Did your school have mean girls like Rainey or Tina? What do you think made them act as they did? How has society changed in its attitude toward bullying behavior?
Linda, Rainey’s mother, abandons the family when Rainey is thirteen. How do you feel about her? How does Rainey feel about her? How does our culture treat mothers who leave vs. fathers who leave?
If you have memories of the 1970s, are they anything like Rainey’s in terms of the permissiveness, the slack standards, things that we might call neglect today? If not, how do your memories of that period differ?
How would Rainey’s life have been different if she had gone to high school not in the early 1970s but forty years later?
Do you think Howard knows on some level that Gordy is tucking Rainey in at night? What do you think he would do or say if he was confronted with that knowledge?
What do you make of Rainey’s not speaking up about Gordy’s “night visits” to her room? What do you think keeps her from doing so?
What is the importance of Rainey’s two major lies—that she plays jazz flute, and that her mother phones her twice a week? Why would young women in trouble lean on fictions like these?
Rainey seeks the protection of a saint for artists and discovers Saint Catherine of Bologna, whom she calls Cath. Is this a religious or an emotional search? How sustaining is her relationship with Cath, and why? Would that relationship be just as important if Rainey’s mother had not left?
Rainey’s shy friend Leah becomes intoxicated with a woman named Zola, follows her to a strip club, and seems to consider auditioning. Why might a young woman as inhibited as Leah ever ponder, or even do, such a thing?
Leah lies to Rainey, insisting that she was unable to interest her decorator-mother in commissioning art pieces from Rainey. What was the motivation behind this lie? Do you think Leah will be able to make amends?
When Rainey tells her father that she was forced to have sex by one of his students, Damien, her father responds that an artist cannot be a criminal. What are your feelings about this statement? If a great artist commits a terrible crime, does it taint his work? Would you still see his paintings or listen to his music?
Howard tells Rainey that she gave at least “half a yes” to Damien when she let him enter her room and sit on her bed. Did you read the situation as a rape or as something more complicated? In your opinion, can a woman ever be responsible for her own sexual assault?
Howard lives on Rainey’s trust fund, but after Rainey owns her townhouse free and clear for a year, she locks Howard and Gordy out. She has the legal right to do this, but what are her ethical and moral rights as a daughter? Is a daughter (or son) obliged to take care of a parent indefinitely, no matter how neglectful, or even abusive, that parent might be?
In the last chapter, we learn the secret—or betrayal—that Tina has kept from Rainey for a decade. To what degree do you still believe in the depth of Tina’s love for Rainey? Can true friendship exist with a dark secret at its heart, and does it make a difference if the secret is in the past?