A Bigamist's Daughter

ABOUT THIS GUIDE

One of America’s most beloved novelists, National Book Award winner Alice McDermott has enchanted us with her tender yet unflinching portraits of families and lovers, dreamers and survivors. A Bigamist’s Daughter is the book that launched this writer’s spectacular career—an ingenious debut novel capturing the dance of memory and aftermath, while raising provocative questions about the very act of writing a novel.

Elizabeth Connelly is an editor at a vanity press, guiding mediocre but often well-heeled authors through the experience of getting published (though they must pay for the process themselves). But when Tupper Daniels brings his manuscript to her, she finds herself confronting a chapter from her own past, and the line between her professional and personal life dissolves. Tupper’s storyline features a man who loves more than one woman at the same time, a situation that echoes Elizabeth’s recollections of her father. As she begins to unravel the unspoken mysteries of her parents’ lives, she awakens to new longings, and to a startling new vision of how her life might unfold.

The questions and discussion topics that follow are intended to enhance your reading of Alice McDermott’s A Bigamist’s Daughter. We hope they will enrich your experience of this haunting novel.

Reader's Guide

1. What were your reactions to Tupper’s novel, which shapes the opening scenes of A Bigamist’s Daughter? Would you have bought his book, joining the hordes of readers he confidently predicted would have been intrigued? What was the effect of reading a book whose plot is built around the publishing process itself—albeit a very different form of publishing from the one Alice McDermott experienced?

2. A Bigamist’s Daughter was originally published in 1982. Has our image of single women changed very much since then? Would Elizabeth’s experiences with dating, living alone, and establishing a career remain the same if she were a twenty-first-century character?

3. How would you describe Elizabeth’s relationship with her mother? What did her mother teach her about the role of women? What transformations did both women undergo after they began living apart?

4. What is the effect of the novel’s shifting points of view? In what way did it enhance the storytelling to use past-tense, first-person narration with the chapters set in Maine, allowing you to hear Elizabeth’s voice in those passages, while the rest of the novel unfolded in the present tense, with third-person narration?

5. How do Ward and Tupper compare as romantics? What makes them attractive to the women in their lives? What accounts for the tremendous differences in their approaches to love?

6. What were your initial impressions of Tupper? Did your opinion of him shift throughout the novel? Would you have trusted him and dated him?

7. What does sex mean to Elizabeth? What did she hope to achieve by staying celibate for several months? What determined whether she found a sexual encounter to be fulfilling—emotionally or otherwise?

8. How do Joanne’s attitudes about weddings and marriage compare to yours? What did her upbringing prepare her for in terms of marriage and having a family of her own? Did she have an advantage over Elizabeth? Would you have preferred to live Joanne’s life or Elizabeth’s?

9. To what extent is Elizabeth influenced by her Catholicism and by her Irish ancestry? Does she reject or embrace these legacies? How do these legacies mesh with Tupper’s notions of being a Southern gentleman?

10. How is Elizabeth affected by the fact-finding trip to Long Island? Is Tupper’s approach to finding an ending appropriate? Is the best ending to a novel found in actual events from someone’s past?

11. Discuss your reactions to Tupper’s comments about men and women at the end of Chapter Seventeen: “If a man fails to connect with a certain woman, he just goes on to someone else. But women—and I’m not condoning this, I’m just talking about the way things are—women derive so much more of themselves, their identity, their self-confidence from men.”

12. Which is the greater crime in the novel’s “bigamies”: disloyalty or dishonesty? What lies does Elizabeth tell? Are they harmful? Or are they necessary for her survival?

13. What parallels run between the seductive hope Elizabeth offers to prospective authors and the romantic seductions she experiences in her personal life? In the end, does Elizabeth become like her father?

14. What patterns did McDermott craft in her literary career with A Bigamist’s Daughter, her debut novel? What threads continued to be woven throughout her subsequent books? In what way is A Bigamist’s Daughter completely distinct from the fiction she would later write?