Surrender, Dorothy: A Novel
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Q: What is your sense of who your readers are? What do they want from a novel? Who is your ideal reader?
A: I’m not really sure who my readers are, although I have a vague sense of them as being in their 30’s and early 40’s, and predominantly female and well-educated. I sense this from the letters I receive and the people who come to my readings. They remind me of my own friends. My ideal reader, of course, is myself. I’ve always said that I try to write the books I wish I could find on the bookstore shelf. This is advice I have given my writing students: write the kind of fiction that you would love to read.
Q: Have you met many of your readers at book signings or through letters and e-mail? What sorts of feedback do you most appreciate?
A: I’ve met some readers at readings I’ve given and through the letters they’ve written me, but I haven’t really gotten to know any of them. Still, it means a great deal to me when someone tells me how much he or she liked a particular book of mine. I think almost all writers feel this way, though readers sometimes imagine that compliments or comments aren’t of great interest to writers. They are wrong; writers love to hear substantive commentary or praise. It may just be because it feels good to have your ego stroked, but I think it’s also because writing so often delivers delayed gratification, and the sudden pleasure of a reader’s reaction is a welcome burst of immediacy. Unsolicited criticism, while valid, is of course less fun to receive. Mostly I just enjoy getting hard evidence that people who aren’t my mother or my relatives or my friends are actually reading what I’ve written.
Reading Group Questions and Topics for Discussion
1. In the particular emotional realm of Surrender, Dorothy, the issue of “growing up” is central. Sara feels that her mother “has not prepared me for being grown up.” Adam is obsessed with losing his identity as a precocious young artist—and the idea of becoming a washed-up, “one-hit wonder” terrifies him. What does “growing up” mean to the novel’s other characters?
2. In what ways has the summer house always offered its inhabitants a sort of month-long respite from these concerns about “growing up”? What else has the summer house represented to Adam, Sara, Maddy, and Peter? After Sara’s death, how does this change?
3. Surrender, Dorothy begins with a powerful internal monologue: “Immortality was the vehicle that transported me, every summer, to the squalid little house we called our own. Immortality was the thing I rode in, barely noticing.” Who is presumably speaking here? To what degree might the thoughts expressed here—that “death was not for us, certainly not for me”—be attributed to every character in the novel? Explain.
4. What does Meg Wolitzer achieve by opening the book with such a rueful and elegiac Prologue? How does it color the tone of the rest of the novel?
5. With which characters in Surrender, Dorothy do you most closely identify? Why?
6. How would you describe each of the main characters in this story? What are the motivations underlying their choices and actions?
7. What can we learn about Natalie’s character from the fact that she continues to think of her 30-year-old daughter and her friends as “irresponsible teenagers, instead of this crew of careful, faithful friends hurtling in a pack toward the middle of their lives”? If Natalie were to recognize them as adults, how would she then have to adjust her own sense of self?
8. What are the dynamics of Adam and Sara’s friendship? What are the advantages and disadvantages associated with their platonic relationship, one that is “freed from the netting of sexual love, from the calamities that regularly plagued their more predictably coupled-up friends”? How does Natalie seem to feel about their relationship?
9. What does the future hold for Maddy? Do you think the marriage with Peter will last? Do you think she should stay with him? Why or why not?
10. Adam is not so much attracted to Shawn as he is flattered that someone so good-looking wants him. Who suffers more as a result of this affair? To what extent is Shawn’s self-image damaged and/or modified by this relationship? Adam’s?
11. Surrender, Dorothy climaxes with an emotional argument between Adam and Natalie. What compels Adam to lash out the way he does? Is his behavior justified? How much of what he says about Natalie is true? And what does his personal attack reveal about his own frustrations?
12. In the middle of this scene, Wolitzer’s omniscient third-person narrator ruminates on the tension underlying her characters’ anger: “Of course it was [a contest], a heated, furious competition, and the theme of it was: Who owned this broken girl now, her mother or her closest friends? There were no rules, no reference book in which to look up the answer.” How does this unspoken “competition” bear out?
13. Describe the nature of the relationship between Maddy and Sara. How does it begin? What roles do competition, jealousy and rivalry play at different points in their friendship? How do these ambivalent feelings color Maddy’s mourning process?
14. What do you think about Peter and Sara’s mutual decision to not tell Maddy about their brief affair? How does this deception contribute to Maddy and Peters estranged marriage after Sara’s death?
15. The ghost of Sara is very much a part of the sexual moment that flickers between Natalie and Peter on the beach. Why is her presence so significant?
16. What effect does Kenji’s translation of Sara’s Japanese diary seem to have on Natalie? Consider her actions and behavior once she hears Sara’s posthumous request to “leave me the hell alone…enough is enough.”
17. Discuss the author’s writing style. How does Wolitzer’s use of dialogue serve to develop and distinguish each of the novel’s characters?
18. Chart the different grieving processes acted out by each of Wolitzer’s characters. By the end of the novel, to what degree has each of them begun to heal?
19. What is the likelihood that the characters in Surrender, Dorothy will remain close friends in the future? Without Sara as their glue, what will hold them all together? What would an Epilogue have in store for this group?
20. What are the central themes in Surrender, Dorothy? What does Wolitzer seem to be saying about the shifting notions of family in modern life?
MEG WOLITZER, a recipient of a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, is the author of Sleepwalking, Hidden Pictures, This Is Your Life, and Friends for Life. Her short fiction has appeared in Best American Short Stories 1998 and The 1999 Pushcart Prize. Wolitzer has taught at Skidmore College and at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She lives in New York City.