Island of a Thousand Mirrors
Nayomi Munaweera, 2012 (2014, U.S.)
St. Martin's Press
288 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781250051875
Summary
A family epic set against the backdrop of the Sri Lankan civil war comes to poignant and powerful life in this lyrical and riveting debut novel by Nayomi Munaweera.
Before violence tore apart the tapestry of Sri Lanka and turned its pristine beaches red, there were two families; two young women, ripe for love with hopes for the future; and a chance encounter that leads to the terrible heritage they must reckon with for years to come.
One tragic moment that defines the fate of these women and their families will haunt their choices for decades to come. In the end, love and longing promise only an uneasy peace.
A sweeping saga with the intimacy of a memoir that brings to mind epic fiction like The Kite Runner and The God of Small Things, Nayomi Munaweera's Island of a Thousand Mirrors strikes mercilessly at the heart of war.
It offers an unparalleled portrait of a beautiful land during its most difficult moments. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1973
• Where—Colombo, Sri Lanka
• Raised—Los Angeles, California, USA
• Education—B.A., University of California (UCAL), Irving; M.A., UCAL, Riverside
• Awards—Commonwealth Book Prize (Asian Region)
• Currently—lives in the San Francisco Bay area
Nayomi Munaweera is a Sri Lankan American writer and author of two novels. Her 2012 debut Island of a Thousand Mirrors won Commonwealth Book Prize for the Asian Region in 2013 and was shortlisted for a number of other awards. In 2016 she released her second novel What Lies Between Us.
Nayomi Munaweera was born in Sri Lanka, but her family left to escape the ravages of the civil war. They went first to Nigeria then eventually settled in Los Angeles, California, where Munaweera spent her teenage years. She holds Bachelor's degree in Literature from the University of California, Irvine, and a Master's degree in South Asian Literature from the University of California, Riverside.
Novels
Island of a Thousand Mirrors, Munaweera's debut novel, was published in South Asia in 2012 and in the U.S. in 2014. It tells the story of the conflict between two main ethnic groups in Sri Lanka from the perspective of two girls who witness the horror of the civil war. The war officially began in 1983 and continued until 2009.
What Lies Between Us is the story of a young Sri Lankan teenager who outwardly has taken up the mantel of American adolescence. Underneath, however, she struggles to reconcile her life in the U.S. with her traumatic past. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 3/52016.)
Book Reviews
The uneasy relationship between "liberation movements" and those they seek to liberate is convincingly captured, as are the constant negotiations civilians have to make to survive in a war zone…. The beating heart of Island of a Thousand Mirrors is not so much its human characters but Sri Lanka itself and the vivid, occasionally incandescent, language used to describe this teardrop in the Indian Ocean.
Nadifa Mohamed - New York Times Book Review
The paradisiacal landscapes of Sri Lanka are as astonishing as the barbarity of its revolution, and Munaweera evokes the power of both in a lyrical debut novel.... The book leaves the reader with two lingering smells that perfectly capture the conflict that nearly destroyed Munaweera’s home country: gasoline and jasmine.
Publishers Weekly
Munaweera's storytelling and lyrical writing easily pull readers into the world of her characters (all strongly drawn, especially the females), and the book as a whole is an eye-opening look at lives and cultures intersecting during a turbulent and disturbing historical period of civil unrest. —Shirley Quan, Orange Cty. P.L., Santa Ana, CA
Library Journal
The Sri Lankan civil war's traumatic effect on the island nation's people—and one family in particular—is the subject of this verdantly atmospheric first novel.... Munaweera's depiction of war-torn Sri Lanka, though harrowing, seems rushed and journalistic, more reported than experienced.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. In this book, Munaweera takes on the point of views of both a Sinhala woman and a Tamil woman. Why do you think she made this decision? What does it mean to try and express both points of view when the subject is a civil war? Do you think she was more successful in painting one or the other of these women? Which one and why do you think so?
2. Did your reading of the Prologue change after you finished reading the book? How?
3. This is a book partly about the process of immigration. Do you think Munaweera successfully captured the pleasures and pains of immigration? Did she successfully express the divided nature of the immigrant? Did she do so in ways that reminded you of other authors or was the experience of reading this book quite different?
4. This novel has been compared to The God of Small Things, Anil’s Ghost, and The Kite Runner. If you’ve read these books, do you think these are fair comparisons? Why or why not? Are there other authors/books Munaweera’s style reminds you of?
5. Visaka and Ravan’s love is thwarted but their children go on to fall in love. What dose Munaweera seem to be saying about destiny, the acts/sins of parents, the nature of love?
6. The big white house on the seaside in Colombo figures prominently in this book. It is where Visaka grows up, where Yasodhara is brought after she is born and where the Upstairs-Downstairs wars take place. What does this house seem to represent in the book?
7. The riots in 1983 are described as a pivot point in the history of Sri Lanka and in the plot of the book. Were these scenes similar to painful moments in other parts of the world? Saraswathie grows up with aspirations of becoming a teacher. Do you think what happens to her subsequently is plausible? Do you think Munaweera properly describes the process by which a normal girl might become a suicide bomber?
9. The scene of Saraswathie’s rape is extremely traumatic and Munaweera has admitted that it was quite difficult for her to write. Do you think the scene was necessary in the book or should literature stay away from depicting the most painful events in a character’s life? Why do you think Munaweera chose to include this scene?
10. Would you describe this book as a feminist work? If so, why?
11. Munaweera has admitted that this is a book obsessed with food. Did you find this to be true? Did the book make you interested in finding out more about Sri Lankan cuisine?
12. What does the ending message of the book seem to be?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
What Lies Between Us
Nayomi Munaweera, 2016
St. Martin's Press
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781250043948
Summary
In the idyllic hill country of Sri Lanka, a young girl grows up with her loving family; but even in the midst of this paradise, terror lurks in the shadows.
When tragedy strikes, she and her mother must seek safety by immigrating to America.
There the girl reinvents herself as an American teenager to survive, with the help of her cousin; but even as she assimilates and thrives, the secrets and scars of her past follow her into adulthood.
In this new country of freedom, everything she has built begins to crumble around her, and her hold on reality becomes more and more tenuous. When the past and the present collide, she sees only one terrible choice.
From Nayomi Munaweera, the award-winning author of Island of a Thousand Mirrors, comes the confession of a woman, driven by the demons of her past to commit a single and possibly unforgivable crime. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1973
• Where—Colombo, Sri Lanka
• Raised—Los Angeles, California, USA
• Education—B.A., University of California (UCAL), Irving; M.A., UCAL, Riverside
• Awards—Commonwealth Book Prize (Asian Region)
• Currently—lives in the San Francisco Bay area
Nayomi Munaweera is a Sri Lankan American writer and author of two novels. Her 2012 debut Island of a Thousand Mirrors won Commonwealth Book Prize for the Asian Region in 2013 and was shortlisted for a number of other awards. In 2016 she released her second novel What Lies Between Us.
Nayomi Munaweera was born in Sri Lanka, but her family left to escape the ravages of the civil war. They went first to Nigeria then eventually settled in Los Angeles, California, where Munaweera spent her teenage years. She holds Bachelor's degree in Literature from the University of California, Irvine, and a Master's degree in South Asian Literature from the University of California, Riverside.
Novels
Island of a Thousand Mirrors, Munaweera's debut novel, was published in South Asia in 2012 and in the U.S. in 2014. It tells the story of the conflict between two main ethnic groups in Sri Lanka from the perspective of two girls who witness the horror of the civil war. The war officially began in 1983 and continued until 2009.
What Lies Between Us is the story of a young Sri Lankan teenager who outwardly has taken up the mantel of American adolescence. Underneath, however, she struggles to reconcile her life in the U.S. with her traumatic past. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 3/52016.)
Book Reviews
The paradisiacal landscapes of Sri Lanka are as astonishing as the barbarity of its revolution, and Munaweera evokes the power of both in a lyrical debut novel worthy of shelving alongside her countryman Michael Ondaatje or her fellow writer of the multigenerational immigrant experience Jhumpa Lahiri.
Publishers Weekly
[A] girl from Sri Lanka's beautiful hill country escapes terror by immigrating with her mother to America yet can't shake off the past and is eventually driven to commit a terrible crime.
Library Journal
This family tragedy begins in a prison cell, where the unnamed narrator wants to explain her (also unnamed) crime.... The melodramatic framing device only distracts from the crystalline precision with which Munaweera renders the richness of the immigrant experience as well as her character's singular longings, fears, joys, and demons.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Did you suspect who really was abusing the main character? What are the clues? What did you think of Samson? Do you think her mother may have suffered a similar transgression? Why did Ganga assume it was Samson all along? Why was she unable to remember the true abuser?
2. What is the book saying about the restorative powers of love. Why was Daniel's loyalty and love not able to save Ganga? Do you think he should have acted differently? What do you think he could have done to prevent what happened?
3. Childhood sexual abuse affects untold numbers of people all over the world. What is the book saying about the lifelong toll of trauma? About the weight of secrets untold upon a life?
4. Ganga's crime is one that is more common than you would think. She is also extremely regretful of her crime. Do you think she should be forgiven? Is this a crime that can be forgiven?
(Questions from the author's website.)
Forty Rooms
Olga Grushin, 2016
Penguin Publishing
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781101982334
Summary
Totally original in conception and magnificently executed, Forty Rooms is mysterious, withholding, and ultimately emotionally devastating. Olga Grushin is dealing with issues of women’s identity, of women’s choices, that no modern novel has explored so deeply.
Forty rooms is a conceit: it proposes that a modern woman will inhabit forty rooms in her lifetime. They form her biography, from childhood to death.
For our protagonist, the much-loved child of a late marriage, the first rooms she is aware of as she nears the age of five are those that make up her family’s Moscow apartment. We follow this child as she reaches adolescence, leaves home to study in America, and slowly discovers sexual happiness and love. But her hunger for adventure and her longing to be a great poet conspire to kill the affair.
She seems to have made her choice. But one day she runs into a college classmate. He is sure of his path through life, and he is protective of her. (He is also a great cook.) They drift into an affair and marriage. What follows are the decades of births and deaths, the celebrations, material accumulations, and home comforts—until one day, her children grown and gone, her husband absent, she finds herself alone except for the ghosts of her youth, who have come back to haunt and even taunt her.
Compelling and complex, Forty Rooms is also profoundly affecting, its ending shattering but true. We know that Mrs. Caldwell (for that is the only name by which we know her) has died. Was it a life well lived? Quite likely. Was it a life complete? Does such a life ever really exist? Life is, after all, full of trade-offs and choices.
Who is to say her path was not well taken? It is this ambiguity that is at the heart of this provocative novel. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1971
• Where—Moscow, Russia
• Raised—Prague, Czechoslovakia
• Education—Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts; Moscow State University; Emory University
• Awards—New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award
• Currently—lives outside Washington, DC
Olga Grushin is a Russian-born award-winning writer whose work has been translated into fifteen languages.
Born in Moscow to the family of Boris Grushin, a prominent Soviet sociologist, she spent most of her childhood in Prague, Czechoslovakia. She was educated at Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts and Moscow State University before receiving a scholarship to Emory University from which she graduated (summa cum laude) in 1993. She became a naturalized US citizen in 2002 and retains her Russian citizenship.
Grushin has worked as an interpreter for Jimmy Carter, as a cocktail waitress in a jazz bar, a translator at the World Bank, a research analyst at a Washington, D.C., law firm, and most recently an editor at Harvard University's Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.
Her first novel, The Dream Life of Sukhanov (2006), won the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Award for First Fiction and for England’s Orange Award for New Writers. The New York Times chose it as a Notable Book of the Year. Both it and her second novel, The Line (2010), were among the Washington Post’s Ten Best Books of the Year (2007, 2010). In 2007, Granta named Grushin one of the Best Young American Novelists. Forty Rooms (2016) is her third novel.
Grushin now lives outside Washington, D.C., with her two children. (Adapted from the publisher and Wikipedia. Retrieved 3/5/2016.)
Book Reviews
The structure of Olga Grushin's Forty Rooms is ingeniously simple...there is enough material to warrant hours of contemplation.... The reader's impulse to grapple with the text, to wrestle it down and to raise objections or to attempt to identify her own place in the context of the story, is a sign not of weakness, but of Grushin's genius. There is no redemption story to relax into here, and no easy answers.... This novel reminds us that to pursue her dreams, a woman is working against the establishment, not with it. To the young women into whose hands I will most certainly be putting Grushin's novel, I will say this: You can do it all, but together we can create a world in which we might be able to do more. Because if we don't keep working for greater gender equality, it's not in the best interests of the current power brokers to stop us from continuing to spend more than a fair share of our lives elbow-deep in soapsuds whether we choose to or not.
Alexandra Fuller - New York Times Book Review
[An] ingenious and original conceit.... Forty Rooms is a deft, engaging novel written with rare eloquence. But a ferociously uncompromising morality play lurks within it.
Wall Street Journal
[A] child of the Moscow intelligentsia rejects a "small life consumed by happiness" in America and a life driven by "the divine standards of art." But her path veers wildly in the New World.... At the end of life, Grushin concludes that the impossible, irresistible path of art is what’s most joyful—and memorable.
Publishers Weekly
Lacking the grandeur of her previous titles despite the masterly writing (and, at times, overwriting), this work might puzzle some of Grushin's fans but will appeal to readers interested in careful portraiture of one woman's struggles. —Edward B. Cone, New York
Library Journal
(Starred review.) The tension between art and domesticity....narrated by an unnamed heroine who can see through mundane reality...into other worlds.... [The novel poses] questions that women, especially, will recognize. Honest, tender, and exquisitely crafted. A novel to savor.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Who is the narrator of this story? Through whose eyes do you see the events unfold? Is it one of the last incarnations of Mrs. Caldwell, if so, which one? Is it her friend, Olga, or the author, Olga Grushin? Who else might be telling this story?
2. From the anonymous child who becomes Mrs. Caldwell to the Olgas (both author and character), what importance can be found in the assigning of names? Is a name felt more in its presence or absence?
3. What you do you make of the apparitions that visit the protagonist? Are they figments of her imagination or a part of the collective consciousness? Are they cruel or benevolent?
4. Could the protagonist have become a great poet? And is creative success about talent, diligence, or something else?
5. Are there any choices the protagonist made that may have acted as a tipping point, or did each lead inevitably to the next?
6. If you were to write your own life story in forty rooms, where would you begin? Are there key moments you would pick out for yourself? And where did they unfold?
7. In their last conversation Apollo tells Mrs. Caldwell:
You must earn your right to say the things that truly matter—and for that, you pay in years, you pay in sweat, you pay in tears, you pay in blood. Both yours and other people’s.
Did the universe give Mrs. Caldwell opportunities, and did she squander them by seeking not to suffer? Were her prayers, especially for loved ones, selfless? Would it have been selfish to embrace their misfortune for her inspiration? And if so, is art an act of selfish appropriation or selflessness?
8. How is accomplishment defined in Forty Rooms and do you agree with these parameters?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
top of page (summary)
The Unfortunate Importance of Beauty
Amanda Filipacchi, 2015
W.W. Norton & Co.
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 978039335230#
Summary
In the heart of New York City, a group of artistic friends struggles with society's standards of beauty.
At the center are Barb and Lily, two women at opposite ends of the beauty spectrum, but with the same problem: each fears she will never find a love that can overcome her looks.
Barb, a stunningly beautiful costume designer, makes herself ugly in hopes of finding true love.
Meanwhile, her friend Lily, a brilliantly talented but plain-looking musician, goes to fantastic lengths to attract the man who has rejected her—with results that are as touching as they are transformative.
To complicate matters, Barb and Lily discover that they may have a murderer in their midst, that Barb’s calm disposition is more dangerously provocative than her beauty ever was, and that Lily's musical talents are more powerful than anyone could have imagined.
Part literary whodunit, part surrealist farce, The Unfortunate Importance of Beauty is a smart, modern-day fairy tale. With biting wit and offbeat charm, Amanda Filipacchi illuminates the labyrinthine relationship between beauty, desire, and identity, asking at every turn: what does it truly mean to allow oneself to be seen? (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—October 10, 1967
• Where—Paris, France
• Education—B.A., Hamilton College; M.F.A., Columbia University
• Currently—lives in New York City, New York
Amanda Filipacchi (fila-paki) is an American novelist. She was born in Paris and educated in both France and the U.S. She is the author of four novels, Nude Men (1993), Vapor (1999), Love Creeps (2005), and The Unfortunate Importance of Beauty (2015). Her fiction has been translated into 13 languages.
Filipacchi was born in Paris, and was educated in France (attending the American School of Paris in St. Cloud) and in the U.S. She is the daughter of former model Sondra Peterson and Daniel Filipacchi, chairman emeritus of Hachette Filipacchi Medias.
Filipacchi has been writing since the age of thirteen, completing three unpublished novels in her teenage years. She has lived in New York since she was 17. She attended Hamilton College, from which she graduated with a B.A. in Creative Writing. At age 20 she tried her hand at non-fiction writing at Rolling Stone magazine. Then in 1990 Filipacchi enrolled in Columbia University's M.F.A fiction writing program, where she wrote a master's thesis, which she later turned into her first published novel, Nude Men.
In 1992, even before graduating from Columbia, her agent, Melanie Jackson, sold Nude Men to Viking Press. Filipacchi was only 24. The novel was translated widely and was anthologized in The Best American Humor 1994 (Simon & Schuster).
Reviewers have called Filipacchi "a prodigious postfeminist talent" and a "lovely comic surrealist." The Boston Globe described her writing style as "reminiscent in certain ways of Muriel Spark ... brisk, witty, knowing, mischievous." Love Creeps, her third book, was included in the syllabus for a course on the comic novel in Columbia University's graduate creative writing program.
In the lead-up to the release of The Unfortunate Importance of Beauty, Bustle listed the novel as one the "12 of the Most Anticipated Books of 2015, aka the Titles We Can't Get Our Hands On Soon Enough." Huffington Post listed it as one of its "2015 Books We Can't Wait To Read." (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 3/5/2016.)
Book Reviews
Funny, surreal, absurd and charmingly preposterous.
Sarah Lyall - New York Times Book Review
The funniest novelist you’ve never heard of.... Few comic novelists get characters talking so naturally, and amusingly.
John Freeman - Boston Globe
Readers who’d like to spend a little time at the corner where a brisker Haruki Murakami meets a drier ‘30 Rock’ would do well to seek out Filipacchi’s radiantly intelligent and very funny novel.
Ellis Avery - San Francisco Chronicle
Filipacchi's lively story reflects on the unearned power that beauty confers on its recipients...breezy with a bite.
Maureen Corrigan - NPR
Magic spills from the pores of Filipacchi’s story.... The resulting romp is a witty and honest rendering of the unknowable distance between perception and reality, exploring the possibility that beauty is literally in the eyes of the beholder.
Alexandra Coakley - Slate
A surreal and utterly compelling triumph.
Buzzfeed
[A] zanily satirical, spot-on novel.
Leigh Haber - Oprah Magazine
Takes a fairy tale, flips it on its head, and adds an element of murder . . . will both make you laugh and keep you on the edge of your seat.
Lynsey Eidell - Glamour
Filipacchi’s fourth novel blithely upends the social constructs of beauty, desire, and art in her signature brisk, darkly comic style.... Filipacchi succeeds by loading this frothy plot with sharp surreal turns and layers of subversive meaning.... [W]hile looks can kill, they’re no match for Filipacchi’s rapier wit.
Publishers Weekly
Filipacchi's absurdist fourth novel requires a reader who is willing to suspend disbelief, so let's accept the ridiculous premise and dive in.... While some of Filipacchi's gags stray into eye-rolling territory and her message about the role of beauty in our culture manages to be both heavy-handed and superficial, the novel has its moments. —Pamela Mann, St. Mary's Coll. Lib., MD
Library Journal
(Starred review.) An astute, piercing look at the value society and individuals place on appearance… impossible to put down and utterly dead-on in its assessment of human nature.
Booklist
[A] little over-the-top.... Still, there's something weirdly compelling about the whole excessive parade, and most people will keep reading just to find out how all the elaborate manipulations turn out.... [A]n unsettling portrait of the way extreme physical beauty or ugliness distort people's impressions.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. In The Unfortunate Importance of Beauty, both Barb and Lily don disguises, of opposite kinds, to hide what they really look like and thereby attract the man of their dreams. Can we consider Barb and Lily as foils for one another in the novel? Are their troubles finally the same or different?
2. Barb, Georgia, and Lily are all artists. What kind of distinction does the novel make between physical beauty and artistic beauty? Which is more powerful? More important? Can one get in the way of the other? Can one serve the other? How?
3. Would you consider The Unfortunate Importance of Beauty to be a comedy of manners? A murder mystery? A modern fairy tale? Or all of the above? Why?
4. The novel presents us with two different forms of love: love between friends and romantic love. Which is more powerful? More important? What is the relationship between love and beauty in the novel?
5. Which scene in the novel did you find funniest? Why?
6. Would you argue that the love between Strad and Lily is real, even though it is based on a lie? Why or why not?
7. Do you trust that Peter would have fallen in love with Barb even if he had not known what she really looked like? Why or why not? Does it matter?
8. Penelope earns her living by convincing customers that they have broken her ugly clay pots. Of this line of work, Barb says she "wouldn’t be surprised if the art of deception became the true art of the piece." Do you agree with Barb that Penelope is a kind of artist in her own right? Why or why not? How does her form of beauty, and art-making, play into the themes established by Barb’s and Lily’s?
9. How does the background information that we get about Barb’s parents help us understand her relationship to her own beauty? Is it really Gabriel’s suicide that causes her to don her disguise, do you think, or had her mother’s story been troubling her as well?
10. How "happy" did you find the ending? How did it resolve Lily’s and Barb’s more existential problems with the nature of physical beauty and of romantic love?
11. How important has physical beauty been in the trajectory of your own life? Do you ever wish you could try on another face? What difference do you think it would make?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
Single, Carefree, Mellow: Stories
Katherine Heiny, 2015
Knopf Doubleday
240 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780804173155
Summary
For the commitment-averse women in the eleven sublime stories of Single, Carefree, Mellow, falling in love is never easy and always inconvenient.
♦ Maya is in love with both her boyfriend and her boss.
♦ Sadie’s lover calls her as he drives to meet his wife at marriage counseling.
♦ Nina is more worried that the Presbyterian minister living above her garage will hear her kids swearing than that he will find out she’s sleeping with her running partner.
The women grapple with love amidst everything from unwelcome houseguests to disastrous birthday parties as Katherine Heiny spins a debut that is superbly accomplished, endlessly entertaining, and laugh-out-loud funny. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1967
• Raised—Midland, Michigan, USA
• Education—M.F.A., Columbia University
• Currently—lives outside Washington, DC
Katherine Heiny was only 25 when she received a call from The New Yorker about publishing her short story "How to Give the Wrong Impression." She was then a poor graduate student enrolled in the M.F.A. program at Columbia University and struggling to pay her rent.
Later, after another of her stories appeared in Seventeen Magazine, she received a different phone call—this one from a book publisher who asked if she would be interested in writing young adult books. Why not, she thinks, and now, years later, she claims more than 20 YA novels under her belt...and under various pen names.
Her debut story collection Single, Carefree, Mellow (2015) is her first book as Katherine Heiny. She lives in Washington DC with her husband Ian McCredie and their children. (Adapted from an interview in Longreads.)
Book Reviews
Sharply perceptive.... Ms. Heiny [has] powers of writerly seduction...[a] gift for dreaming up otherwise smart women who lapse into temporary insanity while besotted.
Janet Maslin - New York Times
[S]omething like Cheever mixed with Ephron: white, middle-class suburban discontent simmering below the surface, but treated with a light touch that keeps the focus squarely on the woman's point of view…. [O]n the whole Heiny is very good at portraying the circumscribed landscapes, both literal and emotional, in which her characters live. She also gives credence to what is still a conundrum for many women: What role can I play in a world in which I am neither fully "carefree" and "mellow" when single, nor entirely "giving" and "content" when attached? A world in which I am still implicated in conventions of how women should be?
Naomi Fry - New York Times Book Review
To encounter the wry, funny stories in Katherine Heiny’s Single, Carefree, Mellow is to experience the best form of simultaneous pleasure and sadness.
Philadelphia Tribune
Heartbreaking and darkly comic.
Atlantic
[Heiny is] a badass storyteller.
Huffington Post
Chances are you’ve already heard the buzz on this collection of short stories, each of which has a relationship or affair at its center. But no matter how good you imagine it is, it’s better.
Glamour.com
Winning stories you won’t forget.
People
Dissatisfied teenagers and bored housewives, clueless boyfriends and cuckolded husbands, and 11 variations on the recurrent theme of infidelity and its fallout populate Heiny’s first collection of stories.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) Not all [of Heiny’s characters] are single (or carefree or mellow), but they are all singular, and following their stories is like sitting at a dive bar tossing back deceptively pretty, surprisingly strong drinks with a pal who may not always make the best decisions but always comes away with the most colorful tales.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Infidelity is an overarching theme of the collection. Are there any commonalities among the affairs described in the book? How do different characters wrestle with the idea of being "the other woman"? Does anyone fight this label? Embrace it?
2. Discuss Sasha’s relationship with Monique as described throughout "The Dive Bar." How would you describe their friendship? How does Sasha depend on Monique for moral support? When Sasha is viewing the apartment with Carson, why does she immediately think of Monique?
3. On page 11, Sasha remarks that there is "no limit to the things a real couple can do!" Discuss what makes a relationship "real." What authenticates Sasha’s relationship? Which story describes the most "real" couple, in your opinion?
4. In "How to Give the Wrong Impression," Gwen wrestles with issues of insecurity in her relationship with Boris. How does this manifest throughout the story? When is she most confident?
5. On page 47, Maya laments that "Rhodes, his mother, Bailey—they all deserved someone so much better." How do feelings of guilt factor into Maya’s self-worth? At what points in the book does her decision-making come from a place of guilt? When does she escape that guilt—if ever?
6. In "Blue Heron Bridge," Nina mentions that she "got the sense she sometimes got when she said something funny, that she had suddenly become visible." Explore this concept of "visibility" in connection with Nina’s identity. How does she define herself? How does she determine her self-worth? Why do you think she embarks on her affair with David?
7. On page 31, Gwen leaves the conversation with Linette to put on more makeup even though "this is about as good as it gets." How is femininity presented throughout Single, Carefree, Mellow? In what ways are dating rituals described as performative?
8. On page 49, in the story "Single, Carefree, Mellow," Maya admits she has a "recurring nightmare about marrying Rhodes," yet by the end of the story she knows that "she could not leave Rhodes." Given her oscillating feelings about their relationship, were you surprised that they did get married? What do you think holds their relationship together?
9. In "Cranberry Relish," Heiny arranges the narrative structure so that the perspective alternates between the present moment, where Billy is describing his newest conquest, and flashbacks to the beginning of Josie and Billy’s affair. Why do you think the author chose to frame their relationship this way?
10. How is motherhood described throughout Single, Carefree, Mellow? Contrast the experiences of the protagonist in "That Dance You Do" with Nina in "Blue Heron Bridge."
11. On page 84, Nina relishes "the sweetness that was [hers] now, of the happiness she knew." Given the reaction she has about the news of David’s affair with Bunny Pringle, what do you attribute her happiness to in this scene?
12. Discuss "The Rhett Butlers." How does the narrator see Mr. Eagleton? Does she ever see him as a sexual predator, or merely a boring boyfriend? How did you react to this story? Its ending?
13. In "Andorra," Sadie describes her ability to carry on a long-term affair as "a sign of strength and character" (page 205). How is this assertion refuted throughout the story?
14. Female friendship is an integral aspect of Single, Carefree, Mellow. How do friends in Single, Carefree, Mellow rely on each other for support and comfort? What did you find to be most realistic about Heiny’s portrayal of female friendship? Did any particular friendships in the book resonate with you?
15. Many of the characters in these stories have roommates. Boris and Gwen are roommates; Sasha and Monique are roommates; Fern and Haley were roommates. How does the role of a roommate both fill and fail to fill the role of a romantic partner for these women?
16. On page 193, Maya says that girls are "nothing but heartbreak." What do you think she means by this? Do you agree? Can you connect this statement with the overarching themes of Single, Carefree, Mellow?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)