수요모임 입니다.
. 일시 : 5월 28일,  10:30am
. 장소 : TCC @ wisma Atria
. 책 : Dear Life / Alice Munro
. 읽을 분량 :  ~끝까지

“The Eye”
1. What aspects of the mother’s behavior are troubling to her daughter and make her welcome an alliance with Sadie? What is admirable about Sadie, especially given the time period?

2. What is strange or uncanny about the idea that Sadie, in death, might have moved her eyelid? The narrator thinks, “this sight fell into everything I knew about Sadie and somehow, as well, into whatever special experience was owing to myself” (269). How do you interpret this moment and its meaning?

“Night”
1. The narrator attributes the strangeness of her thoughts that particular summer to a special status, “all inward,” conferred on her by learning that during a routine appendectomy, the doctor had removed a tumor “the size of a turkey’s egg” (275, 272).  She says, “I was not myself” (276). What do you make of the narrator’s efforts to explain the reasons for her state of mind and the worry that she could strangle her little sister (277)?

2. How does the encounter with her father help the narrator to deal with her fear about her thoughts? Why is it significant to the impact of this encounter that in this family, emotional troubles or worries usually go unexpressed?

“Voices”
1. How is the mother’s character revealed in her reaction to the presence of a prostitute at the dance, as channeled through the daughter’s observations? Why does the narrator find the voices of the soldiers so intriguing and so comforting?

2. What does the story express about the difficult relationship between mothers and daughters, especially regarding the mother’s supposed role as model and mentor in her daughter’s adolescence?

“Dear Life”
1. The title of this story comes from the account the mother gives the narrator of hiding her, when she was an infant, from a strange and threatening woman who used to live in the family’s house (318). This and other salient memories combine to create a picture of an often difficult family life: the mother’s physical decline, the failure of the father’s fox farm and his later work in a foundry, the failure of the narrator to return home for her mother’s funeral.  Does this story seem to embrace the idea that a significant task for the writer is to extend understanding, imagination, and empathy into one’s own past, and to make amends for errors, cruelties, and misjudgments there?