15. At the reunion, Lydia says the “real question” is who she and Danny would have been to each other as adults. Do you think their relationship would have changed or would it have remained the same as it had been in adolescence?
16. The idea of “drifting” comes up throughout the book. Lydia’s parents are classified as “drifters.” Lydia lets herself get swept along with Lola’s enthusiasm and Danny’s friends’ attention and Bayard’s bemused incomprehension of America. Lydia wants to feel a bit lost in the end and theorizes that Danny did too. What do you make of this theme of drifting? What is its significance in the story?
17. In the final car ride with David Nelson, Lydia reflects, “There was a part of me that had long curled in on itself and atrophied, perhaps beginning the day Danny slipped unremarkably out the front door, perhaps long before that. I could feel it unfurling now, churning through my watery belly and rising up my throat, coming out my nostrils and my mouth, dragon breath singeing my earlobes and making my face sweat even in the breeze of the AC”. What exactly is the part of Lydia that had curled up on itself and atrophied? And why is it opening now, in this car ride?
18. The novel ends when Lydia is twenty-eight. Do you think she has, at this point, “recovered” from Danny’s disappearance? Has her mother?
19. In the last sentence, Lydia’s thinking about Danny “jangling with possibility and promise, his future wide open”, and yet we know his future was grim. What do you think this ending might say about Lydia and her future?
MIRIAM GERSHOW was born in Detroit, lived briefly in Philadelphia, and spent the majority of her childhood and adolescence in the Detroit suburbs. She graduated from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor with a degree in women’s studies before moving to Oregon in 1994. She has worked as a life skills trainer for runaway and homeless youth, an office manager, a short-order cook, and a state bureaucrat. She cofounded a nonprofit organization that advocated for the rights of recipients of public mental health services. In 2000, she returned to school at the University of Oregon, where she received her MFA in fiction.
Miriam is the recipient of the James C. McCreight Fiction Fellowship from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, as well as an Oregon Literary Fellowship from Literary Arts in Portland, Oregon. Her stories have appeared in The Georgia Review, Quarterly West, Black Warrior Review, Nimrod International Journal, The Journal, and Gulf Coast, among other journals. Miriam’s stories have been listed in the 100 Other Distinguished Stories section of The Best American Short Stories 2007 and have appeared in the 2008 Robert Olen Butler Prize Stories. She is a past winner of the AWP Intro Journals award and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
Miriam has taught fiction writing at the University of Wisconsin and Portland State University, as well as descriptive writing to gifted high school students through Johns Hopkins University. She currently lives in Eugene, Oregon, with her husband, where she is working on her next novel and teaching in the English department at the University of Oregon.
Copyright © 2009 by Miriam Gershow
All Rights Reserved
www.spiegelandgrau.com
SPIEGEL & GRAU is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gershow, Miriam.
The local news: a novel / Miriam Gershow. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Young women—Fiction. 2. Brothers—Death—Fiction. 3. Grief-Fiction. 4. Loss (Psychology)—Fiction. 5. Domestic fiction. 6. Psychological fiction. I. Title.
PS3607.E785L63 2009
813′.6—dc22
2008033391
eISBN: 978-0-385-52970-9
v3.0_r2
The Local News Page 33