Dream of the Blue Room (23 page)
Read Dream of the Blue Room Online
Authors: Michelle Richmond
Tags: #Literary, #General, #Death, #Psychological fiction, #Married women, #Young women, #Friendship, #Fiction, #Psychological, #Yangtze River (China)
QUESTIONS AND TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION
1. What causes the rift in Jenny and Dave’s relationship? What is their fundamental difference that causes their marriage to fail? Before they part ways in China, Jenny wonders if all Dave needs is “some slight indication that I’m losing my way, that I won’t make it without him—and that if I can give him this, not just now but forever, he’ll come back to me”. Could she have saved her marriage in this way? Should she have?
2. What attracts Jenny to Graham? Graham to Jenny?
3. Do you believe sexuality is a dichotomy or a spectrum? Do you think a person can love—and be physically attracted to—a person of the same sex but not be gay?
4. Amanda Ruth embraced her otherness—her race, her lesbianism—at an age when so many young women try to be like everyone else. Was this courage? Rebellion? How was Amanda Ruth able to stand out so gracefully?
5. Why does Richmond describe the announcements on their boat as “The Voice”? What does it represent?
6. Place is a recurring theme in
Dream of the Blue Room
. What about the characters’ origins defined them? How can a person’s geographical origins affect his or her story?
7. Graham explains his decision to end his life before he is incapacitated by ALS: “Imagine—to choose one’s own time and place of death. To make a conscious decision to leave this earth while you’re still intact, still functioning.” What might you do in Graham’s place? Would you stick it out to the end, alive but not living? Or would you choose the time and place of your own death?
8. Jenny explains her love for Dave when she muses that “it is possible to love a person for being sturdy and reliable in a single, impossible moment, for responding with perfect timing and absolute precision to your unspoken needs.” Do you agree with her? Who else in
Dream of the Blue Room
loves another character for their actions in a single moment? Have you ever experienced this? Is it ever possible to build a lasting relationship on this kind of love?
9. What does Amanda Ruth’s yellow scarf symbolize? Do you agree with Jenny that she betrayed Amanda Ruth by denying that she had a romantic relationship with her? Why or why not?
10. For many years after Amanda Ruth’s murder, Jenny believed that it was the one defining moment of her life, “that other events would never hold for me any real sense of drama.… I have lived my entire adult life with a sense that the timing is all off.” Did other defining moments follow? Have you experienced one of these moments yet in your life? Might there be others?
11. After days, almost weeks, of insomnia, why is Jenny finally able to sleep in Yeuyang?
12. The author retains some mystery about Amanda Ruth’s killer for most of the novel. Why? When did you first realize it was her own father?
13. What is it about Jenny that convinced Graham she could help him die? What is it about her that allowed her to identify her cousin’s body? Kill the rat in her neighbor’s bathtub with no emotion? Do you think she still retains these characteristics when the novel closes?
14. Consider the drowned river victims whom the cruise staff refuses to acknowledge, the staged funeral procession, Yuk Ming’s fabricated “Chinese experience.” Jenny calls her visit to China “an amusement park version of the country”. Why might this “amusement park” sensation be amplified in China? Do you think you have ever had an authentic experience of a foreign place?
15. What is the significance of QiQi the baiji, Jenny’s dream about him, and the baiji’s appearance as she leaves Fengdu?
16. Do you agree with Graham and Jenny that “to be away and adrift, distant and foreign and lost, alone, is to be somehow free”?
M
ICHELLE
R
ICHMOND
is the
New York Times
and
San Francisco Chronicle
bestselling author of
The Year of Fog, No One You Know
, and
The Girl in the Fall-Away Dress
. Her stories and essays have appeared in
Glimmer Train, Playboy, The Oxford American
, and elsewhere. She has received the 2009 Hillsdale Award for Fiction from the Fellowship of Southern Writers, the Associated Writing Programs Award, and the Mississippi Review Prize. A native of Mobile, Alabama, Michelle lives with her husband and son in San Francisco, where she is at work on her next novel.
Dream of the Blue Room
is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
2010 Bantam Books Trade Paperback Edition
Copyright © 2002 by Michelle Richmond
Reading group guide copyright © 2010 by Random House, Inc.
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Bantam Books, an imprint of
The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random
House, Inc., New York.
B
ANTAM
B
OOKS
and the rooster colophon are registered trademarks of
Random House, Inc.
Originally published in hardcover in the United States by
MacAdam/Cage, San Francisco, in 2002.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Richmond, Michelle.
Dream of the blue room / by Michelle Richmond.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-553-90700-1
1. Yangtze River (China)—Fiction. 2. Married women—Fiction.
3. Young women—Fiction. 4. Friendship—Fiction. 5. Death—Fiction.
I. Title.
PS3618.I35 D74 2003 813′.6—dc21 2002153552
www.randomhousereaderscircle.com
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