Q: Tell us something about your writing process. How do you get inspired to share a story?
A: Writing The Madam was an overwhelming task. To come from such stock, however, is a writerly gift, and I knew many years ago that I’d write about it one day. I’d have preferred to have tackled this novel later in my career, at the height of my powers (assuming there will be a height of my powers), but my grandmother had a stroke, and I knew that if I wanted her authenticity, I had no time to waste. The Madam was written with a sense of urgency and familial duty, as well as an overwhelming desire to reclaim the women of my family who were dismissed in their own era.
Q: Where do you see the characters from The Madam in ten years? As an author, do you have a sense of their futures, or do you simply create them and leave them be?
A: Usually, I create them and have a dim sense of the future, but only as much a sense of the future as I have for myself at this very moment. The Madam is different, however, because I know what happened to the real people behind the book. My grandfather wasn’t murdered. (The true ending is, in some ways, more tragic.) I know that my grandmother had a little girl, my mother, her only child. She raised my mother Catholic, and nuns, for the most part, taught her to play the piano. My mother went on to college and gave up a scholarship in Rome and a career as a concert pianist to marry my father, a smart and gentle man. I was their fourth child. I know my great-grandmother eventually got out of the business and fell in love a number of times and became an old woman who sold dresses off of her front porch. My grandmother eventually remarried a double amputee from WWII whom she loved dearly. He died, and she now lives a few miles away in a condo with fringed lampshades. She is eighty-five, and she cried throughout reading this novel, because it was so beautiful to her and the characters—especially her mother—so true.
Questions and Topics for Discussion
1) In The Madam, the author does an amazing job of describing the lives and experiences of many different kinds of characters. From the nun’s life before she joins the convent, to Henry’s troubled childhood, we get intense glimpses into individual characters’ past and what has helped shaped them. What kinds of tools does the author use to weave past and present together so seamlessly? How might this story have been different had it been told in first person point of view?
2) The natural world plays an integral role in this novel and we watch as the characters struggle not only with each other but also with their physical place in the universe—think of Alma ridding her house of the rattlesnake or listening to the bees in her roof. Besides heightening the sense of danger, the animals in this story reflect and sometimes even affect the emotional state of mind of the characters. Look back to the numerous places where people are compared to animals either by direct observation from a character, or from authorial description. How did these techniques help further your understanding of individual characters and seemingly ambiguous situations? Was there a comparison that stuck in your head or really affected your read?
3) On page 178, as Irving contemplates the troubled women in his life, he suddenly thinks of a Coca-Cola advertisement that he has seen pasted on drugstore walls, which reads, “Thirst has no season.” These words bother Irving deeply, striking him as “dark and monstrous.” Why do you think this slogan bothers him? What could these words represent for him? Do they say something about the world, or about the nature of things that Irving may not like? Is it his own thirst that these words speak to, or the thirst of someone else?
4) Love is an often illusive yet intensely compelling force in this novel. And while love takes on many beautiful forms—the love that Alma feels for her children, the love that Roxy and Delphine feel for each other, or even the love the nuns feel for God—it is also a dangerous thing, something that can tie you down to a place and make you vulnerable. Talk about the ways that various characters struggle with the more frightening and stifling aspects of this emotion.
5) When Alma goes to the mill to give notice, Mrs. Bass scoffs at her plan to go to Florida saying dismissively, “Men are full of ideas. Their heads are filled up with ideas. Women live in reality, Miss Alma.” Are these simply harsh words from a jaded woman, or do her thoughts speak to larger issues presented in the novel? How are men and women presented differently? Why does Mrs. Bass also say to Alma in the same scene, “He (Henry) has no children. He has only the idea of children”?
6) Discuss the different ways motherhood is presented in this story. Is there only one way to be a mother? Are only women capable of the nurturing, selfless emotions that mothers feel? After Henry abandons the family, it seems that Alma begins to embrace her role as a mother more seriously and seems somehow more committed to her children. Why is this? Do you get the sense that men actually get in the way of women’s roles as mothers in this story?
7) At one point, we learn of Alma’s “strategy” with her children, which is, “to show her children evil, at an arm’s distance, so that they can spot it before it bites.” And yet, in the previous sentence, Alma worries that she has, in fact, given her children “poisonous creatures.” What do you think of Alma’s approach to her children and her desire to show them all the awful things in the world at such a young age? Have they been helped by this teaching method, or have they been scarred instead? Do you think Alma would have opted to teach them such lessons if she herself had not been emotionally battered throughout her life?
8) Reverend Line seems to be a very important character in this novel, even though he does not necessarily play a key role in the end. On page 247, as Alma speaks to the reverend, she can’t help but be reminded of the elephant she saw on the dock long ago in Florida. She explains the comparison this way: “It’s that the reverend seems so out of place, as wondrous as the elephant, as grand a thing as that, but not made use of. Put to work like an ordinary mill horse.” What is it about the reverend that is so “grand” in Alma’s estimation? How does he differ from the other people (and other men) Alma has encountered in her life? Is it simply his role as a spiritual leader that sets him apart from the average person?
9) After Lettie runs away from the pastors house, thwarting her mothers plans to save her, Irving goes out in search of Smitty and his sister at his mother’s behest. After he finds them and watches them drive off in Smitty’s police car, Irving has an important observation: “They are doomed … He knows this much and yet he can’t stop them. They have a force. They are being propelled … Smitty is an accumulation of other people’s bad decisions and selfishness, but so is Irving …” In what ways does this quote bring to light a central theme that plays out in this story?
10) Along the same lines, do you think anyone in this story ever really breaks free from the experiences that have shaped them? Are there certain characters who seem more trapped by the past than others?
11) The idea that people are compelled to make certain decisions based on their life experiences may be helpful as we look at the character of Lettie. Do you have a clear sense of why she decides to marry Smitty, even after he rapes her in the field? The night when she runs away from the reverend’s house, she talks about wanting the reverend to stop her. Why is this? What is it about Smitty that draws Lettie to him in the first place?
12) Similarly, what does Smitty’s death represent for Lettie, or for any of the women in this novel who help in its planning? For the characters in this story, is Smitty’s murder a break from the past or just its continuation?
Printed in the United States
102343LV00001B/130/A
Julianna Baggott, The Madam
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