Outer Banks
by Anne Rivers Siddons
List Price: $6.99
Pages: 576
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 0061099732
Publisher: HarperCollins
On a Southern campus in the 1960's, four young, disparate
women come together as sorority suite-mates and share a rare, powerful
early friendship. There is Kate, with her elegance and grace; Cecie, the
sensitive and sensible one; Ginger, the gorgeous, unbelievably rich girl
who refuses to grow up; and Fig, the doting, diminutive, misshapen girl
with the brilliant mind. As Fig watches from a distance, carefully noting
everything down in her diary, Ginger embarks on a wild, scandalous life,
and the bond between Kate and Cecie deepens. That bond is tested with
the arrival on campus of Paul Sibley, a sexy and brilliant, half-Seminole
architecture student. Kate and Paul fall hopelessly in love and begin
planning for their future by designing their dream house; she doing the
interior designing, and he the architecture. But when Kate moves to New
York to begin their joint career, Paul writes to inform her that he is
marrying Ginger instead. Plunged into agonizing despair, Kate rebounds
into the arms of an affable Jewish architect, Alan Abrams, and, in her
pain, breaks off all contact with her old sorority sisters. Twenty-eight
years later, Fig plans a reunion of the four women at Ginger's home at
Nags Head, North Carolina, the beautiful, weather-beaten house in which
they all shared two idyllic spring breaks. Now the women return to recapture
the exquisite magic of those early years and to share again the love,
enthusiasm, passion and cruel betrayal that shaped them from girls into
women. What they don't realize is that Fig, now a wildly successful novelist,
has planned a very special surprise for her sisters; one that will irrevocably
alter the rest of their lives.
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1. According to Ginger, "whenever a ship is going to go down you can hear
something like singing in the wind. Bankers say it's mermaids calling
the sailors . . . they say when you hear it, you have no choice but to
follow it, and you end up on the shoals." What is the significance of
this myth for Siddons' characters? Did any of them hear the mermaids singing,
yet not "end up on the shoals?" If so, what saved them? Who are the mermaids
in Kate's life?
2. Kate can't help but imagine her cancer cells as microscopic "Pacmen." How might this metaphor
help her? How does it harm her? What is it that finally enables her to
no longer fear the Pacmen? What does she mean when she thinks the Pacmen,
"went with that other Kate, when she died on the Outer Banks?"
3. What does Kate mean when she refers to herself as an "abyss walker?" What is her abyss?
Do you consider yourself one of the "non-abyss-people?" What role does
her father's suicide play in Kate's understanding of her own abyss?
4. Kate muses, "how truly terrible, that it is easier to live a total lie, become a lie yourself,
than assimilate to the hated truth." Which characters weave fictitious
lives for themselves? And why? What is it that forces each of them to
confront reality?
5. How are the four grown women who return to the Outer Banks different from the young sorority
sisters they were 28 years ago? Which of them have been "battered, beaten
up, kicked" by life the most? How so?
6. How would you characterize the different kinds of friendships and loves explored in
Outer Banks? Which have the capacity to heal, and which to harm? Is it
possible to have one without the other?
7. Why do you think this novel was set on the Outer Banks? What role does the sea play in
these characters' lives? Why are they all drawn to the ocean? How relevant
are the pirate and mermaid myths for these characters?
8. What is it about Dorothy Parker's poetry that so captivates the young Kate and Cecie? What
is their relationship to her acerbic lines as they get older? Why do you
think it changes?
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