Plain Seeing
by Sandra Scofield
List Price: $13.00
Pages: 240
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 0060929456
Publisher: HarperCollins
Plain Seeing is the story of Lucy, a woman whose childhood loss of her mother, Emma Laura, has kept her from fully seeing her own life. The novel chronicles the young adulthood of mysterious Emma Laura, telling the reader the very story that Lucy can never know, and subsequently tells of Lucy's marriage and motherhood, and the events that eventually lead her to search for the meaning of her mother's life.
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1. Emma Laura's story is firmly embedded in the story of her time. The
Depression has a tragic impact on her family. The beginning of World War II
gives the family a fresh start, but by then Greta's character has been
irrevocably shaped by her losses. Emma Laura, on the other hand, looks at
life with the insouciant optimism of youth. Remembering her youth, discuss
her self-centeredness, the way it affects her family, and the ways it isolates
her.
2. Scofield says Emma Laura is a kind of "myth" for her daughter. Discuss
the ways that Lucy's idea of her mother is influenced by actual events in her
childhood or stories she has been told, a slim string that ties her to the
past.
3. How does Lucy's idea of her mother influence the way Lucy connects to
other people? How does she act out the mythic characteristics she
attributes to her mother? Did you lose patience with her? Sympathy?
4. Lucy believes Laurie is very much her father's daughter. Why does she
think so? Do you? How does this serve to create distance between Lucy
and her child? Lucy's accident serves as a turning point in her life. How
does her attitude as a mother change? How does she try to reach her
daughter? Is it too late?
5. Scofield says she envisioned the novel as a kind of "figure 8," in which
two stories intersect and flow into one another. Note that the opening pages
are the only text in the first person. Who is this narrator? Reread the
passage on pp. 4-5 that begins, "I was born on August 5, 1943..." Now
consider: which interpretation of the structure do you prefer: Emma Laura's
story is the one that happened and that Lucy can never know--or is it the
story Lucy constructs to satisfy her longing for a cohesive narrative?
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"Quite original...[Scofield] shows an extraordinary understanding of the power of absence...Redolent of Mary Karr's memoir, The Liar's Club."—Chicago Tribune
"Scofield's sense of history and of place is unfaltering, unflagging...She subtly combines humor and pathos in all her observation."—Boston Sunday Globe
"Genuinely moving...Compelling...Few writers capture feelings of yearning and disappointment as palpably as Scofield."—Newsday
"Lushly described and poignantly rendered...a moving and accomplished tale."—Detroit Free Press
