books of all time. In 1971, she was made a Dame by Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace.
Christie's stage play The Mousetrap holds the record for the longest initial run: it opened at the Ambassadors Theatre in London on 25 November 1952 and as of 2012 was still running after more than 25,000 performances. In 1955, Christie was the first recipient of the Mystery Writers of America's highest honour, the Grand Master Award, and in the same year Witness for the Prosecution was given an Edgar Award by the MWA for Best Play. Many of her books and short stories have been filmed, and many have been adapted for television, radio, video games and comics.
Childhood
Born to a wealthy upper-middle-class family in Torquay, Devon, Christie would describe her childhood as "very happy" and was surrounded by a series of strong and independent women from an early age. Her time was spent alternating between her Devonshire home, her grandmother's house in Ealing, West London, and parts of Southern Europe, where her family would holiday during the winter. Nominally Christian, she was also raised in a household with various esoteric beliefs, and like her siblings believed that their mother Clara was a psychic with the ability of second sight.
Her mother insisted that she receive a home education, and so her parents were responsible for teaching her to read and write, and to be able to perform basic arithmetic, a subject that she particularly enjoyed. They also taught her about music, and she learned to play both the piano and the mandolin; she was also a voracious reader from an early age. Much of her childhood was spent largely alone and separate from other children, although she spent much time with her pets, whom she adored. Eventually making friends with a group of other girls in Torquay, she noted that "one of the highlights of my existence" was her appearance in a local theatrical production of The Yeomen of the Guard where she starred alongside them.
Her father was often ill, suffering from a series of heart attacks, and in November 1901 he died, aged 55. His death left the family devastated, and in an uncertain economic situation. Clara and Agatha continued to live together in their Torquay home; Madge had moved to the nearby Cheadle Hall with her new husband, and Monty, who had joined the army, had been sent to South Africa to fight in the Boer War. Agatha would later claim that her father's death, occurring when she was 11 years old, marked the end of her childhood for her.
In 1902, Agatha would be sent to receive a formal education at Miss Guyer's Girls School in Torquay, but found it difficult to adjust to the disciplined atmosphere. In 1905 she was then sent to the city of Paris, France, where she was educated in three pensions—Mademoiselle Cabernet's, Les Marroniers and then Miss Dryden's—the latter of which served primarily as a finishing school.
Early writing
Returning to England in 1910, she engaged in social activities in search of a husband and also took part in writing and performing in amateur theatrics. She helped put together a play called The Blue Beard of Unhappiness with a number of female friends.
Her writing extended to both poetry and music, and some of her early works saw publication, but she decided against focusing on either of these as future professions. It was while recovering in bed from an illness that she penned her first short story; entitled "The House of Beauty", it consisted of about 6000 words and dealt with the world of "madness and dreams" which fascinated Christie. She soon followed this up with a string of other shorts, all of which were rejected, although they would all be revised and published at a later date, sometimes under new titles.
Christie then began to put together her first novel, Snow Upon the Desert, which was set in Cairo and drew from a recent visit to the city. Sending it to various publishers under the pseudonym of Monosyllaba, which was rejected by a number of publishers.
Marriage
Meanwhile, she had continued searching for a husband, and had entered into short-lived relationships with four separate men before meeting a young man named Archibald "Archie" Christie at a dance given by Lord and Lady Clifford of Chudleigh, about 12 miles from Torquay. Archie had been born in India, the son of a judge in the Indian Civil Service, before travelling to England where he joined the air force, who stationed him in Devon in 1912. Soon entering into a relationship, the couple fell in love, and after being informed that he was being stationed in Farnborough, Archie asked her to marry him, and she accepted.
1914 saw the outbreak of the First World War, and Archie was sent to France to battle the German forces. Agatha also involved herself in the war effort, joining the Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) and attending to wounded soldiers at the hospital in Torquay. In this position she was responsible for aiding the doctors and trying to keep up morale, performing 3,400 hours of unpaid work between October 1914 and December 1916 before earning a wage as a dispenser at an annual rate of £16 until the end of her service in September 1918.
She met her fiance in London during his leave at the end of 1914, and they were married on the afternoon of Christmas Eve. They would meet up again throughout the war each time that he was posted home. Rising through the ranks, he was eventually stationed back to Britain in September 1918 as a colonel in the Air Ministry, and with Agatha he settled into a flat at 5 Northwick Terrace in St. John's Wood, Northwest London.
First novels: 1919–1923
Christie had long been a fan of detective novels, having enjoyed Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White and The Moonstone as well as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's early Sherlock Holmes stories. Deciding to write her own detective novel, entitled The Mysterious Affair at Styles, she created a detective named Hercule Poirot to be her protagonist. A former Belgian police officer noted for his twirly moustache and egg-shaped head, Poirot had been a refugee who had fled to Britain following Germany's invasion of Belgium; in this manner, Christie had been influenced by the Belgian refugees whom she had encountered in Torquay.
After unsuccessfully sending her manuscript to such publishing companies as Hodder and Stoughton and Methuen, she sent it to John Lane at The Bodley Head, who kept it for several months before announcing that the press would publish it on the condition that Christie agreed to change the ending. She duly did so, and signed a contract with Lane that she would later claim was exploitative.
Christie meanwhile settled into married life, giving birth to a daughter named Rosalind at Ashfield, where the couple—having few friends in London—spent much of their time. Archie obtained a job in the City working in the financial sector, and although he started out on a relatively low salary, he was still able to employ a maid for his family.
Christie's second novel, The Secret Adversary (1922), featured new protagonists in the form of detective couple Tommy and Tuppence; again published by The Bodley Head, it earned her £50. She followed this with a third novel, once again featuring Poirot, entitled Murder on the Links (1923), as well as a series of Poirot short stories commissioned by Bruce Ingram, editor of Sketch magazine. When Archie was offered a job organising a world tour to promote the British Empire Exhibition, the couple left their daughter with Agatha's mother and sister and travelled to South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and Hawaii. The couple learnt to surf prone in South Africa and in Waikiki became some of the first Britons to surf standing up.
Disappearance
In late 1926, Christie's husband Archie announced he was in love with Nancy Neele, and wanted a divorce. On 3 December 1926 the couple quarrelled, and Archie left their house Styles in Sunningdale, Berkshire, to spend the weekend with his mistress at Godalming, Surrey. That same evening Agatha disappeared from her home, leaving behind a letter for her secretary saying that she was going to Yorkshire. Her disappearance caused an outcry from the public, many of whom were admirers of her novels. Despite a massive manhunt, she was not found for 10 days.
On 14 December 1926 Agatha Christie was identified as a guest at the Swan Hydropathic Hotel (now the Old Swan Hotel in Harrogate, Yorkshire, where she was registered as Mrs Teresa Neele from Cape Town. Christie never accounted for her disappearance. Although two doctors had diagnosed her as suffering from psychogenic fugue, opinion remains divided. A nervous breakdown from a natural propensity for depression may have been exacerbated by her mother's death earlier that year and her husband's infidelity. Public reaction at the time was largely negative, supposing a publicity stunt or attempt to frame her husband for murder.
Author Jared Cade interviewed numerous witnesses and relatives for his sympathetic biography, Agatha Christie and the Missing Eleven Days, and provided a substantial amount of evidence to suggest that Christie planned the entire disappearance to embarrass her husband, never thinking it would escalate into the melodrama it became. The Christies divorced in 1928.
Second marriage and later life
In 1930, Christie married archaeologist Max Mallowan after joining him in an archaeological dig. Their marriage was always happy, continuing until Christie's death in 1976. Max introduced her to wine, which she never enjoyed, preferring to drink water in restaurants. She tried unsuccessfully to make herself like cigarettes by smoking one after lunch and one after dinner every day for six months.
Christie frequently used settings which were familiar to her for her stories. Christie's travels with Mallowan contributed background to several of her novels set in the Middle East. Other novels (such as And Then There Were None) were set in and around Torquay, where she was born. Christie's 1934 novel Murder on the Orient Express was written in the Pera Palace Hotel in Istanbul, Turkey, the southern terminus of the railway. The hotel maintains Christie's room as a memorial to the author. The Greenway Estate in Devon, acquired by the couple as a summer residence in 1938, is now in the care of the National Trust.
During the Second World War, Christie worked in the pharmacy at University College Hospital, London, where she acquired a knowledge of poisons that she put to good use in her post-war crime novels. For example, the use of thallium as a poison was suggested to her by UCH Chief Pharmacist Harold Davis, and in The Pale Horse, (1961) she employed it to dispatch a series of victims, the first clue to the murder method coming from the victims' loss of hair. So accurate was her description of thallium poisoning that on at least one occasion it helped solve a case that was baffling doctors.
To honour her many literary works, she was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 1956 New Year Honours The next year, she became the President of the Detection Club. In the 1971 New Year Honours she was promoted Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire, three years after her husband had been knighted for his archaeological work in 1968. They were one of the few married couples where both partners were honoured in their own right. From 1968, due to her husband's knighthood, Christie could also be styled as Lady Mallowan.
Final years
From 1971 to 1974, Christie's health began to fail, although she continued to write. In 1975, sensing her increasing weakness, Christie signed over the rights of her most successful play, The Mousetrap, to her grandson. Recently, using experimental textual tools of analysis, Canadian researchers have suggested that Christie may have begun to suffer from Alzheimer's disease or other dementia.
Agatha Christie died on 12 January 1976 at age 85 from natural causes at her Winterbrook House in the north of Cholsey parish, adjoining Wallingford in Oxfordshire. She is buried in the nearby churchyard of St Mary's, Cholsey.
Christie's only child, Rosalind Margaret Hicks, died, also aged 85, on 28 October 2004 from natural causes in Torbay, Devon. Christie's grandson, Mathew Prichard, was heir to the copyright to some of his grandmother's literary works (including The Mousetrap) and is still associated with Agatha Christie Limited. (Adapted from Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
The whole thing is utterly impossible and utterly fascinating. It is the most baffling mystery Agatha Christie has ever written.
New York Times
There is no cheating; the reader is just bamboozled in a straightforward way from first to last….The most colossal achievement of a colossal career. The book must rank with Mrs. Christie’s previous best—on the top notch of detection.
New Statesman (UK)
One of the very best, most genuinely bewildering Christies.
Observer (UK)
One of the most ingenious thrillers in many a day.
Time
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for And Then There Were None:
1. Talk about the characters—are any of them likable? Do you develop sympathy for anyone in particular: put another way, are some more sympathic than others? Why might Christie have put together such an unpleasant cast of characters?
2. Was there any one individual you originally suspected? What about Dr. Armstrong, who goes off alone to find General Macarthur?
3. Locate the various clues Christie leaves along the way... 1) clues designed to lead us off the path, as in a red herring, and 2) clues that point to the real culprit.
4. What is the point of the poem "Ten Little Soldiers" and the fact that after each death one of the figurines on the dining room table goes missing? How do both poem and figurines function in the story? Why might Christie have used such a symbol?
5. Why does Emily Brent write in her diary the name Beatrice Taylor as the murderer? Does Brent feel guilt for what she had done...or not? Do any of the guests come to regret their past actions?
6. Talk about class and gender distinctions. Do you find it strange that Rogers continues to serve the guests despite the death of his wife? Or that women are in charge of meals and clean-up? What about the anti-semitic references?
7. Talk about the motive behind the murders of all the guests—which then might lead you into a discussion of legal justice vs. philosophical justice. Each of the guests is guilty of a crime, but not one that could be prosecuted in a court of law. Does each receive his/her just deserts? In other words, has true justice been accomplished by the end of the novel? Is the murderer insane as all the guests claim? Or is he/she acting with clear-headed logic and rationality?
8. Is the endng satisfying? Were you surprised by the identity of the murderer? Would you have preferred the final victim to discover who the killer was before dying? Why might Christie have withheld that information from readers, as well, until the epilogue?
9. Have you read any other Agatha Christie novels? Which ones...and how does this compare?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
The Imposter Bride
Nancy Richler, 2012
St. Martin's Press
368 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781250010063
Summary
The Imposter Bride by Nancy Richler is an unforgettable novel about a mysterious mail-order bride in the wake of WWII, whose sudden decision ripples through time to deeply impact the daughter she never knew
In the wake of World War II, a young, enigmatic woman named Lily arrives in Montreal on her own, expecting to be married to a man she’s never met. But, upon seeing her at the train station, Sol Kramer turns her down. Out of pity, his brother Nathan decides to marry her instead, and pity turns into a deep—and doomed—love. It is immediately clear that Lily is not who she claims to be. Her attempt to live out her life as Lily Azerov shatters when she disappears, leaving a new husband and a baby daughter with only a diary, a large uncut diamond – and a need to find the truth
Who is Lily and what happened to the young woman whose identity she stole? Why has she left and where did she go? It's up to the daughter Lily abandoned to find the answers to these questions, as she searches for the mother she may never find or truly know. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1957
• Where—Montreal, Quebec, Canada
• Education—Brandeis University
• Awards—Canadian Jewish Book Award; Adel
Wizo Award; shortlist, Soctiabank Giller Prize
• Currently—lives in Montreal, Quebec
Nancy Richler is a Canadian novelist. Born in Montreal, Quebec in 1957, she spent much of her adult life and career in Vancouver, British Columbia before returning to Montreal in the early 2010s.
Richler published her first novel, Throwaway Angels, in 1996. The novel was shortlisted for an Arthur Ellis Award for Best First Novel. Her 2003 novel Your Mouth Is Lovely won the 2003 Canadian Jewish Book Award for Fiction and the 2004 Adei Wizo Award. Her 2012 novel The Impostor Bride was a shortlisted nominee for the 2012 Scotiabank Giller Prize.
She lives with her partner Vicki Trerise, a lawyer and mediator, in Montreal. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
Richler is back, and with an elegant, ambitious, accomplished new work.
Toronto Globe and Mail
A hopeful testament to the power of family and memory, and the importance and meaning of one’s name.
Winnipeg Free Press
Richler’s third novel explores emotional devastation that lasts generations, delivering a powerful punch. In post-WWII Montreal, Canada, Lily Kramer, a young refugee, marries Nathan, the brother of the man with whom she had corresponded and who, after catching his first glimpse of his bride-to-be, refused to marry her. But Lily is no saint herself, and not who she portrays herself to be. Told in alternating chapters, Lily’s life after marrying Nathan is juxtaposed with the life of her daughter, Ruth, abandoned soon after she was born. Two notebooks and a mysterious diamond are all that remain for Ruth of her mother, along with a need to know the truth (“Could a person really lose her very sense of self because the world that formed and reflected that self back to her was destroyed?”). Richler—whose previous novel, Your Mouth Is Lovely, won the 2003 Canadian Jewish Book Award—perfectly captures Lily’s heartbreak and the secrets that she keeps. Chapter by chapter the wrenching secrets of the Kramer family peel away, until finally what Lily has hidden is revealed. Once the truth comes, it is heartbreaking.
Publishers Weekly
Richler infuses her work with iconic images from the era she covers, painting a rich image of the Canadian Jewish community, their customs and family relationships, in a past century… A beautiful tale.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. What does the novel suggest about whether families are born or made?
2. Why do you think Lily chose to communicate with her daughter through rocks as opposed to words?
3. There are many secrets in The Imposter Bride, beginning with Lily's true identity. What secrets do other characters keep, and how do you think the secrets ultimately help or hurt their loved ones?
4. Lily attempts to sever her childhood and the difficult years in her homeland completely from her adult life. Is that ever really possible? Is it healthier to leave everything behind?
5. Why do you think Lily went to the home of the relative of the girl whose identity she had stolen?
6. The Imposter Bride shifts time periods and narratives several times, sometimes providing different perspectives of the same event. Are there any characters you wished had revealed more of their own perspective? In what ways does this structure reflect the experience of an individual within a family?
7. Why did some people have to take the identity papers of others at the end of WW2? Why did Lily feel she had to? Do you feel she had to?
8. What purposes were served for her by assuming the identity of another person?
9. Do you feel Lily bore any responsibility in the death of the girl whose identity she stole? Do the demands of morality/moral agency shift or change when a person is in danger or has been victimized?
10. Lily's behavior toward her daughter could be perceived as cold, distant, and uncaring. How do you see her attempts to communicate, and her treatment of Ruth later in life?
11. How do the main characters perceive loyalty? Does the abandonment of a parent affect Ruth's adult relationships?
12. Many of the characters in The Imposter Bride walk the line between selfishness and compassion. What does The Imposter Bride tell you about forgiveness? Do you agree with Ruth's forgiveness of the women in her life?
13. The conclusion of Ruth's relationship with her mother may be unexpected for some readers. Do you think it's realistic? After years of romanticizing her mother, does Ruth find what she was hoping for?
14. How were you affected when Ruth read the letter from her deceased grandmother? The letter from her own mother?
15. Did you find the conclusion satisfying?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
Another Piece of My Heart |
|
—Excerpt—
***
* * *
|