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Overview
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9780312156091 |
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Publisher: | Picador |
Publication date: | 05/15/1997 |
Pages: | 288 |
Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.68(d) |
About the Author
What People are Saying About This
Mary Morris inhabits Ivy with an intensity and clarity of vision that makes this a story at once sad, tough, and honest, but at the same time hauntingly beautiful.
Reading Group Guide
In The Night Sky, Mary Morris tells the story of Ivy Slovak, a single mother struggling to provide for her infant son while coping with childhood memories of abandonment by her own mother. While Ivy's story invokes memories from the past and struggles of the present, the night sky holds within it dreams yet to be realized. With quiet eloquence and deep compassion, The Night Sky establishes Mary Morris as one of the foremost chroniclers of the secrets and strengths of the human spirit.
Discussion Questions:
1. In manuscript, this book was originally called The Night Sky, but Morris's publisher felt she should change the title, so it was published first as A Mother's Love. At some risk Morris wanted Picador to republish this book with the original title. Why do you think Morris felt so strongly about this? Why is The Night Sky the real title of this book?
2. Why do we need the story in the past to inform the present?
3. How is Ivy's art reflected in the structure of the novel as a whole?
4. Ivy is named Ivy because her mother says she likes to cling. How and to what does she cling? Is her name a self-fulfilling prophecy?
5. In some ways this novel is a book about gambling. What is the role of gambling in the novel?
6. Sense of place is always important for Morris who is also a travel writer. What part does the desert play in this book?
7. Is Ivy a good mother? How is it in the end that we know what kind of mother she is or will be?
Mary Morris, in her own words:
"I came to domesticity backward," Morris explains. "First I had a child, then I had a husband." Morris was not married when her daughter Katie was born in 1987. In 1988, she met Canadian journalist Larry O'Conner at a conference in Virginia. After surviving the difficulties of a long-distance relationship, the two married in August 1989, spent a year traveling around the Southwest, and finally settled in Brooklyn, New York.
"I feel ill at ease with the notion of who I am. There are really three parts: who I am as a person, who I am as a writer, and then there are characters in my books. I think my fiction and nonfiction get blurred together in readers' minds. It may be that the parts people think are the most autobiographical are the least so, and the parts they think are the least [true] may -- on another, disguised level -- be the most faithful."
-- Publishers Weekly
About the Author
Mary Morris is also the author of the novels House Arrest, (available from Picador USA), Crossroads, and The Waiting Room; two travel memoirs, Nothing to Declare: Memoirs of a Women Traveling Alone and Wall to Wall: From Beijing to Berlin by Rail; and the award-winning story collections Vanishing Animals and Other Stories and The Bus of Dreams.Her new story collection is The Lifeguard. Mary Morris teaches writing at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband and daughter.