Book Club Discussion Questions
For supplemental discussion material see our Beyond the Book article, and our BookBrowse Review of Veronica.
Please be aware that this discussion guide will contain spoilers!
ABOUT THIS GUIDE
The introduction, discussion questions, suggestions for
further reading, and author biography that follow are designed to enhance your group’s discussion of Mary Gaitskill’s
Veronica, which
The New York Times Book Review hailed as “a masterly examination of the relationship between surface and self, culture and fashion, time and memory.”
ABOUT THIS BOOK
Set primarily during the narcotic glitz and casual
cruelties of the 1980s,
Veronica traces the rise and fall of Alison, from teenager runaway in San Francisco to the runways of Paris and finally to a menial job cleaning apartments in San Rafael. But the novel is far more concerned with Alison’s inner life than her outward trajectory. As she looks back over her life, Alison flows in and out of past and present, searching for meaning in the choices she has made, in the suffering that has come from those choices, and most of all in her friendship with Veronica, an eccentric office worker with AIDS who Alison meets while temping in New York. While Alison has been in many ways a prisoner to her beauty, exploited by photographers and agents, lured into the modeling world where she was manipulated, sexually used, and cheated out of her earnings, Veronica’s relative “ugliness” has allowed her to run her own show. Veronica is unlike anyone Alison has ever met—socially awkward, fiercely contentious, exhibiting her own ideas on style. Their unlikely friendship drifts in and out of various levels of intimacy and distance,
but when Veronica contracts AIDS from her promiscuously bisexual boyfriend, Alison is the only one who does not desert her. And as Alison must deal with her own present illness and loss of stature, Veronica comes to haunt her thoughts more and more obsessively.
Ugliness and beauty, the ugliness that underlies beauty,
and the way each exerts a kind of magnetic attraction and repulsion on the other, is a major theme of the novel. Alison describes Veronica, with “her ugly face, her proofreader’s kit—her rulers, her box of colored pencils—her prissiness, which denied the shit of the world and so drew it down upon herself” [p. 231]. Suffering comes down, with torturous intensity, on all the major characters of Veronica. But joy and gratitude move just under the surface of the narrative, looking
for a way in, as Alison gropes her way toward hope amidst the wreckage of her life.
In prose that is as sensual, musical, and richly metaphoric as any in recent literature, Mary Gaitskill offers an unflinching exploration of one woman’s journey from desolation to stardom and back again.
Reader's Guide
- What is the significance of the story Alison’s
mother told her about the wicked little girl when she
was a child? In what ways does it function as a kind of
parable, or prediction, of Alison’s life?
- Alison’s narrative shifts between past and
present, or rather between several layers of the past
and the present. What effects does Mary Gaitskill create
through this method of narration? In what ways does it
mirror the way the mind and memory actually work?
- What kind of relationship does Alison have with
her parents and with her sisters? How do they view her
modeling career?
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- How does the author develop themes of identity and belonging throughout the narrative?
- What role does the setting play in shaping the characters' decisions and relationships?
- Discuss how the ending reframes the events of the story. Were you surprised?
Unless otherwise stated, this discussion guide is reprinted with the permission of Vintage.
Any page references refer to a USA edition of the book, usually the trade paperback version, and may vary in other editions.
