Spoiled
Page 23
“Okay.”
“Hey, isn’t that Cassiopeia?” Will said, craning his neck at the sky.
“Is it?” Lydia said. She was very calm, letting him point out the stars.
Acknowledgments
I’d like to thank Laura Ford, who brought the book to fruition, and Dan Menaker, who was a great source of encouragement early on.
David McCormick saw me through the fits and starts of a long project.
I’m lucky to have as my friend Cressida Connolly, whose guidance and good taste I relied on from beginning to end.
A Conversation with Caitlin Macy
Random House Reader’s Circle: Each of the stories in Spoiled is wonderfully unique, yet there are similar themes running throughout the collection. How did you decide on the subject matter for these stories? Why did you choose to write about what might be perceived as a certain type of woman?
Caitlin Macy: I started writing the stories and the unifying theme came later. An editor of mine at Random House came up with the title for the story “Spoiled.” At that point I had written about half of the stories in the book and I thought, Aha, that’s what this book is about.
RHRC: In many of the stories, you show women and girls behaving badly—acting spoiled. Are we supposed to empathize with them?
CM: Not necessarily! I do care about all of my characters no matter how repellent their behavior, I suppose because I feel that they’re ultimately suffering also. Many of them are trapped emotionally and psychologically if not logistically. That doesn’t excuse their behavior of course, but for me, it mitigates it a bit. People act out when they are anxious and unhappy.
RHRC: Do you relate to any of the women in particular? Are any of them based on people you know?
CM: I definitely relate to the younger sister in “Bait and Switch,” as I’m a younger sister myself. I also empathize with the thirty-something lawyer in “The Secret Vote.” The anxieties of contemporary life for my generation are manifold; any decision that represents a break with one’s family can be agonizing.
None of the characters map directly to friends of mine though I certainly use details from acquaintances’ lives, from conversations I’ve overheard in the park, from gossip in Starbucks.
RHRC: Your last book, The Fundamentals of Play, was a novel. Which do you prefer, short stories or novels? And how is the writing process different for each?
CM: I think I’m more naturally a novelist and I find the longer form friendlier; it’s more forgiving to a writer—one can wax on a bit about things, one doesn’t have to have to write quite as tightly as one does in a story. With a story, I really have to have a sense of where it’s going right from the beginning and how it’s going to get there. It’s a challenging form: like making up a riddle or a joke, there’s very little room for digression.
RHRC: Who are some of your literary influences? And do you see this book as part of a certain tradition of books that explore wealth and class?
CM: My first book was heavily influenced by The Great Gatsby, which I reread a thousand times. Nowadays I read a lot of contemporary women writers: Alice Munro, Nadine Gordimer, Tessa Hadley, Rachel Cusk. I’m happy to be included in the tradition of people who write about class. On the other hand, I am fascinated by class not as a study in and of itself but as a particularly illuminating lens through which one can explore the emotional drives of one’s characters.
RHRC: We’d love to know what you’re working on now. Is it something in the same vein as Spoiled?
CM: It’s a bit of a departure! I just finished a screenplay, a romantic comedy. Beyond the love interest there is a central relationship between the heroine and a female friend of hers—a bad friend actually—so I’m still exploring women’s relationships.
Questions and Topics for Discussion
1. In two of the stories, “Annabel’s Mother” and “The Red Coat,” Macy writes about a woman’s conflicted relationship with her domestic help—a nanny and a cleaning woman, respectively. What do you think a woman’s relationship with her help says about her as a person?
2. In “The Secret Vote,” a young woman raised Roman Catholic reacts with distaste to the idea of a gay couple having a child with a surrogate mother. But the story ends with the young woman herself having an abortion. What is Macy saying about the woman’s perspective? Is it hypocritical?
3. Unlike the United Kingdom, America isn’t supposed to have true class distinctions, yet these nuances play an important role in Spoiled. Why do you think that is?
4. Are there moral lessons that can be taken from the ways the women in these stories behave? Do you think these stories are meant to be cautionary tales?
5. The women in most of these stories are well-off, some of them very well-off. Why do you think they aren’t happier?
6. The subjects of several of the stories (“Annabel’s Mother,” “Bad Ghost,” “Spoiled,” “Bait and Switch”) are parents and their children, or parental stand-ins—nannies, friends’ mothers, a girl’s riding instructor—and their charges. Do you think a spoiled child makes for a spoiled adult?
7. This book came out in the middle of a global financial meltdown. How do you think the characters would be doing in today’s financial climate?
8. What does it mean to be spoiled?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
CAITLIN MACY is the author of The Fundamentals of Play and the winner of an O. Henry Prize in 2005. Her work has been published in The New York Times, The New Yorker, and Slate. Macy lives with her family in New York City.
Spoiled is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents
are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living
or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2009 by Caitlin Macy
Reading group guide copyright 2010 by Random House, Inc.
All rights reserved.
RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks
of Random House, Inc.
Random House Reader’s Circle and Design is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc.
eISBN: 978-1-58836-792-1
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