We Had It So Good (42 page)

A Scribner Reading Group Guide

We Had It So Good
 
Linda Grant

I
NTRODUCTION

Set in the United States and the United Kingdom, Man Booker—shortlisted author Linda Grant's
We Had It So Good
is a sweeping history of the evolution of the baby boomer generation. In 1968 Stephen Newman, the son of an immigrant Californian, leaves America for Oxford University on a Rhodes Scholarship. There his world evolves, as he; his future wife, Andrea; and their friends come of age during the hazy 1970s. Written with humor and coruscating insight,
We Had It So Good
is an unfailingly tender portrait of a family and an era.

Q
UESTIONS FOR
D
ISCUSSION

1. There are a number of catastrophic events that hang over the social landscape throughout the narrative–including the remnants of World War II, the Vietnam War, the September 11 attacks, the terrorist bombing of the London tube, and the political strife witnessed by Marianne outside of Bosnia. How does disaster shape the characters in
We Had It So Good
?

2. On page 14, Marianne tells her brother that “you cannot rely on them for the truth. Parents, by definition, are liars.” Do you agree? Does her statement make you rethink the validity of Stephen and Andrea's perspectives?

3. Should Si have told Stephen the truth of his emigration to the United States? Once Andrea knew his secret, should she have been the one to divulge his story? What did you make of Stephen's “numb” reaction to reading his father's therapy file and discovering the truth?

4. On page 300, considering her analysis of Grace, Andrea thinks, “Of course . . . it's in childhood that we are building our neuroses, and God forbid, if you
are
abused and neglected, something can go so badly wrong so early that it can never be put right.” How do formative childhood events affect the characters in the book? Consider Stephen's trying on the mink stole, Andrea's “froggy” day, Grace's strange upbringing, Max's deafness, and Marianne's being called fat. Do the characters ever break free of their childhood trauma? Were you reminded of any specific moments or experiences from your own childhood?

5. Linda Grant employs a unique narrative style throughout
We Had It So Good,
switching perspectives within the same chapter and dedicating entire chapters to the first-person narration of Grace. How did the shifting voice affect your reading? Did you feel you gained greater insight into Grace and the other characters?

6. Grace maintains that she is more liberated and more in touch with the world than Ivan, Stephen, and Andrea. Is there something to envy about her lifestyle? Is there something to pity?

7. National identity plays an important role in the book. Discuss how nationality influences each character. Consider Stephen's Americanism in England, Si's emigrant history, Andrea's trip to America, and Stephen's mother's Cuban idealism in comparison to Grace's views.

8. How did Stephen and Andrea change from young hippies smoking on the lawn into a successful BBC producer and a respected psychotherapist? How does the couple handle this success? What do you think their former selves would think of their current lives in the “blur of middle age and child-rearing”?

9. On page 320, as Stephen reflects on their youthful, utopian values he says to Ivan, “But most of it was dross. What did we accomplish?” Ivan replies, “We're all condemned to live on our own times, our little period of history.” Do you agree with Stephen? Was anything actually accomplished? Was there some lasting validity from their beliefs that helped shape their adult lives?

10. Discuss romantic relationships and the nature of love in the narrative. Consider Stephen/Andrea, Stephen's infidelity, Ivan/Simone, Max/Cheryl, and Marianne/Janek. What makes a lasting love? What ruins it?

11. The friendship between Grace and Andrea is one of the key relationships in the book. Describe their relationship in particular and, more generally, the importance and role of female friendship in women's lives. What do you think draws Grace and Andrea to each other? Discuss their friendship in relation to the end of the book.

12. Did the meaning of the title,
We Had It So Good,
change for you after you finished reading? Why or why not? Do Stephen and Andrea appreciate the good fortune of their upbringing, education, and “moment in history”?

13. Why is Stephen unable to accept Andrea's sickness and imminent death? Why does he take solace in the Internet?

14. On page 205, Stephen tells his children that the whole point of sixties culture was to live an “authentic life.” Does anyone in the novel achieve this? According to Stephen, what makes something authentic? Is the past just a narrative or a story?

E
NHANCE
Y
OUR
B
OOK
C
LUB

1. Make a list of the ideals and beliefs you held when you were young. Include political leanings, theories, and doctrines you may have subscribed to. Discuss with your book club where you stand on those issues now, and how long you maintained these ideas about the world. Do any of these notions still appeal to you?

2. Read Linda Grant's Man Booker—shortlisted novel
The Clothes on Their Backs,
about a young, sheltered girl's strong desire to live and experience life more fully after she meets her charismatic uncle. What themes seem to prevail in Grant's writing?

3. Perform your own photo experiment and try to capture the things that fascinate you in a picture. Share your photos with your book club and discuss the nature of Marianne's work and her choice of subjects.

4. Visit someplace foreign to you. Document your feelings upon first arriving. Is there a point at which you assimilate? Do you always feel like an outsider? If you've moved from where you grew up, visit your place of origin. Do the myths and perspectives you held about that locale still hold true? Discuss how time changes your view of the past and present.

Author Q & A

How did you come to write this book?

On the day after 9/11 I first began to think what a very lucky generation mine had been, not having suffered the traumas of war and depression experienced by our parents, and now, it seemed, the world was going to change overnight. I believed there would be devastating acts of terrorism in London, very soon. I was both wrong and right: there was an attack on the London Underground, but not for another six years, and the real disasters that seem to have felled us are financial; perhaps I was half right and it is depression and not war on our own streets that will change everything.

In 2005, at a party in my own neighborhood, a very well-dressed, distinguished-looking man approached me and said he believed we had gone to the same university, which we had. He asked me if I remembered the hippy health food shop Alligator, which I certainly did. It sold brown rice, brown bread so dense you could knock someone out with it, brown lentils, brown sugar, joss sticks, patchouli oil–a whole brown world for us organic hip-pies. What was his connection? I asked him. He told me he was one of the founders. And what do you do now? “Advertising.” So I was instantly riveted by the trajectory of his life, the arc that led him from there to his current situation, and when I investigated further I found that it was the
events of his upbringing that had informed everything.

So these things were very much on my mind when I was beginning to think about writing a new novel and they came together in the idea of following a group of friends whose children don't believe that their parents were ever interesting.

We Had It So Good
is about the baby boomer generation, but it also tracks the trajectory of a very particular and very fortunate kind of middle-class person. How did you think about class when you were writing the book?

The characters are carefully plotted in class terms. They are a group of people who could have met only at university in the sixties and seventies and it was my intention to plot the rise and fall of that particular university-educated middle class who entered the workforce in the early seventies. It was quite deliberate to put Stephen, Andrea, and Ivan all in Islington, a working-class neighborhood when they arrive there, full of fly-blown corset shops. I remember walking the length of Upper Street in the late seventies trying to get a cappuccino and no one knew what I meant. I found a caff with two urns. When I asked for a black coffee, no sugar, I was told that the milk was already in it. “This one's with sugar, this one's without.” Each character comes from a particular class niche: Stephen, lower-middle-class American, inheritor of the American Dream, the vision of classlessness and progress; Andrea, the daughter of the English middle class who did badly after the war because they weren't in touch with social change, clinging to gentility; Ivan, the son of the archetypal Hampstead lefty intellectuals (based on a family I knew); and Grace, the child of the Home Counties, a marriage crossing the tracks between the upper-class wife and the scholarship boy who is going to get on through education. So all of them arrive at Oxford and have this tremendous start, and rise more or less seamlessly, apart from Grace, the refusnik.

Are the characters in
We Had It So Good
meant to be inherently ridiculous?

I think the only characters who aren't ridiculous are Andrea and Max. Yes, please feel free to laugh at them. They deserve it, as fond of them as I am.

Stephen is an American who steps into a very British world–but is never entirely assimilated. How was it imagining British habits, hang-ups, and tastes through the eyes of a semi-outsider? Did it reveal things about our way of life that were unexpected?

I needed someone who was the epitome of optimism, of the idea of the bright future, and a Californian seemed the best repository for that. But he's also an outsider who doesn't even want to be an insider, so it allows him always to be restless, always to think that there's something better, and for him to observe Englishness.

Have you spent much time in the United States?

In a sense I grew up in an American household. My father, like Stephen, was a merchant seaman in his teens and jumped ship in New York as a wetback, where he lived for several years. For my family, America was always better, brighter, the optimistic, longed-for land. I first went to America in 1975, immediately after I graduated from university, hitchhiked from one coast to the other and back again, detouring up to Canada. I saw an America not visible to tourists, and talked to everyone who gave me a ride, from Montana ranchers (very kind, with libertarian politics, utterly alien to my young, European ears), to liberals deeply ashamed of the recent Watergate scandal and Mexicans wanting to talk about American racism. The wheat fields of Kansas are permanently tattooed on my eyes. Since then I have visited the United States every few years and have been to most parts, except, sadly, the Southwest. Texas and Arizona remain virgin territory for me still.

What do you think the legacies of the baby boomer generation are? What's the best? The worst?

Without a doubt the greatest legacy of the baby boomers was feminism, the real revolution of the sixties, and the most permanent. If you watch
Mad Men,
you see how much daily reality has changed for women. I'm both proud of it and proud of the part I played in it. Our worst legacy was our obsession with our own entitlement to youth without end, giving rise to a pitiful refusal to age and a massive growth in cosmetic surgery.

You write beautifully about friendship–between Andrea and Grace and Stephen and Ivan–especially female friendship. What is the power and draw of these relationships, for the characters and for most of us in real life?

Friendship is one of the most unlikely forms of social relationship. We are under such obligations to be pleasant to people we are related to or work with; we acquire acquaintances at parties. But friendship that lasts our whole lives is to be valued as highly as a marriage, more so, perhaps. These long friendships are based on shared experiences and memories, but also tolerance of the other's failings and weaknesses. In the case of Andrea and Grace, each has drawn strength from the other, without, perhaps, ever fully realizing it.