~ For Your Consideration ~
Chapters 7 - 11


  • 1. Have you ever known anybody like Tripp? Did you marry your first love? If not what happened to him or her? Have you been able to find out?

  • 2. "Mama says I'm going to get the big house [Sweetgrass], seeing as how I'm the daughter and all." (Page 175)

  • "What Mama intended me to have" has split many a family, sometimes permanently. This seems a good rationale to help explain Adele's bitterness and sarcastic remarks. Are there others? Let's list here some of the things Adele may be angry or bitter about:
  • A. Not getting the house she feels she was promised.
  • 3. The writing is particularly good in these sections. What is one example to you this morning of some really superior writing or descriptions YOU found in these chapters?

  • 4. "People should be rewarded for doing well, like Preston." (page 175)
  • In your opinion, is this a theme of the book? Is this the way it normally works in real life? Why or why not? Do you share this philosophy?
  • 5. What is a Moses basket?

  • 6. What do you know about the beat poet Jack Kerouac? Have you ever read anything he wrote? Bring here something he's said so we can all see it.

  • 7. "You fool, " she murmured, looking deeper into her own eyes. " You poor old fool." (page 209)_

    One of the somewhat grounding experiences OF growing old is the realization that no matter how much passion we may have brought to this or that, or how much WE personally felt right, in retrospect, we have often been wrong, and not only wrong, disastrously so. There is no person who escapes this. Nothing shows this more than letters, which are an art form rapidly disappearing in the age of telecommunications and email.
  • Why now, though? Why should this character NOW be realizing that Tripp never loved her at all? Was that evident to you from reading the letters or did you need her to tell you? Why is she just now finding this out?
  • 8. "In Sweetgrass, Mama June had to journey through the past--the good and the bad--to reach truth. She was lost in the fog of a hazy past because of false memories or deliberately discarded/avoided ones. After all, she followed her mother's advice of, "don't think of that now." I think many people do this from time to time. In her case, the tragedies of Tripp's and her son's deaths were overwhelming. I sympathize with that kind of loss." --- Mary Alice Monroe

    Let's watch each of these characters as they journey through the past and see what truth each of them reach.
  • 9. "How ironic, she thought, to store the past but never tend to it." (page 201).
    What does that mean? How could you "tend" the past?

  • 10. " It's not right. You're not right for Tripp. "
    What would YOU have said to Adele? What did you understand her to mean? Are these the words of a friend?

    Questions for Chapters 1 - 6

    Questions for Chapters 12 - 16

    Questions for Chapters 17 - End