Dimestore (Smith) - Discussion Questions

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 start discussion for Dimestore...and then take off on your own:

1. As a child, Lee Smith dreamed of being in the South of France, drawing on a cigarette, "hollow-cheeked and haunted." How do childhood dreams inspire a life? Have you ever had such dreams...and followed them...or wanted to?

2. Talk about Lee's family. How, for example, did Lee's mother's own upbringing clash with her daughter's tendency to accept and blend into the culture of southwest Virginian?

3. Trace Lee Smith's journey as a writer, who when told to write what she knew, thought, "All I knew was that I was not going to write about Grundy, Va., ever, that was for sure." How did she reverse that decision and come to embrace her heritage?

4. Follow-up to Question 3: Describe Lee's growing up years. Would you consider them idyllic? How did her youthful experiences come to shape her writing?

5. Talk, especially, about the dolls in her father's store and the way she invented "long, complicated life stories for them." Consider, too, the role of the one-way mirror through which she watched customers. What did it teach her about writing?

6. What the impact did other Southern writers have on Lee's development as a writer: Faulkner, Styron, Welty and Sill. How did she begin to see her own life in Grundy, Virginia, as "stories"?

7. What role does mental illness play in Lee's family life?

8. In what way did fiction became an outlet for Smith, a habit that saved her from getting "too wrought up." How did her writing eventually became an affirmation of life in Grundy and a way to preserve the mountain culture?

9. Lee says that "most of us are always searching, through our work and in our lives: for meaning, for love, for home." Is that the role of writers...to help us understand where we come from?

(We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher. In the meantime use these, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

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