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About the book
Questions for Discussion
1. Betsy sees herself differently than others see her. Do you think that you perceive yourself in the same way that others do? When and why are there discrepancies?
2. The Drifter delves into sorority culture of the late 1980s and early 1990s. How does this inform all of the women’s relationships throughout the novel?
3. Betsy’s friends become like family when she’s at school. How do these friendships define her over the course of her life? Is Caroline a true friend? Is Gavin? Is Betsy?
4. What are your impressions of Caroline? What are your impressions of Ginny? Do those change as the novel progresses?
5. Music is a big part of The Drifter. How do you think the songs relate to the story? Do they foreshadow events? Do they set a tone for the story? Are there any themes hidden within them?
6. Betsy’s adult life is defined by her time in Gainesville—the music, the art, the fashion, the friends. Is there a time or a place in your life that has helped to define you?
7. Betsy often uses unconventional humor to lighten the mood or cast a shadow over a situation. Why do you think she does this? How does this influence her relationship with those around her? Does her humor reveal how she is feeling? Explain why or why not.
8. Gavin and Betsy have a complicated relationship. Do you think it progressed too fast? Was Ginny’s death a catalyst for their relationship? Do you think they are ultimately a good match?
9. There are a number of parent–child relationships in the story. How would you describe the relationship between Betsy and Kathy? Does this affect how Betsy interacts with her daughter? Do you think Betsy is a good parent?
10. To what extent do you think that each of the girls could have prevented Ginny’s tragic death? Were they in any way guilty? How did their innocence play into the crime?
The Story Behind the Story
At 6:55 a.m. on November 16, 1984, I was standing in front of my bathroom mirror, struggling with my uncooperative bangs, dreading another friendless day of ninth grade at a new school, when the windows of our house in Clearwater, Florida, shook from the force of a sonic boom.
My family had been in the state for less than two weeks. We moved from Kansas City to the Gulf Coast because my father had another new job, and chronic wanderlust, and he dragged us along for the ride.
We hadn’t lived there long enough to know that when the space shuttle Discovery descended toward the Kennedy Space Center after its three-million-mile mission, it would hurtle through the sky over our single-story, cinder block and stucco rental house at an astounding speed. When it passed overhead, it made more than just a sound. The force of its motion on the atmosphere rattled your bones and your teeth and your organs. It felt fascinating, kind of cool, a little creepy, and generally weird. It was unlike anything I had experienced before. In short, it was very Florida.
To me, Florida is an adjective and a proper noun, a feeling and a place. It conveys oppressive humidity, the sticky-warm water of the Gulf of Mexico, dirty soles of bare feet,relentless sun, salt-stained visors, sunglasses permanently perched on the tops of heads of the odd characters that populate the place.
I lived in the state for eight years. To everyone’s surprise (especially mine) I stayed in state for college at the University of Florida in Gainesville, another peculiar town in the center of the state, which felt like it was being slowly consumed by trees and moss, climbing vines and all manner of growing green things.
The city was small but the school was huge, so I pledged a sorority to feel less anonymous. It’s a fact that is constantly amusing to the people who know me now, but should come as no real surprise since I’ve made my living working among women for fashion magazines. I guess I feel most comfortable in an estrogen fog? My new “sisters” were completely irresistible and terrifying, exotic creatures to be admired, studied, and sometimes feared. It was girl culture at its most extreme. We were young and not exactly stupid, but we said and did ridiculous things in the way that audacious young people who think they run the place often do. When I see the women those girls have become, successful business owners, executives, doctors, lawyers, and excellent mothers—one of them worked in the White House for the first Clinton administration, another was the youngest female to ever make the Forbes billionaire list—I’m still impressed. I don’t regret the time I spent with them, but I’m glad I got out when I did.
At my first official fraternity party as a freshman, a man fell off of a third-story balcony on to concrete and died. I heard screams over the pounding music. Someone called 911, and everyone at the party, including underage drinkers like me, scurried out in a panic. I remember downing my red Solo cup full of keg beer before I ran up the back steps and out to the parking lot. I remember catching a glimpse of a shoe and part of a leg on the ground through a small crowd of people, though I’m sure it’s just a trick my mind plays on me, Photoshopping a detail to embellish a memory. Later, I was told that the guy, who I did not know, died saving his girlfriend, who was about to fall herself. I doubt that it’s true, but that’s how news traveled back then. It was distorted, exaggerated, passed along in rumors and whispers as if the facts of what actually happened weren’t tragic enough. In some ways, that dark beginning set the tone for my entire experience at school. We were wild and a little reckless, feeling immortal, cooking up ways to spike our adrenaline in an otherwise sleepy place.
Don’t get me wrong. Gainesville was, and still is, fun. It delights in its weirdness in the same way Austin, Texas, does, except without the added legitimacy of being the state’s capital. It’s a town that’s obsessed with sports, both playing them and gathering in large crowds to watch them, where drinking also takes on a competitive zeal. College campus culture has changed considerably since then, but back in 1990, the perception was that the greatest threats to students were alcohol and drug-related: Drunk driving, booze-fueled fraternity hazing, overdoses, and alcohol poisoning were justifiable causes of concern.
But in August of that year, there was a more acute danger lurking in the shadows. Danny Rolling, a career criminal, sex offender, armed robber, and murderer from Shreveport, Louisiana, arrived in Gainesville by bus. He checked into a hotel under an alias and started stalking his future victims. He claimed that voices in his head told him to do it. By the time he was finished, he killed five people—four women and a man—and a shockwave traveled through college campuses across the country, places populated with students who were still riding high on the Reagan 1980s, all optimism, John Hughes movie angst, and popped collars. And the world had another serial killer to analyze and mythologize, the Gainesville Ripper. Kevin Williamson, the creator of the Scream movies, has said that the first film was inspired by the murders. When I tell people where I went to school, I often see the flicker of recognition in their eyes. People remember the Gainesville murders. It was a time before student deaths and violence were plastered across the news and the headlines stayed with them.
The timing may have been pure coincidence, but the fall of 1990 also ushered in a darker moment in our culture. There was a shift in music from pop anthems to grunge, fashion became darker and more subdued as women my age traded in their white sneakers for Doc Martens, and a generation, X, was born.
The Drifter is inspired by that time and those events. It is not a roman à clef or a memoir or true crime. It’s a story that evokes the place and the time as I remember it, with a cast of fictional characters who feel completely, eerily familiar to me. It’s a story about the strange and powerful bonds of female friendship. It’s a story about Betsy Young who loses the first love of her life—her best friend, Ginny—to a brutal act of violence, and finds the second love of her life, Gavin, over five long, excruciating days in Gainesville. It’s about how losing someone you love and the ensuing grief can shape our lives into adulthood, and how we struggle to manage the guilt we feel w
hen we make terrible choices and others suffer the consequences. It’s about building a life in a strange new city, and returning to the place that made us who we are, to make amends, to reconnect, and to say good-bye.
The Playlist
Psychologists refer to our freaky ability to recall fully formed memories from our adolescence and early adulthood as the “reminiscence bump.” For reasons we don’t completely understand, the friendships, stories, events, and thoughts from the third decade of our lives—our twenties—become our most vivid recollections. It makes perfect sense, then, that the music we hear during that time of our lives plays a big role in our life story, and in many ways, shapes our lives for decades to come.
As a young teenager in Kansas, if I fiddled with the tuner dial on my clock radio late at night, I could tune into Jayhawk Radio (KJHK 90.7 FM), the college station at KU in Lawrence, almost forty miles away. It’s when I first fell in love with R.E.M. and the Smiths and the Replacements and all of the other staples of classic alternative radio. By the time I got to school at Florida, I was very excited to be in a college town where I thought that kind of music culture lived. Little did I know that in the late 1980s the South Florida dance music/Vanilla Ice–force in Gainesville was strong, and the scene I was looking for was harder to find than I thought. I did find some kindred spirits, though, and we rarely missed the Wednesday late-night alternative dance parties at Gator Bumpers, a bar with bumper cars (really) and a tiny dance floor. Every week, the last song they played at 2:00 a.m. was R.E.M. “Superman,” and I remember feeling that as long as I had music, I could, in fact, do anything.
By the time I was a senior, popular music had shifted so completely that you were more likely to hear Nirvana blasting from a dorm room than the 2 Live Crew. And the transformation of the culture was fascinating to watch.
When I began writing The Drifter, I started by listening to the music I loved in 1990. Whether you experienced it the first time over twenty years ago, or are discovering it now, I hope that hearing these songs makes you feel twentysomething and equal parts excited and terrified by what your future holds.
Here is a playlist of songs mentioned in and that inspired The Drifter. For a complete list of the bands and songs mentioned in the book, and the more contemporary songs that inspired modern-day Betsy, check out The Drifter: The Playlist on Spotify.
“Here’s Where The Story Ends” by the Sundays
“Gone Daddy Gone” by Violent Femmes
“Dirty Boots” by Sonic Youth
“Slow Down” by the Feelies
“Makes No Sense at All” by Hüsker Dü
“Freak Scene” by Dinosaur Jr.
“Wichita Lineman” by Urge Overkill
“Psycho Killer” by Talking Heads
“You My Flower” by the Afghan Whigs
“No New Tale to Tell” by Love and Rockets
“The Globe” by Big Audio Dynamite
“Sour Times” by Portishead
“Needle in the Hay” by Elliott Smith
“I Am a Scientist” by Guided by Voices
“Like a Fool” by Superchunk
“Motion Picture Soundtrack” by Radiohead
(Honorable mentions that didn’t make it into the book, but were no doubt on Betsy’s mixtape: “911 Is a Joke” by Public Enemy, “I’ll Be You” by the Replacements, and “Nightswimming” by R.E.M.)
Read on
Narrowing my list of favorite books to just eight was nearly impossible. So many books! And yes, so many years of my life! I didn’t start out with a theme, but it occurred to me when I saw the titles I picked—in chronological order—that each of these stories feature characters that could be described as drifters, or at least adrift in the way that Betsy is drifting. For the most part, they all feel rootless and disconnected or on the outside of life looking in, and are considering their past and how it shaped them. With a few exceptions, they’re brutally honest (maybe not Tom) and self-critical, but none of them fail to see the humor in their situation—even if it’s a bit morbid (yes, I’m talking about you, Esther Greenwood). Below, a few of my favorite stories:
TOM SAWYER BY MARK TWAIN
* * *
In fourth grade, I was assigned to a reading group. We were given a list of classics and I picked Tom Sawyer. At that age, the thickness of a book was almost as important as its contents. I remember people being impressed by a ten-year-old lugging around a big book and feeling pretty pleased with myself. At the time, I lived in Kansas City and I roamed our neighborhood with a pack of unruly kids, so despite the century that separated us, Tom was a character who was weirdly familiar to me. I also have a soft spot for troublemakers, and Tom was a badass.
THE BELL JAR BY SYLVIA PLATH
* * *
When I read this in high school, I missed the point of it as a cautionary tale about mental illness and treated it more like an aspirational, feminist “Modern Girl’s Guide.” I was so obsessed with Sylvia Plath that I applied to a bunch of the Seven Sisters colleges (I didn’t get in) and was determined to move to New York, write for magazines, and live in a hotel for unmarried women which, I am realizing now, must be a lot like living in a sorority house.
GEEK LOVE BY KATHERINE DUNN
* * *
A friend gave me his dog-eared copy of Geek Love in college and I devoured it. I didn’t realize how popular it was—like a counterculture bible of the Pacific Northwest alternative scene (Kurt and Courtney were fans)—until much later. The Binewskis made every other sick and twisted family look like amateurs, but the raw emotion of the story and the relationship between the siblings was what really got me.
HERE IS NEW YORK BY E. B. WHITE
* * *
As a kid, I read Stuart Little and The Trumpet of the Swan and Charlotte’s Web so many times. And as a young journalist, Elements of Style saved my ass every day. But Here Is New York, which is really a long essay, is my favorite of White’s stories. A friend gave it to me during a weird transitional time in my life. I was ending a long, difficult relationship and felt so lonely. When I read this, it struck me that people had been living there and feeling exactly what I was feeling, which was both isolated and somehow connected to the city, for generations. It made me feel less alone.
WHERE I WAS FROM BY JOAN DIDION
* * *
I’ve been a Didion fan forever, but I really reconnected with her writing when I moved to Los Angeles. I’d roll down the windows of my Passat and wish I were in her Stingray on my way to a beach house on Portuguese Bend instead of my tiny bungalow in Silver Lake. When I went to hear her read from The Year of Magical Thinking at the Hammer Museum, my husband and I were running late so we dashed into the elevator. Just as the doors were closing, I realized that Joan Didion was one of two other people on it with us. I interview celebrities for a living, but I couldn’t come up with a single thing to say. I wish I had just remembered to say “Thank you.” I love everything she touches, but this one is a favorite.
A VISIT FROM THE GOON SQUAD BY JENNIFER EGAN
* * *
I have loved Egan’s writing since I read her New York Times Magazine profile on model James King back in 1996. I devoured Look at Me and The Keep. But Goon Squad is a masterpiece. From those first lines describing Sasha in a restroom at a bar, fixing her yellow eye shadow, focusing on a handbag that someone left on the counter and trying desperately not to steal it, I was hooked. I love how she weaves music through the story, too. It’s amazingly complex and so fun to read.
ST. LUCY’S HOME FOR GIRLS RAISED BY WOLVES BY KAREN RUSSELL
* * *
Southern Gothic writers like Carson McCullers and Eudora Welty are among my very favorites. I find all of those dark characters, all of that suffering and booze, and the strange social politics of small-town life really irresistible. Somehow Russell has turned the whole genre on its head with her bizarre stories about Florida, which is clearly a place that fascinates me. The worlds she creates are so unique and, yes, dark.
And she’s so young! I’ve loved everything she has written and can’t wait to see what’s next for her.
DEPT. OF SPECULATION BY JENNY OFFILL
* * *
So many terrific books have been written about the challenges of being in a modern marriage, but I think it’s harder to write about being a modern parent. A mother who is conflicted about raising kids, even a little bit resentful about the sacrifices she has to make to do it, is considered unlikable. And the world just doesn’t embrace female assholes the way it does their male counterparts. Anyway, Offill writes about motherhood with such breathtaking skill, marveling at women who “cast ambition off like an expensive coat that no longer fits” when they have children, that it was impossible not to like, or at least admire, her nameless main character, even as her world implodes around her.
CREDITS
Cover design by Elsie Lyons
Cover photograph © Pat Canova / Getty Images
COPYRIGHT
Grateful acknowledgment is made for the use of text from I’ll Take You There by Joyce Carol Oates.
P.S.™ is a trademark of HarperCollins Publishers.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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