While I Was Gone (43 page)

Do you think the liberties she takes with these and other details about her previous life enable her to be more herself-more honest, in a way, because this reinvention of herself is truer to her heart than the life and the identity she fled—or do they engage her in falsehoods and deceptions that undermine the possibility of truth, and of true friendship?”

Discuss Jo’s feelings after Daniel’s sermon. She has not seen him since their disagreement the night before, yet as she leaves the church she feels “such a wild reckless joy and excitement that I wanted to yell, to dance under the pelting rain. Daniel! I wanted to shout… Daniel, my husband!” What’s changed?”

5. Discuss the sermon itself—in particular, this notion of “memory as a god-given gift.” How do themes of memory and forgetfulness reverberate in the novel as a whole?” What relationship, if any, does memory have to morality7 How and on what levels do you think Jo was moved by Daniel’s sermon?” How were you moved by it as a reader?”

6. After Eli’s confession Jo has to make a series of difficult choices.

She could have shielded Daniel from the knowledge that she had been prepared to commit adultery, but to do so she would also have had to shield Eli. Should she have turned Eli in to the authorities?” Should she have confessed her romantic intentions with Eli to Daniel? What should Jo have done? What do you think the author believes Jo should have done? What would you have done?”

7. After he confesses to the murder, Eli makes the argument that his scientific achievements counterbalance his crime.

“I’ve worked the rest of my life to assure that who I am has some meaning, some value beyond this part of my past… And I have lived my life that way, making sure every day of its usefulness, of its meaning. I wrecked one life, yes. Dana’s life… but I’ve given, I’m giving now, to thousands, to hundreds of thousands, of other lives.” Has Eli redeemed himself?” How is your response to this shaped by the fact that—financially, in stature, in his notion of his own self worth, in the pleasure that he derives from it—Eli has benefited from this work?” Can a person who has committed a murder ever be redeemed7 What do you think the author believes, and why?”

8.

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” Long before Eli’s confession to Jo, Eli and Jo meet for coffee and Jo makes a similar comment about her own guilt about having treated her first husband so poorly, and how her work has helped to ease her conscience, “It made me feel I’d earned my way back to a normal life.” Is this legitimate?” More legitimate than Eli’s argument7 Do you feel that either of them ever really has to face A Reader’s Guide the consequences of their mistakes?” Discuss the differences-and the similarities—between the ways in which the two have lived their lives.

9. After Jo’s description of her second meeting with Daniel, she says, “We were married six weeks later, and I would say we have lived happily, if not ever after, at least enough of the time since.

There are always compromises, of course, but they are at the heart of what it means to be married. They are, occasionally, everything.” What does she mean by this?” What kinds of compromises have she and Daniel made for each other?” Discuss this in relation to the end of the novel. Look in particular at the scene where Daniel waits in the shadows for Jo to depart (“He’s seen me in the car, and he’s stopped there, waiting. He doesn’t realize I’ve seen him. He doesn’t want me to see him.”), and the scene with Daniel and Jo at the airport (“I made myself register consciously the expression that had passed for a moment over his face as he moved forward to hold me, a sadness, a visible regret.”) When her children were young, Jo used to tell them bedtime stow ries about a character named Miraculotta. One night Cassie said to Jo, “I know who Miraculotta really is, Mom… she’s you.”

Later, as an angry, disaffected fourteen-year-old, Cass’s awe for her mother has changed to contempt, “You’re so limited,” Jo recalls Cass telling her, and in response, Jo thinks, “Well yes, of course I am.” What does Jo mean by this? Is she referring to herself specifically, or to all parents? What do you feel about Jo as mother?

11. “Deliberately, playfully, I fed fantasies about Eli. I allowed them to become sexual, I gave them specific flesh. I imagined us in sundering, tearing passions in hotel rooms in Boston, in nonS de script motels or inns in towns twenty or fifty miles away…

It was all right to imagine this, I said to myself… as long as I understood it wasn’t going to happen.” Do fantasies have a morality? Is it all right to imagine, as long as we don’t follow through? Are thoughts, in and of themselves, dangerous? Immoral?

12. What do you think of Daniel and Jo’s marriage? Would Jo’s betrayal of Daniel have been more profound if she’d actually had an affair with Eli? What do you think the author thinks, and why?”

13. At the end of the novel, several people are confronted by revelations they find shocking about people they thought they knew, Sadie discovers the murder in her mother’s past, Jo discovers that her father had a previous marriage, and Daniel, of course, discovers his wife’s near infidelity. In her letter to Sadie, Jo writes, “Now there’s a different message, I guess, something having to do with our inability to know or guess at the secret depths of another person.” Later she makes reference to a similar feeling on Daniel’s part—“the momentary possibility that he didn’t know me at all”—and she recalls her mother’s words after her mother’s confession, “We’re the same, aren’t we? It hasn’t changed us in your eyes to know this.” Is it possible to ever really know another person?” Should all secrets be told?”

14. Using Jo’s reflections after her mother’s confession (“It seems we need someone to know us as we are—with all we have done-and forgive us… “) and, most particularly, her reflections in the novel’s closing pages (“Perhaps it’s best to live with the possibility that around any corner, at any time, may come the person who reminds you of your own capacity to surprise yourself, to put at risk everything that’s dear to you. Who reminds you of the distances we have to bridge to begin to know anything about one another. Who reminds you that what seems to be—even about yourself—may not be. That like him, you need to be forgiven.”), discuss the theme of forgiveness in the novel.

SUE MILLER is the best selling author of The Good Mother, Inventing the Abbotts, Family Pictures, For Love, and The Distinguished Guest.

She lives in Boston.

Excerpts from Reviews of Whzk I Wm > “This well-written, well-crafted book is, in part, a study of the corrosive effects of secrets and deceits, in part a meditation on forgiveness, and in part a paean to plunges taken, even those with dire results. Miller stares us down, provokes questions, dares us not to get it’ about ourselves. She startles. She also satisfies expectations.”—Washington Post Book World “This is one of those books… which adds to the reader’s expeo rience rather than just amusing for a short while. Miller writes beautifully about the delicate vagaries of consciousness. The dialogue throughout is excellent, capturing character and mood with energy and charm.”—The Washington Times “Scene after Miller scene is an artfully staged mini-drama of those painful or delightful moments that reveal humanity in all its awkward, muddled splendor. They are the result of deft pacS ing, deep sympathy for her characters and a knowing grasp of how people really talk.”—Newsday “Miller writes about a point in life when one has experienced both birth and death, enough beginnings and endings to form some conclusions about how the remaining minutes, weeks and years will best be spent. Wisdom creeps up on Miller’s characters, and they do not swoon.”—Los Angeles Times the end.