My Life, Starring Dara Falcon [Paperback]

In her latest novel, the author ofAnother Youcombines intensely realistic description and an effortless command of mood to examine the treacherous difference between love and fascination--between what we know about other people and what we think we know.  Dara Falcon is someone other people think they know.  Charismatic and theatrical, she has no sooner arrived in a New England town than she is wreaking havoc in the lives of her new friend Jean and her family.  As Ann Beattie follows Dara's antics, she braids subplots and vibrant characters into a work that is compassionate, tartly funny, and teeming with life.  Ann Beattie lives in Maine and Key West, Florida.  Her latest novel,Park City:  New and Selected Storieswill be published by Knopf in June 1998.The questions, discussion topics, and author biography that follow are designed to enhance your group's reading of Ann Beattie'sMy Life, Starring Dara Falcon, a novel that explores the obsessive side of female friendship and traces the events that impel one woman out of the cocoon of her marriage and into independence, but also into a web of moral uncertainty and self-questioning.

1. Until meeting Dara, Jean has simply fallen into things rather than actively making choices in her life. Jean remembers her aunt telling her "over and over that my passivity would be a lifelong habit, and lifelong curse for everyone else" [p. 100]. Is Jean's passivity a fixed feature of her character, or is it the result of her circumstances? Does the novel imply that Jean's experience with Dara roused her from her habitual passivity, or not?

2. One of the first things we hear from Dara (regarding her relationship with Tom Van Sant) is that "it's really pathetic to be liked by an orphan, just because the person's so needy, and you happened to appear" [p. 60]. Considering that Jean is also an orphan--although Dara doesn't know this lsH