English 12 Novel Study Summative Activity.
1. Review the biographical information/interview with the author of the book you chose to
read.
a. Record one piece of information that you think is important to your appreciation
of the author’s choice of writing. Explain your choice.
b. Record one piece of information that surprised you or made you rethink
something about the book you read. Explain your choice.
2. It is quite common for publishers or authors to release Reading Guides or Discussion
Questions for groups and book clubs. Review those questions.
a. Find one question that you think would make for an effective small group
conversation. Explain your choice.
b. Select two questions to answer. Record your answers below and indicate the
numbers of the questions you selected.
Question 1
Question 2
6.1 [Students will] respond to challenging texts and reflect on their responses
1 Responses are
incomplete; no
evidence provided to
support answers.
2 Responses may
be complete; evidence
provided is vague or
unclear.
3Responses are
complete; evidence
provided is clear.
4 Responses are
complete; evidence
provided is specific
and thoughtful.
Lawrence Hill — Biography
Lawrence Hill is the son of American immigrants — a black father and a white mother — who came
to Canada the day after they married in 1953 in Washington, D.C. On his father's side, Hill's
grandfather and great grandfather were university-educated, ordained ministers of the African
Methodist Episcopal Church. His mother came from a Republican family in Oak Park, Illinois,
graduated from Oberlin College and went on to become a civil rights activist in D.C. The story of
how they met, married, left the United States and raised a family in Toronto is described in Hill's
bestselling memoir Black Berry, Sweet Juice: On Being Black and White in Canada
(HarperCollins Canada, 2001). Growing up in the predominantly white suburb of Don Mills,
Ontario in the sixties, Hill was greatly influenced by his parents' work in the human rights
movement. Much of Hill's writing touches on issues of identity and belonging.
Lawrence Hill's third novel was published as The Book of Negroes in Canada and the UK, and as
Someone Knows My Name in the USA, Australiaand New Zealand. It won the overall
Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best Book, the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, the Ontario
Library Association's Evergreen Award and CBC Radio's Canada Reads. The book was a finalist for
the Hurston/Wright LEGACY Award and longlisted for both the Giller Prize and the IMPAC
Award.
Hill is also the author of the novels Any Known Blood (William Morrow, New York, 1999 and
HarperCollins Canada, 1997) and Some Great Thing (HarperCollins 2009, originally published by
Turnstone Press, Winnipeg, 1992). Hill's most recently published fiction is the short story 'Meet
You at the Door', which appeared in the January-February, 2011 issue of The Walrus magazine.
Hill's most recent non-fiction book The Deserter's Tale: the Story of an Ordinary Soldier Who
Walked Away from the War in Iraq (written with Joshua Key) was released in the United States,
Canada, Australia, Japan and several European countries.
In 2010-11, Hill received honorary doctorates from the University of Toronto, Wilfrid Laurier
University and the University of Waterloo, the Bob Edwards Award from the Alberta Theatre
Projects, and was named Author of the Year by Go On Girl, the largest African-American women's
book club in the United States. Hill won the National Magazine Award for the best essay published
in Canada in 2005 for "Is Africa's Pain Black America's Burden?" (The Walrus, February 2005). In
2005, the 90-minute film document that Hill wrote, Seeking Salvation: A History of the Black
Church in Canada, Travesty Productions, Toronto (2004), won the American Wilbur Award for
best national television documentary.
Formerly a reporter with The Globe and Mail and parliamentary correspondent for The Winnipeg
Free Press, Hill also speaks French and Spanish. He has lived and worked across Canada, in
Baltimore, and in Spain and France. He is an honorary patron of Canadian Crossroads
International, for which he travelled as a volunteer to the West African countries Niger, Cameroon
and Mali. Hill is also a member of the Council of Patrons of the Black Loyalist Heritage Society, and
of the Advisory Council of Book Clubs for Inmates. He has a B.A. in economics from Laval
University in Quebec City and an M.A. in writing from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Hill
lives in Hamilton, Ontario.
http://www.lawrencehill.com/bio.html
Book of Negroes Discussion Guide
Created by W.W. Norton (http://www.wwnorton.com/rgguides/someoneknowsmynamergg.htm)
Introduction by Lawrence Hill
Years before I began writing Book of Negroes, I came across two startling discoveries in a scholarly work.
I read that thousands of African Americans fled slavery to serve the British, who promised to liberate
them in return for service during the American Revolution. When the British lost the war, they sent
those African Americans who could show that they had served the British for at least one year to
Canada. Three thousand names were entered into a 150-page military ledger known as the "Book of
Negroes," and, in the last half of 1783, the former slaves set sail to Nova Scotia. Ten years later, many of
these same former slaves were so disgruntled with the hardships they encountered in Canada—slavery,
indentured servitude, anti-black race riots, and segregation—that in 1792 they accepted an offer from
the British government and sailed to Africa in a flotilla of fifteen ships, to form the colony of Freetown in
Sierra Leone.
This was the first back-to-Africa exodus in the history of the Americas, and it turns out that a number of
the adults swept up in this migration had actually been born in Africa. As I began to write Book of
Negroes, I imagined the life of an old woman on one of those vessels carrying liberated African
Americans from Halifax to Freetown. What would she look like? Where had she been born in Africa?
How had she been stolen into slavery, where had she lived in South Carolina, and how on earth did she
find herself, in late life, sailing back to Africa from Canada? Book of Negroes is my attempt to give this
fascinating but little-known story a human face.
I gave the protagonist, Aminata Diallo, my eldest daughter's middle name. It is the story of a heroic
woman in the eighteenth century, and I felt that the best way to lift her off the page was to love her like
I love my own daughter. And indeed I loved Aminata from the moment I first started imagining her face,
hearing her voice, seeing the way she walked with a platter balanced on her head. My daughter,
Geneviève Aminata Hill, was eleven years old when I started to write this story. The same age as my
character when she is kidnapped by slave traders. What if this had happened to my own child? Aminata,
the character, grew up under my tutelage. She learned to walk and then to read and to navigate her way
in the world, and now this fictional creation of mine is all grown up and gone from the house. She
belongs to the world of readers now, and I hope she will be well loved.
Discussion Questions
1. What is your opinion about Hill's suggestion that Aminata's very youthfulness at the time of her
abduction enables her emotional survival, even as some of the adults in her world show signs of
crumbling?
2. The section of the book set in the sea islands of South Carolina depicts eighteenth-century indigo
plantations where African American slaves and overseers are left largely to their own devices during the
"sick season"—a good half of the year. To what degree does this cultural and social isolation allow for an
interesting development and interaction of African American characters in the novel?
3. Aminata suffers some horrifying cruelties at the hands of her captors, but her relationships with her
masters aren't always what you'd expect. How does Aminata's story reveal the complex ways that
people react to unnatural, unequal relationships?
4. During the course of the story, Aminata marries and has a family. Although she is separated from
them, she is reunited from time to time with her husband and one of her children. What does the work
tell us about the nature of love and loyalty?
5. Aminata struggles to learn and master all sorts of systems of communicating in the new world: black
English, white English, and Gullah, as well as understanding the uses of European money and maps. How
do her various coping mechanisms shed light on her character?
6. Aminata longs for her home. What is the meaning of home in the novel, and how does the meaning
change as the novel progresses?
7. What does the novel tell us about survival? Which characters fare best and why?
8. As Aminata moves from slavery to freedom, she finds that freedom is sometimes an empty promise.
At what points in the novel did you feel this was true? Did it change how you thought about the
meaning of freedom?
9. Aminata is a woman of extraordinary abilities—she is skillful with languages, literate, a speedy
learner, a born negotiator. Why did Hill choose this story to be told by such a remarkable woman? What
effect do her abilities have on the shaping of the story?
10. What do you think would be the challenges involved in writing a realistically painful novel that still
offers enough light and hope to maintain the reader's interest and spirit?
11. What lessons does Aminata's tale hold for us in today's world?
Looking for Alaska
John Green’s Biography
John Green is the New York Times bestselling author of Looking for Alaska, An Abundance of
Katherines, and Paper Towns. He is also the coauthor, with David Levithan, of Will Grayson,
Will Grayson. He was 2006 recipient of the Michael L. Printz Award, a 2009 Edgar Award
winner, and has twice been a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Green’s books have
been published in more than a dozen languages.
In 2007, Green and his brother Hank ceased textual communication and began to talk primarily
through videoblogs posted to youtube. The videos spawned a community of people called
nerdfighters who fight for intellectualism and to decrease the overall worldwide level of suck.
(Decreasing suck takes many forms: Nerdfighters have raised hundreds of thousands of dollars to
fight poverty in the developing world; they also planted thousands of trees around the world in
May of 2010 to celebrate Hank’s 30th birthday.) Although they have long since resumed textual
communication, John and Hank continue to upload three videos a week to their youtube channel,
vlogbrothers. Their videos have been viewed more than 75 million times, and their channel is
one of the most popular in the history of online video. He is also an active (if reluctant) Twitter
user with more than 1.1 million followers.
Green’s book reviews have appeared in The New York Times Book Review and Booklist, a
wonderful book review journal where he worked as a publishing assistant and production editor
while writing Looking for Alaska. Green grew up in Orlando, Florida before attending Indian
Springs School and then Kenyon College http://johngreenbooks.com/bio-contact/
SPEAKING WITH JOHN GREEN
Q. In that vein, just how autobiographical is Looking for Alaska?
A. I have always danced around this question, and I think I’m going to continue dancing around it now. Like Miles, I
grew up in Florida and attended a boarding school in Alabama. And the physical setting of Alaska is very, very similar
to the physical place I attended boarding school. Generally, the book is probably more autobiographical than I usually
acknowledge. But it is very much a work of fiction. The facts, I can assure you, were ignored.
Q. What was the catalyst for this novel?A. In the study of religion, there is this word theodicy, which refers to the
question of why a God who is both loving and all powerful would allow there to be such unequal suffering in the world.
In college, when I started to study religion, that was the question that interested me most. So in some ways, that was
the catalyst for the novel. After I graduated from college, I worked for a while at a children’s hospital, where I
encountered the same problem in stark, awful reality. It was in the hospital that I started to think about writing a story
in which teenagers experience loss and a consuming guilt that cannot be easily assuaged. I started writing it just a
few months after I left the hospital.
Q. Did you write it with a specific audience in mind?
A. Yes. From the very beginning, I wrote the book for high-school students.
Q. Miles writes, “Teenagers think they are invincible.” Did you when you were a teen? Do you, now, as an
adult?
A. I was aware as a teenager of the fact that I might die, and it scared me a little. But I never felt like dying would
affect my overall invincibility, if that makes sense. It’s a little like what Muhammad Ali said after his third fight with Joe
Frazier. After the fight, which Ali won, Ali said that he thought at times that Frazier might kill him. “If he had killed me,”
Ali said, “I would have gotten back up and won the fight. I would have been the first dead heavyweight champion of
the world.” I felt like that as a teenager. I feel a little more fragile now. I still think people are invincible, but I’d rather
not find out for sure.
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
Discuss the book’s unusual structure. Why do you suppose Green chose this strategy for telling his
story? How else might he have structured the same material?
Miles tells the story in his own first-person voice. How might the book differ if it had been told in
Alaska’s voice or the Colonel’s? Or in the voice of an omniscient narrator?
The Colonel says “Everybody’s got a talent.” Do you?
Miles’s teacher Dr. Hyde tells him to “be present.” What does this mean?
John Green worked for a time as a chaplain in a children’s hospital. How do you think that influenced
the writing of Looking For Alaska?
What do you think “The Great Perhaps” means?
And how about Bolivar’s “labyrinth?”
In the “Some last words on last words” section at the end of the book, Green writes, “I was born into
Bolivar’s labyrinth, and so I must believe in the hope of Rabelais’ Great Perhaps.” What do you think
he means by this?
Has this novel changed the way you regard human suffering? And death?
One of the characters, Dr. Hyde says, “Everything that comes together falls apart.” Do you think the
author agrees? How does he deal with this Zen belief in his novel?
Alaska loves these two lines from the poet W. C. Auden: “You shall love your crooked neighbor / With
your crooked heart.” What do these lines mean to you and why do you think Alaska likes them so
much?
Miles writes, “Teenagers think they are invincible.” Do you agree? Why or why not?
Was it necessary for Alaska to die?
This novel is filled with wonderful characters. Who is your favorite? Why? Do you know any people like
these characters?
Can you imagine Miles and the Colonel as adults? What might they be like? What professions do you
suppose they might choose?
Long Way Gone
“Everyone in the world should read this book . . . We should read it to learn about the
world and about what it means to be human.” —Carolyn See, The Washington Post Book
World
Ishmael Beah was born in Sierra Leone in 1980 and moved to the U.S. in 1998.
In 2004 he graduated from Oberlin College with a B.A. in political science. He is a member of Human
Rights Watch Children’s Division Advisory Committee, and has spoken before the United Nations, the
Council on Foreign Relations, and the Center for Emerging Threats and Opportunities (CETO) at the
Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory. Beah’s writing has appeared in VespertinePress and LIT
magazine. He lives in New York City.
7
In the fifty-plus conflicts now going on around the globe, it is estimated that there are some 300,000
child soldiers. Ishmael Beah, the author of this horrifying yet vitally important memoir, used to be one of
them.
What is war like for a twelve- or thirteen-year-old soldier? How does a child become a killer? How does
one stop? Child soldiers have been profiled by journalists, and novelists have tried to imagine their lives.
But until now, there has been no firsthand account by someone who came through such hell and
survived.
Riveting yet readable, unimaginable yet unforgettable, A Long Way Gone is sure to become a classic: a
unique autobiography about the civil war in Sierra Leone, as recorded by one who took up an AK-47 at
the age of twelve. Now in his mid-twenties, Beah is both eloquent and perceptive in his account of
fleeing attacking rebels, searching for his lost relatives, seeking out food and shelter in the bush, and
wandering a land rendered unrecognizable by brutality and violence. Yet once he’s been picked up and
recruited by the government army, Beah, a gentle boy at heart, find that he, too, is capable of truly
terrible actions. Told with real literary force, ample insight, and heartbreaking candor, A Long Way Gone
is a rare, mesmerizing work that addresses a twenty-first-century, and international, nightmare: the
collision of war and childhood.
1. What did Ishmael’s personal history communicate to you about the recent history of his homeland?
2. This book describes two kinds of domestic living in detail, village life and city life. Which does Ishmael
prefer, and why?
3. Violence is, of course, a major theme in these pages—physical, psychological, social, and otherwise.
Indeed, some of the more violent passages in this book make for very difficult if not unsettling reading.
Reflect on what Ishmael’s many violent experiences taught you about the consequences or aftereffects,
both intended and unintended, of violence.
4. What kinds of music does Ishmael like, and why? What is it about music that matters to Ishmael, or
that moves him so? Why is it important to him, especially during his rehabilitation at Benin Home?
5. “I could no longer tell the difference between dream and reality” (p. 15), Ishmael writes early in his
tale. Indeed, memories, dreams, and troubling or inescapable thoughts are perhaps even more
important to this book than firsthand events and actions are. Talk about A Long Way Gone as a
psychological memoir, comparing and contrasting it with other works you have experienced in this vein.
6. Review the tale of the “wild pigs” (p. 53) that Ishmael learned about from his grandmother, and the
“Bra Spider” story (p. 75) that Musa tells Ishmael at the other boys. What other myths or legends did
you come across in this book? After naming a few, explain the particular narrative and cultural purposes
of each.
8. Early in his account, Ishmael laments how “the war had destroyed the enjoyment of the very
experience of meeting people” (p. 48). Where else does he express this fact, or else suffer from its
consequences? As a class, discuss the book’s ongoing struggle between trust and survival. Can these two
phenomena coexist?
10. A Long Way Gone is a book with much to say on the subject of family: family life, family
relationships, and family environment. Catalog and characterize the many different families that Ishmael
has belonged to over the course of his young life.
11. How are “civilians” depicted in this book? How are they thought of? How are they treated?
12. Finally, discuss this harrowing account of civil war and childhood as a meditation on finding one’s
ultimate purpose. How does Ishmael, at a relatively early age, arrive at what seems to be his calling in
life?
6
Night
Elie Wiesel was born in 1928 in Sighet, Transylvania, which is now part of Romania. He was fifteen years
old when he and his family were deported by the Nazis to Auschwitz. His mother and younger sister
perished, his two older sisters survived. Elie and his father were later transported to Buchenwald, where
his father died shortly before the camp was liberated in April 1945.
After the war, Elie Wiesel studied in Paris and later became a journalist. During an interview with the
distinguished French writer, Francois Mauriac, he was persuaded to write about his experiences in the
death camps. The result was his internationally acclaimed memoir, Night (La Nuit), which has since been
translated into more than thirty languages.
In 1978, President Jimmy Carter appointed Elie Wiesel as Chairman of the President's Commission on
the Holocaust. In 1980, he became the Founding Chairman of the United States Holocaust Memorial
Council. He is President of The Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity, an organization he and his wife
created to fight indifference, intolerance and injustice. Elie Wiesel has received more than 100 honorary
degrees from institutions of higher learning.
A devoted supporter of Israel, Elie Wiesel has also defended the cause of Soviet Jews, Nicaragua's
Miskito Indians, Argentina's Desaparecidos, Cambodian refugees, the Kurds, victims of famine and
genocide in Africa, of apartheid in South Africa, and victims of war in the former Yugoslavia. For more
than fifteen years, Elie and his wife Marion have been especially devoted to the cause of Ethiopian-born
Israeli youth through the Foundation's Beit Tzipora Centers for Study and Enrichment.
Teaching has always been central to Elie Wiesel's work. Since 1976, he has been the Andrew W. Mellon
Professor in the Humanities at Boston University, where he also holds the title of University Professor.
He is a member of the Faculty in the Department of Religion as well as the Department of Philosophy.
Previously, he served as Distinguished Professor of Judaic Studies at the City University of New York
(1972-76) and the first Henry Luce Visiting Scholar in Humanities and Social Thought at Yale University
(1982-83).
Elie Wiesel is the author of more than fifty books of fiction and non-fiction, including A Beggar in
Jerusalem (Prix Médicis winner), The Testament (Prix Livre Inter winner), The Fifth Son (winner of the
Grand Prize in Literature from the City of Paris), two volumes of his memoirs, All Rivers Run to the Sea
and And the Sea is Never Full, and most recently The Sonderberg Case.
For his literary and human rights activities, he has received numerous awards including the Presidential
Medal of Freedom, the U.S. Congressional Gold Medal, the National Humanities Medal, the Medal of
Liberty, and the rank of Grand-Croix in the French Legion of Honor. In 1986, Elie Wiesel won the Nobel
Prize for Peace, and soon after, Marion and Elie Wiesel established The Elie Wiesel Foundation for
Humanity.
http://www.eliewieselfoundation.org/eliewiesel.aspx
1. As Night begins, Eliezer is so moved by faith that he weeps when he prays. He is also searching
for a deeper understanding of the mystical teachings of the Kabbalah. How does Eliezer's
relationship with his faith and with God change as the book progresses?
2. What literal and symbolic meanings does "night" have in the book?
3. Early in the book, after Moishe the Beadle escapes his execution, no one, not even Eliezer,
believes his tales (p. 7). Even when the Germans arrive in Sighet and move all the Jews into
ghettos, the Jewish townspeople seem to ignore or suppress their fears. "Most people thought
that we would remain in the ghetto until the end of the war, until the arrival of the Red Army.
Afterward everything would be as before" (p. 12). What might be the reasons for the
townspeople's widespread denial of the evidence facing them?
4. Think of the kapos and the little blonde pipel who is hanged on page 64. Who are the
bystanders? Who are the perpetrators? Who are the victims in Night? Do these roles sometimes
overlap?
5. At the end of Night, Wiesel writes: "From the depths of the mirror, a corpse was
contemplating me. The look in his eyes as he gazed at me has never left me" (p. 115). What
parts of Eliezer died during his captivity? What was born in their place?
6. What scenes from Night do you remember most vividly? Have they made you look at the
world or your family differently?
7. In his 1986 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, Wiesel says: "[O]ne person of integrity can
make a difference, a difference of life and death. As long as one dissident is in prison, our
freedom will not be true. As long as one child is hungry, our life will be filled with anguish and
shame. What all these victims need above all is to know that they are not alone; that we are
not forgetting them, that when their voices are stifled we shall lend them ours, that while
their freedom depends on ours, the quality of our freedom depends on theirs" (p. 120). How
has Elie Wiesel fulfilled this purpose with this book? How does this statement make you feel
about your place in the world?
Read more: http://www.oprah.com/oprahsbookclub/Oprahs-Book-Club-Night-Questions-andDiscussion-Topics#ixzz1unI9oIXv
Girl, Interrupted
Susanna Kaysen
Born: November 11, 1948 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, The United States
Susanna Kaysen is an American author. Kaysen was born and raised in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Kaysen attended high school at the Commonwealth School in Boston and the Cambridge School before
being sent to McLean Hospital in 1967 to undergo psychiatric treatment for depression. It was there she
was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. She was released after eighteen months. She later
drew on this experience for her 1993 memoir Girl, Interrupted, which was made into a film in 1999, her
role being played by Winona Ryder.
She is the daughter of the economist Carl Kaysen, a professor at MIT and former advisor to President
John F. Kennedy. Her mother, deceased, was sister of architect Richard Neutra. Kaysen also has one
sister and has been divorced at least once. She lived for a time in the Faroe Islands, upon which
experience her novel Far Afield is based
http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/4376.Susanna_Kaysen
The questions that follow are designed to enhance your group's reading of Susanna Kaysen's Girl,
Interrupted. We hope they will provide you with new ways of looking at--and talking about--a book
whose style and subject matter are equally provocative. As she recounts her two-year sojourn in a
Boston psychiatric hospital and her experience of what she calls the "parallel universe" of madness,
Kaysen compels readers to consider how thin the line is that separates "madness" from "sanity,"
deviance from normalcy, and treatment from control. Her memoir forces us to ask what role Kaysen's
gender had in her diagnosis and hospitalization. And it makes us wonder whether some forms of mental
disturbance are not really illness, but, rather, new names our society has given to unhappiness and
confusion, states that are common enough in teenage girls or, for that matter, in anyone who possesses
an interior life.
top of the page
1. The voice that narrates Girl, Interrupted may at first strike readers as cool, intellectual, rational, and
controlled, qualities normally associated with sanity. It is a voice full of humor, characterized by an
understatement that leaves much to the imagination. How, as we go deeper into the book, does the
voice play against what it is describing--or heighten it? What is the overall effect of this voice?
2. At what point, if any, does your perception of the narrator (whom for convenience we call "Susanna")
change? Does Susanna's "unreliability" as the narrator suggest something about the nature of madness
itself?
3. What does the author accomplish by juxtaposing her actual medical records and case notes with the
narrative? How do these documents contribute to your impression of Susanna's psychic state? How
would this book be different without them?
4. The narrator reveals little about her life before entering McLean Hospital, and the only biographical
information we receive appears rather late in the book. Why do you think Kaysen has chosen to do this?
5. The narrator describes her sojourn in McLean as a journey into a "parallel universe," one of many that
"exist alongside this world and resemble it, but are not in it." What resemblances or analogies does
Kaysen find between madness and everyday reality? How are the laws of these two universes different?
How does one pass from one universe into another?
6. Kaysen gives us two ways of experiencing her parallel universe. One way is to make us understand
how madness feels; another is to show how madness is treated (or, more accurately, controlled). What
effect does she create by giving us two opposing ways of understanding insanity?
7. Most of the early sections of Girl, Interrupted are devoted to the narrator's observations of her fellow
patients. To what extent, if any, do these women seem "crazy" to you? What difference do you see in
the book's treatment of "Susanna," the character, and its treatment of the other patients?
8. How does Kaysen describe McLean's "keepers"--its nurses, doctors, and therapists? How do you
account for the difference between the hard-bitten full-time staff and the wide-eyed student nurses?
9. In many ways McLean seems like an orderly place whose patients might easily be bored, slightly
neurotic college students killing time in the dorm. Madness, real madness, creeps in insidiously, taking
both reader and patients by surprise. At what points do we see madness intruding into McLean?
10. At certain points the author suggests that there is something comforting, and even seductive, about
insanity. What might make madness comforting to a young girl in the late 1960s--or, for that matter, to
anyone at any time?
11. A girl named Daisy kills herself in between hospital stays. Is this foreshadowed by what we already
know about her? Why this patient, rather than another? To what extent is the behavior of any of these
characters foreseeable?
12. Susanna has no apparent reaction to Daisy's death, but after Torrey, another patient, is released into
the custody of her neglectful parents, she has an episode of what her case report calls
"depersonalization" [p.105] and mutilates her hands to see if "there are any bones in there" [p.103].
Why? What is she looking for underneath her skin? What is the effect of the graphic physicality of this
chapter?
13. The narrator sums up her release from McLean in the following way: "Luckily, I got a marriage
proposal and they let me out. In 1968, everybody could understand a marriage proposal." What does
this passage say about the choices available to female psychiatric patients--and, by extension, to any
woman--at the time this book takes place?
14. The narrator describes 1968 as a time when "people [outside the hospital] were doing the kinds of
things we [the patients] had fantasies of doing" [p.92]; a patient's paranoid "delusions" might turn out
to be accurate descriptions of the U.S. government's clandestine activities. What other connections does
Kaysen draw between her characters' disturbance and the social paroxysms of their time? In what way is
this book a document of the 1960s?
15. How does the narrator feel when she meets Georgina and Lisa in the outside world, years after her
release? What comparison can we make between the way Susanna sees their lives and the way she sees
her own?
16. How does the madness of the 1960s compare to the private and collective neuroses of Freud's
Vienna--or to the spectacular symptoms (Multiple Personality Disorder, False Memory Syndrome) of the
1980s and '90s?
17. One reviewer has noted that someone with Susanna's symptoms would today be given "60 days inpatient [treatment] and a psychotropic magic bullet. In 25 years, the cultural metaphor...has changed
from incarceration to neglect." Is "neglect" preferable to "incarceration"? How do you think Kaysen
might answer such a question?
18. Another critic begins her review of Girl, Interrupted with the observation: "When women are angry
at men, they call them heartless. When men are angry at women, they call them crazy" (Susan Cheever,
"A Designated Crazy," The New York Times Book Review, June 20, 1993). In what ways is Girl,
Interrupted a book about the sexual constructs of madness? What role does the narrator's gender
appear to have played in her diagnosis and treatment? How do gender relations inside McLean mirror
those in the outside world?
19. What is the significance of the Vermeer painting "Girl Interrupted at Her Music" that appears in the
last chapter? How did Susanna feel about the painting the first time she saw it? And how did she feel
about it later, after her hospitalization? Why does the gaze of the music student in the painting so haunt
her?