Featured Reading Guide
Alice Hoffman
This dark and utterly compelling new novel is about the shadows that lie beneath ordinary lives, about the hand that fate deals you – and what you make of it – and the ripples that carry on indefinitely from a violent act.
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Alice Hoffman is the bestselling author of many successful novels and screenplays, including Here on Earth (Oprah Book Club Choice in 1998), Illumination Nights, Turtle Moon, Practical Magic (made into a recent major film) Local Girls and The River King. She lives in Massachusetts.
topAbout the Book
This dark and utterly compelling new novel is about the shadows that lie beneath ordinary lives, about the hand that fate deals you – and what you make of it – and the ripples that carry on indefinitely from a violent act.
topAlice Hoffman interview/review
New York Times – 14 August, 2000
“I was told I had cancer on a beautiful blue day in July. I was certain my doctor was phoning to tell me the biopsy had come back negative, but then she said, ‘“Alice, I’m sorry.”’ I understood that some things are true no matter how and when you’re told. In a single moment, the world as I knew it dropped away from me.
In a time when everything around me seemed completely out of control, I had the need to get to an ending of something. I was desperate to know how things turned out, in fiction if not in life. More than ever, more than anything, I was a writer. Even when I became too ill to sit up for long, writing was a transcendent experience.
An insightful oncologist told me that cancer need not be a person’s whole book, only a chapter. Still, novelists know that some chapters inform all others. These are the chapters of your life that teach you and bring you to tears, that invite you to step to the other side of the curtain.
I wrote because that was who I was at the core, and if I was too damaged to walk around the block, I was lucky all the same. Once I got to my desk, once I started writing, I still believed anything was possible.”
FOOTNOTE: Alice Hoffman underwent treatment for her cancer, and since then has slowly been regaining her life, and writing a new novel, The Probable Future.
topStarting Points for Discussion
- Blue Diary, like many of Hoffman’s novels, revolves around a small, closely knit community that could be set in any time. What do you think the novel gains from this sense of timelessness?
- Although the Blue Diary of the title features for only a few pages towards the end of the novel, the whole book reads like a diary. How does Hoffman achieve this affect?
- Of all the transitions undergone by the characters, Ethan’s is the most radical and forms the dramatic core of the novel. How convincing do you find his reformation from rapist and murderer (Byron Bell) to model husband and citizen (Ethan Ford)? Do you think it’s possible for someone to embody these extremes of character?
- Jorie’s reaction to the discovery of her husband’s crime changes dramatically over the course of the novel. How does knowledge of the rape alter her opinion of her husband? Is there a detectable shift in other male/ female relations on account of it?
- Whilst supporting Jorie through her crisis, Charlotte quietly deals with her own tragedy: cancer. Although a peripheral character, do you think Charlotte’s growing cancer could be said to be an analogy for the destructive forces at work in the novel?
- In France, fairy tales were called ‘cahiers bleus’, which means ‘blue notebooks’. What do you understand by fairy tales? In what ways can aspects of Blue Diary be read as a fairy tale? Consider themes such as: reinvention, secrets, passion and oppositions.
Other Books by Alice Hoffman
Blackbird House
From the great May storm in 1778 when John Hadley and his sons slip the British…
Here On Earth
March Murray returns to the small town where she grew up for a funeral and …
Illumination Night
Vonny lives on the island of Martha’s Vineyard with her husband Andre and son…
Local Girls
In this series of connected stories young Gretel Samuelson comes of age in a…
Practical Magic
From one of the most captivating storytellers in American fiction comes a tale…
Property Of
The Night of the Wolf. On the Avenue in the bleak area where New York City …
Suggested Further Reading
- Five Quarters of the Orange ~ Joanne Harris
- Atonement ~ Ian McEwan
- Fortune’s Rocks ~ Anita Shreve
- After You’d Gone ~ Maggie O’Farrell
- Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage ~ Alice Munro
- The Poisonwood Bible ~ Barbara Kingsolver
- The Republic of Love ~ Carol Shields
- Back When We Were Grown Ups ~ Anne Tyler