BKMT READING GUIDES
Life After Life: A Novel
by Jill McCorkle
Published: 2013-03-26
Hardcover : 352 pages
Hardcover : 352 pages
22 members reading this now
10 clubs reading this now
3 members have read this book
10 clubs reading this now
3 members have read this book
Award-winning author Jill McCorkle takes us on a splendid journey through time and memory in this, her tenth work of fiction. Life After Life is filled with a sense of wonder at our capacity for self-discovery at any age. And the residents, staff, and neighbors of the Pine Haven ...
No other editions available.
Jump to
Introduction
Award-winning author Jill McCorkle takes us on a splendid journey through time and memory in this, her tenth work of fiction. Life After Life is filled with a sense of wonder at our capacity for self-discovery at any age. And the residents, staff, and neighbors of the Pine Haven retirement center (from twelve-year-old Abby to eighty-five-year-old Sadie) share some of life’s most profound discoveries and are some of the most true-to-life characters that you are ever likely to meet in fiction. Delivered with her trademark wit, Jill McCorkle’s constantly surprising novel illuminates the possibilities of second chances, hope, and rediscovering life right up to the very end. She has conjured an entire community that reminds us that grace and magic can—and do—appear when we least expect it.
(from the Algonquin catalog)Excerpt
JOANNA Now Joanna is holding the hand of someone waiting for her daughter to arrive. Only months ago, this woman — Lois Flowers — was one of the regulars in Pine Haven's dining room where the residents often linger long after the meal for some form of entertainment or another. She was a woman who kept her hair dyed black and never left her room without her hair and make-up and outfit just right. She had her color chart done in 1981 and kept the little swatches like paint chips in the zippered section of her purse. She told Joanna that having your colors done was one of the best investments a woman could ever make. "I'm a winter," she said. "It's why turquoise looks so good on me." She loved to sing and some nights she could convince several people to join in; other nights she simply stood in one corner and swayed back and forth like she might have been in Las Vegas singing everything she knew of Doris Day and Rosemary Clooney and Judy Garland. She loved anything Irving Berlin had ever written. Now she has forgotten everything except the face of her daughter, random lyrics and that your shoes and purse should always match. Joanna has watched the daughter night after night, leaning into her mother's ear to sing — first upbeat (clang clang clang went the trolley, ding ding ding went the bell). She always ends with one of her very favorites like "It Could Happen to You" or "Over the Rainbow" or "What'll I Do?" Joanna — as ordered by Luke's many rules — keeps a notebook with an entry on each of the people she sits with. She has to do an official one to turn over to the nurse who oversees her work, but this is a different, personal notebook she writes just after someone has died. It's a notebook she bought and showed Luke to prove to him that she was taking his assignments seriously — a bright yellow college ruled spiral bound notebook, which was all she could find at the Thrifty Market there close to Luke's house. It was near the end for him so she didn't venture far. "This is my page," he told her. "Everybody should get at least a page." She writes what she knows: their names and birthplaces and favorite things. Sometimes she asks questions: what is your first memory? your favorite time of day or holiday or teacher or article of clothing? How would you describe your marriage? Was there something you learned in your life that surprised you? She records the weather and season and last words if there are any. Luke said that this would be her religion, the last words and memories of the dying her litany. She should read and reread the entries regularly like devotionals. Keep us close, he said, keep us alive. Don't ever let us disappear. The longest and most expensive journey you will ever make is the one to yourself. Joanna's life is blip blip blip, like images on an old film projector that keeps sticking and burning. She's been spliced a lot of times over the years but finally she feels free — not perfect, not problem-free, just free. No one likes to talk about the positive parts of getting older and aging into orphan hood, how with your parents you often bury a lot of things you were never able to confront or fix or let go of. She has spent long hours discussing this with C.J., a girl most likely not to be Joanna's best friend, and yet, she is. C.J. is half her age, punk and pierced and tattooed with a baby boy whose father she won't discuss — not yet at least. C.J. is beautiful and so unaware of it, long legs and hazel eyes and a beautiful dark complexion that leaves people perplexed and wondering about her ethnicity. It seems she might even be perplexed herself and camouflages herself with tattoos and loose clothing and colors of hair dyes that are not natural to any race. Joanna wasn't there for her mother, but she was there for her dad, and seeing him through those last days allowed her to let go herself. Being there may prove to be the greatest gift of her life. And of course none of that would have happened without Luke and Tammy. In her work, Joanna has learned the importance of making peace. She sees it all the time, the stubborn child who won't come to the bedside and so the parent lasts far longer than should be asked of anyone. It is painful to watch and for this reason, she feels lucky to have journeyed her way back to this place. Her dad wanted her to promise to keep the The Dog House running and now she is doing her best, opening and closing and hiring responsible people to work the place, so she can devote herself to the volunteer hospice hours she gives over in Pine Haven's nursing wing. "Make their exits as gentle and loving as possible," Luke had said. "Tell them how good it will be, even if you don't believe it yourself. You're Southern, you know how to do that." And now family members greet and embrace her like she is one of them. Lung. Brain. Breast. Uterus. Pancreas. Bone. The families discuss and explain the symptoms and diagnoses for her as if they have never been heard of before, have never happened to anyone else, and she listens. Mistakes are made in the telling and she does not correct them. It is important to remain separate, to allow them to claim the disease, claim their grief. It is important not to get too attached or personally involved. Sometimes, when family members are naming the tests and the symptoms and prognosis, she allows herself to imagine her mother, getting the news and then driving home. Actively deciding what to do next but not calling her. But Joanna can go only so far with that or she'll undermine her purpose in the present. She is there, compassionate and listening, guiding the patients to talk and tell their stories if inclined, but knowing when to step back into the shadows of the drapes or a closet door so family members get their time. She knows how to disappear. Relatives show her all the old photos and letters; they tell her of accomplishments and regrets, and then afterwards, they drift away, her presence like something from an old dream, a reminder of their grief and loss. Sometimes they see her in the grocery or hardware store or when they drive up to The Dog House, and they can't help themselves, their eyes well up and words get choked. Like Pavlov's dogs, they react to her presence. It makes her think of poor Harley, the docile old orange cat at Pine Haven with enough poundage to warm even the coldest circulation free feet only now all of the residents are terrified of him because of the story in a recent news broadcast about a cat who chose to curl up beside whoever was most likely to die. The reports speculated how the cat knew. Did he sense something? Did he smell some chemical release of a body shutting down? His track record was convincing enough that the people who worked in that particular place paid attention to where he spent his time, and the story told was convincing enough to ruin poor Harley's life there at Pine Haven. Once he was the most beloved and coveted creature in the place, and now he is greeted by shrieks and screams — slippers and plastic cups tossed his way. He is just a reminder of what is coming, a feline representation of Joanna herself, the one who appears bedside at the end and massages their cold, darkening feet.
view abbreviated excerpt only...
Discussion Questions
Everyone in this book is starting over in a way. Can people remake their lives? Can they change themselves by changing their lives?? The character Sadie recreates memories for her friends and fabricates new memories of things that never happened with her photo-collage business. Do we create “memories” for ourselves, moments we truly believe happened? Are memories about truth? Are they about the emotions of the moment rather than the facts?
? C.J. and Stanley could be seen as opposites – one is trying to be more; one is trying to be less. Do they succeed in their quests? Do they get what they wanted anyway?
? Even though the novel is set in a retirement center, McCorkle develops characters of all ages. What is the effect of having this mix of characters? How do they relate to one another?
Notes From the Author to the Bookclub
A Note from Jill McCorkle: My writing process often involves a lot of note taking, every day jotting down thoughts and ideas and in the evening putting the scraps away for later perusal. Eventually, there are enough pieces that a whole begins to come into view. I think we all are like those old antenna contraptions that used to perch on rooftops, turning and turning to pick up signals in hopes of making a connection and finding clarity. The pieces that led me to Life After Life began accumulating long before I was ready to write it. The first being when my dad died twenty years ago; I wrote how strange it was that I was able to sit and pay bills and feed my children and do all sorts of everyday tasks in the midst of that sorrow. How odd that even as I was heartbroken, I was equally amazed and enthralled by the process of death and how the body does everything it can to protect the heart and keep it beating as long as possible, the color and life leaving the extremities like someone going through a house and turning out the lights. I was aware of how I had dreaded and had been waiting for this moment my whole life. My dad had suffered severe depression and was hospitalized several times during my childhood, and I think I had always been preparing myself to lose him again. And then it happened, and there I was, still there with my bills to pay and my children to care for and students I would see back in class the next week. In those last days, my dad said many things. He asked my sister and me to help him get to the corner where they (he wasn't sure who) were waiting for him. He said he wished he had a train and could go and pick up everyone he had ever loved in his whole life. He told me he was sorry that there were things he hadn't been able to do in life and hoped he hadn't let us down, and that he was sorry that he wouldn't be there to see his grandchildren grow. And then he said, You — meaning my mom, my sister, and me — are my heart. That's all that there is. When I began writing this novel, it was with the desire to capture such moments of realization in a character's life, to reduce a whole life to the purest form, like a kind of distillation process. Who was this person and what is left? But I didn't see that so clearly then. It took many more scraps thrown into the mix: years of raising children and then realizing how much I missed bedtime stories and Little League games and snow days. My mother diagnosed with dementia and slowly losing touch with the present. One friend desperately fighting to stay alive and another choosing to leave. I dreamed of my dad for a whole year after he died, and in the dream he would often say to me, I'm not dead. I had dreamed of my grandmother years earlier, and she had said the same thing. I have a photo of her I took with a little box camera when I was eight years old. Really, it's a photo of her screen door as she stepped in and hid from my camera. I have carried it around for years, loving that I knew that she was standing there behind the dark screen even though I couldn't see her — my picture of faith. I kept it with other photos slipped into the frame of my window over my desk and had done so for years. But when I moved to a new place, the light different, I looked up one morning and I could see her there, her image clear as a bell. I knew I would find a home for this in fiction, this image of faith revealed. Not too long after, I was riding in the car with my then fourteen-year-old son, who asked me how often I thought we passed a car with someone in it who had committed murder. I looked at the long lines of traffic surrounding us and started reaching for a pen to make a note, knowing that the answer to his question was probably one we would really hate to know; it was a chilling thought, and of course it was an easy step from that to the consideration of all dark secrets. I was already attempting to work out a part of that equation for various characters populating my work. Where is the weak spot? What is it that no one else knows about this human? The moment of death, faith, darkness. It began to come together, and in the bits and pieces, I began studying the ideas for various characters and where each might fit. I would resurrect my fictional town: here's the cemetery and here's the retirement home and here's the road to the beach. There is a man who is faking dementia to escape life with his son, a woman from Boston who has come to this place to retire because it's the hometown of a long-ago lover no one knew about; there is a hospice volunteer committed to collecting the most important details about those she sits with while also making amends with her own life, a young woman trying to survive the legacy of her own sad upbringing, a kid witnessing her parents' volatile marriage, and a senile third-grade teacher who believes we are all eight years old in the heart and who takes photographs and makes things happen that never did, most important, memories of herself with her mother, who died young. I have always loved composite pieces, each character introduced like an instrument, their voices blending until there is a communal symphony of a particular place. I greatly admire the novel The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter for this reason, and for the way Carson McCullers managed to highlight every walk of society and longing. In the same way, I have long been inspired by Thornton Wilder's Our Town, especially its use of time and the way it give voice to the dead. That's all that there is. I am very interested in that fine line between fiction and reality and between comedy and tragedy — and pushing the line as much as possible. In this novel, I was also interested in pushing the line between life and death in hopes of finding that split moment when the reader is aware of both places — what those left on earth are recalling and what the one leaving is thinking, that brief spark of connection and recognition before the paths continue in different directions. This novel is a love song to memory and life. It's a love song to the ocean and elementary school, Boston and the Lumber River and Meadowbrook Cemetery, where I went to bike all through childhood and still visit frequently, one of those places where you're surrounded by history and if you stare upward and no planes pass over, you could easily imagine yourself in another time. It's a love song to all those scraps of sensory memories that leave us feeling timesick: the way the light hits a wall, a piece of clothing or fabric you long forgot, the smell of a house you once visited, a strain of music — all those bits that come together to form your interior life and to mark one life as different from all others. It's an acknowledgment of the fragility of it all. It's nothing new, obviously, just my attempt at it. Somewhere in the box of notes I had written thoughts about how life is often like a magic trick — years and years of sleight of hand and lots of smoke and mirrors and doves and scarves and wands and words when so often the result is very simple, right before your eyes. I recently spoke to my mother, who at the end of the call asked, “Would you like to speak to your daddy?” and I said of course I would. After a few moments of fumbling she came back to tell me that he was in there on the bed taking a nap and she hated to wake him, that she would just tell him that I had called. And I could see him there. For several hours, I thought of him there. Sometimes she tells me they're at the beach and sometimes she's waiting for him to get home from work, and my mind leaps to the kitchen of the house where I grew up, and there's the dog from forty years ago, and there's that Chevrolet Caprice station wagon in the drive and the dogwood tree my mother named for her Aunt Lottie, and there's that antenna on the roof that turns and turns as it attempts to find a clear channel. My hope is that Life After Life will entertain but also will leave the reader to connect to his or her own signals and memories. After all, That's all that there is.Book Club Recommendations
Recommended to book clubs by 0 of 0 members.
MEMBER LOGIN
BECOME A MEMBER it's free
Book Club HQ to over 88,000+ book clubs and ready to welcome yours.
SEARCH OUR READING GUIDES
Search
FEATURED EVENTS
PAST AUTHOR CHATS
JOIN OUR MAILING LIST
Get free weekly updates on top club picks, book giveaways, author events and more
Get free weekly updates on top club picks, book giveaways, author events and more
Please wait...
