A Reading Group Guide
“Heaven is a place where artful little
books are as big as this.”
—Janet Maslin, CBS Sunday Morning
Susie Salmon is 14. She likes peppermint-stick ice cream, art class,
and a boy named Ray Singh who kissed her in front of her locker one
afternoon when she was still alive. Now she is in heaven. It’s a place
PHOTO: JERRY BAUER
where all her simplest desires are fulfilled, but not her dearest wish
“S E B O L D ’ S
writing achieves an
exquisite balance between
sadness and hopefulness.
The nerve-ending pain of
great loss and the promise
of life’s inevitable
march forward.”
of all: to be back home with her family.
So Susie must watch as those left behind on earth struggle to cope
with her disappearance: Her school friends trade worried rumors,
her killer tries to cover his tracks, and her family is by turns torn
apart and drawn closer together by their grief and love. Gradually,
Susie explores her new otherworldly home, tests the boundaries
between the living and the dead, and begins to understand that even
in the wake of tragedy there will be laughter and joy for the people
she cares about.
With tenderness, humor, and the astonishing voice of an unforgettable
heroine, THE LOVELY BONES builds out of a family’s unthinkable
loss a story full of promise and hope.
—Maria Russo, Washington
Washington Post
Post Book
Book World
World
1
What readers and critics say about
“Savagely beautiful.... A strange and compelling
novel.”
Alice Sebold’s THE LOVELY BONES
“A stunning achievement.”
—THE NEW YORKER
—MONICA WOOD, SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
“Mesmerizing .... Sebold deals with almost unthinkable subjects with humor and intelligence and a kind of
mysterious grace .... THE LOVELY BONES takes the stuff of
neighborhood tragedy—the unexplained disappearance of a
child, the shattered family alone with its grief—and turns it
into literature.”
—KATHERINE BOUTON, NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
“A novel that is painfully fine and
accomplished, one which readers will have their own
“THE LOVELY BONES is a book that truly defies a pat
description. The subject is not death, or life, but how close
the two really are ....Be warned: This is a book
you will have a hard time forgetting.”
–SARAH DESSEN, RALEIGH NEWS & OBSERVER
“Don’t start THE LOVELY BONES unless you can finish it.
The book begins with more horror than you could imagine,
but closes with more beauty than you could hope
for ....Alice Sebold has done something
difficulties relinquishing, long after the last page is turned.”
miraculous here.”
—PAULA L. WOODS, LOS ANGELES TIMES
—RON CHARLES, CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR
“So this is what heaven is like.
It comes bottled
in a blue drink of a book and reads like a fairy tale .... Sebold
has worked wonders.”
“The most touching and yet bracing imagining
of what the dead may have to say to the living that I’ve read
in a long time.” —MARTA SALIJ, DETROIT FREE PRESS
—KAREN VALBY, ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY
“An audacious novel.... THE LOVELY BONES seems
to be saying there are more important things in life on earth
than retribution. Like forgiveness, like love.”
—CONAN PUTNAM, CHICAGO TRIBUNE
“THE LOVELY BONES is a stor y you’ll want to pretend was
written for yourself alone.”
—U.S. NEWS & WORLD REPORT
“A keenly observed portrait of familial love and
how it endures and changes over time....A deeply affecting
meditation on the ways in which terrible pain and loss can
be redeemed—slowly, grudgingly, and in fragments—
through love and acceptance.”
—MICHIKO KAKUTANI, NEW YORK TIMES
“There aren’t many writers who could pull off a stor y
about a dead girl, narrated by that dead girl—from heaven,
no less. But this astonishingly assured novel has
“Here is a writer who honors fiction’s primar y gift—the
infinity of possibilities—by following her imagination to
wondrous and terrifying places.”
—KAREN SANDSTROM, CLEVELAND PLAIN DEALER
“A haunting meditation on family and youth, loss,
love, and redemption. It is a book that startles and rewards
on page after page, a book that rivets attention from its
simple opening lines…Susie’s voice is the key ingredient in
the brilliant magic of THE LOVELY BONES. She is the voice
of promise unfulfilled, life cut short, forever young, but also
achingly real.”
–JOHN MARSHALL, SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER
“A luminescent debut novel.”
—JOY PRESS, VILLAGE VOICE
“A triumphant novel .... The breakout fiction debut
of the year .... It’s a knockout.” —LEV GROSSMAN, TIME
wit, affection, and just the right amount
of heart.” —SARA NELSON, GLAMOUR
2
3
The Oddity of Suburbia
by Alice Sebold
My family was watching television when a couple—the mother
and father to a woman who lived one street over with her family—were hit
by a car and landed on our front lawn. The man who hit them leapt out of his
car and shouted to two boys playing basketball in the driveway of the house
across from ours. He yelled: “These people need an ambulance.” He then
proceeded to jump back in his car and drive three houses down, where he
calmly parked in his own driveway and went inside his house. The daughter
of the couple who had been hit had been walking behind her parents and,
having lapped them once, now came up upon the scene. We heard the
screaming and ran out. Both of her parents were killed. One died on our
lawn, the other died later, in a hospital. And the man who struck them? He
was both one of our neighbors and, by profession, a paramedic.
As I grew up and left home, living in Manhattan and just outside L.A., I
began to realize more and more that within the suburban world of my
upbringing there were as many strange stories as there were in the more
romanticized parts of the world. Ultimately, the East Village had nothing on
Nowhere U.S.A. and I returned, after several failed attempts at “the urban
novel,” to the material I knew best. Of course, I found the elements for THE
LOVELY BONES in a combination of things, but a major element in its pages
is the oddness of what we often condescendingly refer to as the suburbs.
In those places—like the place where I grew up—where all the houses of a
particular development share the same floor plan or, in upper end versions
of recent years, vary among three or four, live people with lives much more
complex than the architecture containing them would suggest. But it took
me years to go home again in my mind and imagination. To see the incidents
that occurred all around me as a child and as a teenager as worthy of narrative. But growing up in one of many supposed Nowhere U.S.A.’s has created
for me a bottomless well of narrative ideas.
Who would have thought that the place I most despised growing up—where
I felt like the weirdest freak and the biggest loser—would turn out to be a
gift to me. But what I have finally, to my joy, been made aware of is that
while I grew up hearing that there were ‘a thousand stories in the naked city
and none of them the same,’ this was as true of the look-alike houses all
around me as it was of the places I lived as an adult. The difference perhaps
is that you have to look harder in the suburbs, past the floor plans and into
the human heart.
4
Questions for Discussion
1. In Susie’s Heaven, she is surrounded by things that bring her peace.
What would your Heaven be like? Is it surprising that in Susie’s inward,
personal version of the hereafter there is no God or larger being that
presides?
2. Why does Ruth become Susie’s main connection to Earth? Was it
accidental that Susie touched Ruth on her way up to Heaven, or was Ruth
actually chosen to be Susie’s emotional conduit?
3. Rape is one of the most alienating experiences imaginable. Susie’s rape
ends in murder and changes her family and friends forever. Alienation is
transferred, in a sense, to Susie’s parents and siblings. How do they each
experience loneliness and solitude after Susie’s death?
4. Why does the author include details about Mr. Harvey’s childhood and
his memories of his mother? By giving him a human side, does Sebold get
us closer to understanding his motivation? Sebold explained in an interview about the novel that murderers “are not animals but men,” and that
is what makes them so frightening. Do you agree?
5. Discuss the way in which guilt manifests itself in the various characters—
Jack, Abigail, Lindsay, Mr. Harvey, Len Fenerman.
6. “Pushing on the inbetween” is how Susie describes her efforts to connect
with those she has left behind on Earth. Have you ever felt as though
someone was trying to communicate with you from “the inbetween?”
7. Does Buckley really see Susie, or does he make up a version of his sister as
a way of understanding and not being too emotionally damaged by her
death? How do you explain tragedy to a child? Do you think Susie’s parents do a good job of helping Buckley comprehend the loss of his sister?
8. Susie is killed just as she was beginning to see her mother and father as
real people, not just as parents. Watching her parents’ relationship
change in the wake of her death, she begins to understand how they react
to the world and to each other. How does this newfound understanding
affect Susie?
9. Can Abigail’s choice to leave her family be justified?
5
Words to Live By
The author of THE LOVELY BONES talks
w i t h D a v i d M e h e g a n o f t h e BB oo ss tt oo nn GG ll oo bb ee . .
10. Why does Abigail leave her dead daughter’s photo outside the Chicago
Airport on her way back to her family?
11. Susie observes that “The living deserve attention, too.” She watches her
sister, Lindsay, being neglected as those around her focus all their
attention on grieving for Susie. Jack refuses to allow Buckley to use
Susie’s clothes in his garden. When is it time to let go?
12. Susie’s Heaven seems to have different stages, and climbing to the next
stage of Heaven requires her to remove herself from what happens on
Earth. What is this process like for Susie?
13. In THE LOVELY BONES, adult relationships (Abigail and Jack, Ray’s
parents) are dysfunctional and troubled, whereas the young relationships (Lindsay and Samuel, Ray and Susie, Ray and Ruth) all seem to
have depth, maturity, and potential. What is the author saying about
young love? About the trials and tribulations of married life?
14. Is Jack Salmon allowing himself to be swallowed up by his grief? Is
there a point where he should have let go? How does his grief process
affect his family? Is there something admirable about holding on so
tightly to Susie’s memory and not denying his profound sadness?
15. The scene in which Susie inhabits Ruth’s body and fulfills one of her
greatest wishes—making love with Ray—is the most supernatural part
of the novel. Is it difficult to make this leap of faith with the author? Do
you think there are times when we do things to satisfy the wishes of
those in Heaven, who are unable to achieve their own unfulfilled
dreams on Earth?
16. Ray and Susie’s final physical experience (via Ruth’s body)seems to act
almost as an exorcism that sweeps away, if only temporarily, Susie’s
memory of her rape. What is the significance of this act for Susie, and
does it serve to counterbalance the violent act that ended Susie’s life?
17. Alice Sebold seems to be saying that out of tragedy comes healing.
Susie’s family fractures and comes back together, a town learns to find
strength in each other. Do you agree that good can come of great trauma?
6
Nothing about Alice Sebold would suggest that she has been the most popular novelist in America for the last seven months—not her casual clothes nor
the Spanish-style bungalow that she shares with her husband, novelist Glen
David Gold. Sebold, 40, is reflective, relaxed, often quite funny, and determined that her quiet writing life will go on, despite all that has happened
since July.
That’s when her first novel, THE LOVELY BONES, was published. It’s about
Susie Salmon, a 14-year-old girl who has been raped and murdered. Susie
narrates from heaven the murder and the later histories of her family,
friends, and the killer. Sebold and publisher Little, Brown had hoped for a
good first-novel sale for the unorthodox narrative—a few thousand copies
would be considered a success. What they got was the biggest-selling novel
of 2002. Nielsen BookScan, the book tracking service, places THE LOVELY
BONES at the top for last year, with 1.5 million copies sold, ahead of such
power authors as J. K. Rowling, Tom Clancy, and John Grisham. After 34
weeks on the New York Times hardcover fiction bestseller list, THE LOVELY
BONES is in its 20th printing, with at least 2.37 million copies in print. In
addition, Lucky, Sebold’s 1999 memoir of her rape, has spent 22 weeks on the
New York Times paperback list.
On the surface, the phenomenon is another example of the unpredictability
of readers’ tastes and needs, and of how word-of-mouth praise, smart
marketing, and lucky breaks can come together to put a book into orbit. On
a personal level, though, Sebold’s own story illustrates how writing, and the
writer’s life, rescued her from a sinkhole of trauma, isolation, and despair.
One night during her freshman year at Syracuse University in 1981, Sebold
was jumped from behind, punched, and dragged at knife point into a tunnel
entrance to an amphitheater. The man forced her to strip in the cold darkness, then raped her. Police later told her she was lucky; a previous rape victim had been killed.
Seventeen years later, after wrestling with drugs and despair, she wrote about
her experience in Lucky: the rape, the 1982 trial in which the rapist was convicted and sent to prison, and especially the lingering, bitter aftermath. The
psychological trauma, Sebold wrote, isolated her from friends, lovers, other
7
rape victims, and family. Even her father, shocked and confused, wanted to
know: “How could he have raped you unless you let him?”
The damage, she says, can fester under layers of time and change, and an
ignorant, thoughtless remark can easily reopen the wound. “There is no way
you can tell someone in that moment what you are experiencing,” she says,
“that their behavior does nothing but alienate you, makes you experience
your own alienation.”
Sebold returned to college in the fall of 1981 and took a poetry workshop with
poet Tess Gallagher, who urged her to write about her experience. Sebold
did, beginning with the line “If they caught you…” Not long after, she spotted
the rapist on the street and went to the police, who arrested him. Gallagher
helped her a second time by going with her to the preliminary hearing, where
she had to come face to face with the defendant.
‘I HAD CHANGED’
Sebold graduated but still struggled to put the rape behind her. In Lucky, she
wrote, “I had changed….In my world, I saw violence everywhere.” She
entered a master’s program in poetry at the University of Houston but soon
washed out. She went to New York, rented a room on the Lower East Side,
worked as a hostess in a midtown club, and began “dabbling” in heroin,
snorting the drug with her boyfriend. (She says she never became addicted.)
Sebold was writing, too; her first novel, Tripping, in 1986 was nominated in
manuscript for a Pushcart Prize, but it was never published.
She could have been ruined by drugs but in 1989 was offered an interview for
a job at New York’s Hunter College. They were desperate for an adjunct
instructor; she had teaching experience from graduate school and had studied with Gallagher and Tobias Wolff at Syracuse. It was a part-time job—
teaching freshman composition—but Sebold discovered she liked teaching
young writers and was good at it. And it helped stabilize her life. In Lucky, she
writes, “My students became the people who kept me alive.” Eventually she
dumped the boyfriend, moved uptown, gave up heroin.
She wrote short stories and a second novel—none published—but mostly she
worked with student writers, at Hunter, New York University, Bucknell
University, and other colleges. She taught at Hunter for almost 10 years until
1995, when she decided to try another master’s program in creative writing at
the University of California at Irvine. She met Glen David Gold on her first
day of class. In time they became a couple, but he vowed he wouldn’t propose
to her until his own first novel was accepted. His Carter Beats the Devil was
published in 2001, and they were married that year.
At Irvine, Susie Salmon, the main character of THE LOVELY BONES,
was born.
Sebold says she had been working on another book, but “I was not compelled
by it. I went and read some poems and came back to the desk and wrote that
first chapter in one sitting. So Susie came upon me more than me deciding,
‘I’m going to write about a teenager, she’ll be dead and speaking from heaven.’
That idea of a shadow that travels with you, that has another destiny than you
might have imagined, has always fascinated me. For me, that shadow has
always been a teenage girl who died.”
In the book, Susie gazes down from “my heaven,” which seems to be a combination of park and playground. She wants to help her loved ones, or lead
them to the man who killed her. But like Sebold in the aftermath of her rape,
Susie can’t break through a frustrating, invisible barrier between herself and
others.
Sebold worked on the book in her Irvine fiction workshop, which was led at
one point by novelist Margot Livesey of Cambridge. “She struck me as
immensely determined as a writer,” Livesey recalls. “She had a strong sense
of the novel. Though she acknowledged that the premise was far-fetched,
there was a real ambition, a desire to make the book as good as possible.”
Still, it was hard going, and Sebold realized that before she could finish
Susie’s story, there was another book about a young rape victim that she had
to write.
HEALING PROCESS
She went back to Syracuse and researched everything that had happened to
her in 1981, scouring police, medical, and court records. She interviewed the
investigator and prosecutor. The result was Lucky, an unflinching account
that she says was cathartic and healing, for her parents as much as herself.
Back at work on Susie’s story, she finally showed 150 pages to her agent,
“My students became the people who kept me alive.”
8
9
Henry Dunow of New York. “I thought it was brilliant,” Dunow says, “as
startling and moving a batch of pages as I had seen in years.” He sent it to
Scribner, the publisher of Lucky, which had an option to make a first offer on
Sebold’s second book.
“There was a polite but modest offer,” Dunow says. “They were nervous
about the subject in two dimensions: the violence toward a child and the
heavenly narrator.”
He declined the offer. Several other publishers turned the book down, but
Little, Brown snapped it up with an offer Dunow describes as “a good level
for a first novel but not a spectacular deal by any means.” Sebold buckled
down and finished the book.
From there, THE LOVELY BONES built momentum like a runaway train.
An excerpt appeared in Seventeen magazine, and the reader response was
electric. At Book Expo America, the big spring trade show, booksellers were
so excited that Little, Brown had to print more advance reader copies, which
is almost unheard of. It instantly became a Book-of-the-Month Club
selection. Then, just weeks before the book hit the shelves, a huge break:
Novelist Anna Quindlen told Today show viewers, “If you only have time to
read one book this summer, it’s THE LOVELY BONES.”
The book exploded out of the gate, pushed in part by Michiko Kakutani’s
rave review in The New York Times. On July 14, THE LOVELY BONES hit the
New York Times bestseller list and hasn’t dropped off since.
Sebold says she doesn’t know why THE LOVELY BONES resonates with so
many people. “I don’t feel particularly connected to what is going on in society.
This book was not calculated in any way,” she says. “If I were a savvy
calculator, I would have published my first novel before I was 39.”
Without intending to, Sebold touched a nerve in America, having to do with
the horror of lost children and the healing from unimaginable loss. Some say
the reader response had to do with still-raw emotions after Sept. 11, others
relate it to the several infamous child murders in the last year.
“When a book is both good and well published,” Livesey says, “success may
seem self-evident. But other books are good and well published and not on
the bestseller list. I do think there is something radiant and heartfelt about
the early chapters. It is haunting and persuasive and memorable.”
“From a parent’s point of view,” says Dunow, “that first chapter is almost
unbearable, but Alice pulls you through with a message of healing that speaks
to people.”
Some critics dismissed THE LOVELY BONES as a crude anodyne. In a
scathing review in The New York Review of Books, Daniel Mendelsohn called its
success “symptomatic of a larger cultural dysfunction” and sneered at the
novel’s “proleptic yearning for relief…its emphasis on the bathetic appeal of
victimhood, its pseudo-therapeutic lingo of healing.”
Sebold shrugs at that view. “I have my own beliefs, and that’s certainly reflected in my characters,” she says. “I have a tendency to feel that it’s possible to
keep hope alive and that sometimes in the darkest circumstances that’s all
you’ve got going for you. If that makes me disgusting, I embrace my disgust.”
The least-expected difficulty of her fantastic success—her fans’ desire for a
more personal connection—occurs most often at book signings. “There are
people who are hoping that you can give them something,” she says. “They
come up and tell me of a person they had lost, sometimes a child or a parent.
I want to be able to acknowledge people, but if there are 200 in line, you have
30 seconds to do it.”
Sebold seems well insulated from hype, criticism, celebrity, or the commercial
publishing marketplace. She likes a quiet life, has few close friends, and
makes new ones slowly.
Money and fame are OK, she makes clear, but the most important effect of
her success is the unfettered freedom to do the thing she loves best: write.
“I want to work on my next book,” she says, “and try to be here to garden a little
in the fall, and read.
I’m married to the man I want to be married to, live in a certain way that I like
living. It’s very weird to succeed at 39 years old and realize that in the midst of
your failure, you were slowly building the life that you wanted anyway.”
David Mehegan’s article on Alice Sebold and THE LOVELY BONES originally appeared in
the Boston Globe on February 25, 2003. Copyright © 2003 by Globe Newspaper Co.
(MA). Reprinted with permission.
“I want to work on my next book and try to be here to garden a little in the fall, and read.”
10
11
Also by Alice Sebold
MORE THAN SIX MONTHS
ON THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER LIST
PRAISE FOR LUCKY
“A literar y memoir that shines with personality. There is such
openness in Sebold’s brash, vibrant style that the book feels like
the long version of a friend’s breathless account of an ordeal.”
—CARMEN SCHNEIDEL, TIME OUT NEW YORK
lucky
“A rueful, razor-sharp memoir…funnier than you’d think was
possible....Sebold’s commanding skill as a narrator (at her best,
describing the awful crime itself, she brings to mind a fierce
young Joan Didion) forces you to relive her terror....She tells what
it’s like to go through a particular kind of nightmare in order to
tell what it’s like—slowly, bumpily, triumphantly—to heal.”
—SARAH KERR, VOGUE
“Gruesome and strangely enchanting....The quiet achievement of
Sebold’s memoir is that she handles her subject with the integrity
of a journalist and the care of a survivor.”
—CASEY GREENFIELD, NEWSDAY
“LUCKY is exhilarating to read…sharp-eyed and
unsentimental....The ironic, nervy Sebold refused to let the
experience diminish her…or her sense of humor.”
—FRANCINE PROSE, ELLE
“LUCKY—which reads like a John Grisham page-turner—can’t
help but haunt you....Sebold’s is a stor y about having the courage
to speak about the unspeakable.”
—SHERYL ALTMAN, BIOGRAPHY
Alice Sebold was an 18-year-old college freshman when she was
brutally raped and beaten in a park near campus on the last night of
school. The police told her she was lucky to be alive—and that dubious
“luck” is the focus of this fiercely observed memoir. What animates the
story of her recovery is Sebold’s indomitable spirit—as she withstands
the sometimes hapless efforts of family and friends to provide comfort
and support, and as, ultimately, she triumphs, managing through grit
and remarkable coincidence to help in securing her attacker’s arrest
and conviction. In a narrative by turns disturbing, thrilling, and inspiring,
Sebold illuminates the experience of trauma victims even as she
imparts wisdom profoundly hard-won: “You save yourself or you
remain unsaved.”
12
“Stunningly crafted and unsparing....A memoir that reads like
detective fiction....Told with mettle and intelligence, Sebold’s stor y
of fierce determination to wrest back her life from her rapist will
inspire and challenge.”
—KIRKUS REVIEWS
“Sebold’s opening scene is as gripping and terrifying as any in a
film....Her voice is a powerful new plea to break the silence that
still clings to this taboo, and little understood, subject.”
—JOAN ULLMAN, CLEVELAND PLAIN DEALER
“Give Alice Sebold your attention for her first five pages and you’re
in for the whole ride.”
—SARAH ECKHOFF, SALON
13
Alice Sebold’s Suggestions for Further Reading
Short Stories
The Collected Stories by William Trevor
This is, at best, a partial, partial, partial list of books I love. I’ve tried to provide a
variety—nonfiction and fiction, and a few biographies that are both amazingly written
and lead the reader toward finding the books or creations of the subjects written
about. Some are new and some not so new. Pursue them and you will be rewarded.
Above all, keep reading!
—A.S.
This is a large and meaty collection of a master short story writer. He is such an incredible writer, so
funny, so deft. These stories are condensed jewels. The very best.
Birds of America by Lorrie Moore
This is another collection that combines many of the author’s best stories. No one writes like Moore
or uses language like her. How she works an image brings instant delight.
Eleven Kinds of Loneliness by Richard Yates
Novels
Best known for his novel Revolutionary Road, this is the Yates book I return to again and again. He
reveals the dark layers of an individual’s soul like no one else can.
Two Serious Ladies by Jane Bowles
Nonfiction
A 1947 masterpiece of comedy—dark, dark, dark comedy—concerning the adventures of two
women who live entirely by pursuing their desires, no matter how fleeting, irrational, or inexplicable.
Told with compassion, wit, and elegance, it’s like an Audrey Hepburn movie gone terribly awry.
Agitations: Essays on Life and Literature by Arthur Krystal
So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell
A classic. In 135 pages, you live a world away in a landscape where memory evokes a lost world and
lost youth. Maxwell is a master stylist.
Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin
Again, a classic. And again a novel under 200 pages that brings you into another place and time—
set in Paris in the 1950s, it tells the story of one man’s search and discovery of his sexual identity.
Beautiful stuff!
The Emigrants by W.G. Sebald
I love books about reading or, in this collection of essays by the curmudgeonly Krystal, why we
shouldn’t read, why all modern literature is dead, why life is horrendous but we keep trying to prevail. Sometimes a smart man in a bad mood is just my cup of tea.
Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader by Anne Fadiman
Fadiman, who also wrote the incredible book The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down (hint, a recommendation inside a recommendation!), is in love with books and shares this love in a slender
collection of essays that makes a fine companion for anyone who has ever taken solace in the beauty
and life-sustaining path that being a committed reader can provide.
Ornament and Silence: Essays on Women’s Lives, from Virginia Woolf to Germaine Greer
by Kennedy Fraser
This is my favorite of Sebald’s stunning novels. His ability to condense and crystallize memory
makes his work so evocative—like extended prose poems that lead into the heart and brain of the
reader. Four imagined biographies of Germans in exile that combine photographs and documents in
the text. A different kind of book.
I bought and gave away so many copies of this book, I need to buy a new one for myself. This is a
personal and political book in its study of how creative achievement and male love often conflict and
the struggle to have both that remains a persistent challenge. Plus, again, Kennedy is a superb stylist.
Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury by Sigrid Nunez
Oh to have a big wonderful bio—a biographer more than equal to her subject—a wealth of
photographs to illustrate the exquisite episodes in Colette’s colorful life and consistent revelations
provided by the author on how Colette fit into and was defined by her time. Yum! (A beautiful bridge
to Colette’s work. My favorite: My Mother’s House & Sido)
For those of you who loved Michael Cunningham’s The Hours and are having a fit of Woolfishness,
this slender book is absolutely delectable. It tells the true story of Virginia and Leonard’s pet marmoset. Nunez is deeply intelligent on the period and uses this brief (116 pages) moment in time to
tell us about the Woolfs as well as the world on the verge of war.
The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber
Wow! This is a biggie and a beauty. Rich, lusty, smart, and funny. Faber never allows his knowledge
of the period to overwhelm the narrative. It flounces and pulses and vibrates. When a book is long it
better be good and this one is!
And to round out the novel section, four classics that I return to and reread:
The Ambassadors by Henry James; Middlemarch by George Eliot; Anna Karenina by Leo
Tolstoy, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsy (the newest
translation is a world of difference—a true discovery); The House of Mirth by Edith
Wharton; and Anthony Trollope novels for the joy of abundance!
14
Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette by Judith Thurman
How to Read a Poem—And Fall in Love with Poetry by Edward Hirsch
The Demon and the Angel: Searching for the Source of Artistic Inspiration by Edward
Hirsch
In my ongoing desire to bring more people with me into my first love, I recommend these two
Hirsch books. He is a fine poet and his love of poetry is articulated here passionately. Anyone who
has ever wanted to write or have insight into the creative process will find The Demon and the Angel
very revealing.
And again, closing out this list of five nonfiction books (okay more, really) with some
wonderful reads (I am a sucker for short acute bios of women and for analysis of
these bios!): Ladies and Not-So-Gentle Women by Alfred Allan Lewis; Passionate Minds
by Claudia Roth Pierpont; Alice James: A Biography by Jean Strouse; and The Silent
Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes by Janet Malcolm. Check them out!
15
NOTES
Alice Sebold’s THE LOVELY
BONES is available
i n h a r d c o v e r f r o m L i t t l e,
B r o w n a n d C o m p a n y.
LUCKY is now
available in paperback
f r o m B a c k B a y B o o k s.
Little, Brown and Company
An AOL Time Warner Book Group Company
www.twbookmark.com
16