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- Why
do you think Jean Hegland chose to call
her novel Windfalls? Do you think it is a good
title for the book? Why or why not?
- The
novel opens with a lyrical description of
one of Anna's photographs -- of a lone tree on a barren
windswept hillside beneath a stormy sky, its trunk split
almost in two. What purpose do the tree and its photograph
serve in the novel and in the lives of the two main characters?
- Both
Anna and Cerise find themselves
facing unplanned pregnancies, but they make very different
decisions about their lives. Were the choices they made
the right ones for them at the time? Do they turn out to
be wise decisions as their lives unfold?
- Windfalls
has been described as a deeply stirring
novel about the choices that every woman faces. Discuss
the ways that life circumstances either force choices on
us or take them away from us.
- Joelle
Fraser, author of The Territory of Men,
describes Windfalls as "an elegy to motherhood
in all its painful, beautiful complexity." Talk about
the rapturous joys and heartbreaking sorrows and terrors
of motherhood depicted in Windfalls. What other
novels have you read or movies have you seen that deal with
the theme of motherhood and its rewards and costs? How do
they compare with Windfalls?
- What
do you think of the way the author deals
with the sensitive subject of abortion and a woman's right
to choose? Are her own views about abortion made clear in
the novel? Should they be? Is it possible for a work of
fiction to simply explore the human dimensions of a highly
controversial political, moral, or religious issue without
taking a stand? If you knew that an author's views on a
social issue you feel passionately about stood in opposition
to your own, how do you think it would it affect your response
to her novel?
- In
Windfalls, Jean Hegland also explores
such volatile contemporary social issues as welfare and
homelessness. In an interview she gave after her acclaimed
first novel, Into the Forest, Hegland explained that regardless
of how important an author considers the themes of her fiction
to be, "in a novel, it's the story that comes first.
It's a challenge because one can get so fervent, but more
is less when it comes to fervency." Do you agree or
disagree? Do you think she succeeds or fails in Windfalls
in expressing the passions of her characters while keeping
her own fervency in check?
- Anna's
decision to terminate her pregnancy is influenced
by her impression of her sister's life. "Sally had
been a painter before Jesse was born. She had studied in
Italy, had won awards but the woman she'd been then seemed
to have vanished into the abyss of motherhood. Anna wondered
how much art was lost to the world each time another baby
was born. With a ferocity that nearly frightened her, she'd
thought, I could never be like that." Later on, when
Anna marries and has two children of her own, how do her
views change? How does she balance the conflicting demands
of art and motherhood?
- Why
do you think Anna asked to see what was
taken from her body during the abortion? Did the request
surprise you? How do you think her graphic image of what
she saw affected her? Why do you think she never told anyone
about her abortion, and why does she finally open up to
Cerise toward the end of the novel?
- When
Cerise was a teenager she
often would deliberately burn her wrists with a heated iron,
a mysterious craving to hurt herself that she could neither
understand nor stop, but which disappeared when Melody was
born. She is frantic when she witnesses her 14-year-old
daughter plunging her forearm against the heated element
of the stove. She ached with pain both current and remembered—not
the sting of blisters on tender skin as much as the hole
in her soul those burns were meant to cauterize. Talk about
the overwhelming mix of love, fear, anger, and self-recrimination
Cerise—or any mother—experiences as she watches
her child behave in dangerous and self-destructive ways.
- What
do you think of the way the novel is constructed—as
a series of alternating sections on the separate lives of
its two main characters? Talk about the way the author manages
to intertwine their lives. How do these two women, of very
different educational backgrounds, economic stations, and
temperaments, become friends and what does each learn from
the other?
- What
life lessons does Anna learn from her grandmother's
story of her stillborn daughter? What is the significance
of that one quietly spoken word, "Because"? How
does the woman Cerise encounters in the forest help her
to go on living when she longs to end her life? How does
young Lucy help Cerise to cope with her grief over Travis?
What does Cerise mean when she says goodbye to Anna and
explains, "I need to find out what someone means by
Saturday morning"?
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