Almost Moon (Sebold)

The Almost Moon
Alice Sebold, 2007
Little, Brown & Co.
292 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780316022842


Summary
When all is said and done, killing my mother came easily.

So begins The Almost Moon, Alice Sebold's astonishing, brilliant, and daring new novel. A woman steps over the line into the unthinkable in this unforgettable work by the author of The Lovely Bones and Lucky

For years Helen Knightly has given her life to others: to her haunted mother, to her enigmatic father, to her husband and now grown children. When she finally crosses a terrible boundary, her life comes rushing in at her in a way she never could have imagined

Unfolding over the next twenty-four hours, this searing, fast-paced novel explores the complex ties between mothers and daughters, wives and lovers; the meaning of devotion; and the line between love and hate. It is a challenging, moving, gripping story, written with the fluidity and strength of voice that only Alice Sebold can bring to the page. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—September 6 1963
• Where—Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
• Education—B.A., Syracuse University; M.F.A., University of
   California, Irvine
• Currently—lives in Long Beach, California


As Alice Sebold relates in her chilling memoir Lucky, she was considered fortunate for surviving a violent, devastating rape in her freshman year at Syracuse University. The woman before her had not been so "lucky": She was murdered and dismembered.

The shadow of this fact survives in Sebold's acclaimed novel The Lovely Bones, which is narrated by another not-so-lucky victim from beyond the grave. It's such a maudlin premise that the book shouldn't have been successful—in fact, Sebold's editor has told the author that the manuscript never would have been bought if she had been told what it was about before reading it.

But in her ability to convey the brutal details of crime and its aftermath—both the imagined instance and the real—Sebold is a gripping writer. She is straightforward, but not simply a reporter; in The Lovely Bones, she maintains with sympathy and humor the voice of a 14-year-old who continues, from heaven, to be engaged with life on earth. Without pandering or overwriting, Sebold can elicit tears with the simple but painfully true expression of a character's thought or wish.

Extras
• Sebold is married to author Glen David Gold, author of Carter Beats the Devil. The two met when Sebold was in the fiction writing program at University of California, Irvine.

• Part of the aftermath of Sebold's traumatic rape in college was a long period of self-abuse, including heroin addiction. After a hard trial in New York trying (and failing) to get published, Sebold decided to leave the city and ultimately applied to grad school at Irvine. ''I couldn't handle the rejection and the failure anymore...and the 'almost' of it all,'' she told Entertainment Weekly. ''Everybody from New York has their almost-but-not-quite story, and I just felt like I don't want to be walking around on the planet trotting out mine.''

• Sebold says that her continued failures ended up creating a good mindset for her writing. "After a while, you don't think what can't be done and what can be done, because no one's going to care anyway," she said in an Associated Press interview. "You just go and have fun in your room, which is what, to me, art should be about anyway." (Author bio from Barnes and Noble.)

Book Reviews
It is indisputably a good thing when writing is so vivid it causes physical reactions.... [Sebold’s] willingness to pry into the darker aspects of human consciousness is what's important.
Los Angeles Times


It's a strange, wild, even hysterical book: visceral, black and unguarded, and there were moments when I wondered if Sebold had gone too far. But my God, it grips....I lay awake half the night, feverishly hoping both that it would never end, and that it would all be over soon.
London Evening Standard 


Advance notices of The Almost Moon have tended to carry a caveat, suggesting that Sebold's topic is too unrelentingly grim to promise the sort of reception that The Lovely Bones warranted. For my money it's a better novel. It's brilliantly paced, it's brutally honest, and the Gordian knot at its core—an abusive mother and her traumatically attached daughter—is depicted with such generous intelligence that the fineness of the novel more than surpasses its own horror show of circumstance.
Boston Globe


The Almost Moon has intensity and a page-turning quality. Readers of this book are likely to be discussing it for a long time.”
Seattle Times


A dark, masterful contrast to her essentially sunny crowd-pleaser, The Lovely Bones.... The material is risky and exciting and refreshingly new. Whether readers sympathize with poor Helen or not, all but the squeamish will fall in and follow her to the end.
Chicago Sun-Times


Sebold's unblinking authorial gaze is her hallmark: where lesser writers would turn away from things too horrible to see or feel or admit, her scrutiny never wavers.
Lev Grossman - Time


Sebold's disappointing second novel (after much-lauded The Lovely Bones) opens with the narrator's statement that she has killed her mother. Helen Knightly, herself the mother of two daughters and an art class model old enough to be the mother of the students who sketch her nude figure, is the dutiful but resentful caretaker for her senile 88-year-old mother, Clair. One day, traumatized by the stink of Clair's voided bowels and determined to bathe her, Helen succumbs to a life-long dream and smothers Clair, who had sucked the life out of [Helen] day by day, year by year. After dragging Clair's corpse into the cellar and phoning her ex-husband to confess her crime, Helen has sex with her best friend's 30-year-old blond-god doofus son. Jumping between past and present, Sebold reveals the family's fractured past (insane, agoraphobic mother; tormented father, dead by suicide) and creates a portrait of Clair that resembles Sebold's own mother as portrayed in her memoir, Lucky. While Helen has clearly suffered at her mother's hands, the matricide is woefully contrived, and Helen's handling of the body and her subsequent actions seem almost slapstick. Sebold can write, that's clear, but her sophomore effort is not in line with her talent.
Publishers Weekly


Sebold strikes two notes: grim and grimmer.... The result is an emotionally raw novel that is, at times, almost too painful to read, yet Sebold stays remarkably true to her vision...[and] brings ... such honesty and empathy that many will find their own dark impulses reflected here; however, it is so unremittingly bleak that it seems unlikely that it will be greeted with the same enthusiasm as her debut. —Joanne Wilkinson
Booklist


(Audio version.) Much has been made of Sebold's opening line to her new novel, but it immediately sets the listener up for a roller-coaster journey into ethics and family relationships that may seem too familiar to some and too discomforting to others. Helen Knightly's climactic decision opens the book, but her history with her mother, Clair, and her deceased father are brutally explored through the skillful weaving of memories and haunted immediacy. Almost Moon is very different from The Lovely Bones, and yet the strength of the author's sense of danger told rather matter-of-factly is highly compelling. Joan Allen's reading is almost hypnotic. Highly recommended.
Joyce Kessel - Library Journal

Discussion Questions
1. After the conversation with her father about almost moons, Helen says, "I knew I was supposed to understand something from my father's explanation, but what I came away with was that, just as we were stuck with the moon, so too we were stuck with my mother." (page 134) What did Helen's father intend to say with his example of almost moons? Did you think his metaphor was apt?

2. The Almost Moon opens with a startling confession. After the first several pages, why did you think Helen killed her mother? Did you feel sympathy for her at that point? As you learned more about Helen's relationship with her mother—and her mother's overall mental state—did your feelings about Helen change? Did you think she was more justified to act as she did, or did you lose sympathy for her?

3. In Chapters 2-4 and Chapter 11, Helen flashes back to memories from her past. In the first section, she is slowly removing her mother's clothes to bathe her. In the second, she is posing for art students. What do you think Sebold is implying about the relationship of the body to memory? Can you think of other instances in the text when the tactile leads Helen into a greater understanding or awareness of hers or another's past?

4. What motivated Daniel to stay with Clair for all of those years? Do you think his bouts of depression stemmed from a difficult home situation, or did he have larger issues? Should he have taken his daughter and left his wife—for Helen's sake, if not his own—or did he do the right thing by taking care of his wife, so that she wouldn't have to be in an institution? How much do we owe to those we love or have married?

5. What moves Helen to seek a physical connection with Hamish? Did you think their interaction was more than just physical? Was their relationship troubling to you, and was Natalie right to be angered by it?

7. Helen's two daughters, Emily and Sarah, are very different from each other, at one point reminding Helen of polarized magnets (page 80). Helen also tells Jake that "You left the girls ... I may not have been perfect, but I didn't take off ... " (page 167). Do you think Helen was a good mother? Was she a better mother to Sarah than to Emily? How do you feel her daughters would respond to that question?

8. In Chapter 9, Helen meets Mr. Forrest, who provides her an escape from her house. What is the significance to her of the illuminated manuscripts he collects? How does this visit change her view of her own life?

9. When they meet, Jake is Helen's teacher, and she is his muse. What causes them to drift apart and divorce? When he returns, how has their relationship changed?

10. In Chapter 12, Helen's father takes her to Lambeth, where he shows her the remains of his old house. What is the significance of the plywood people? Do they mean different things to Helen and to her father? Why does he select these particular moments of his life to commemorate? And does the town having been unsuccessfully "drowned" reflect any other situations in the novel?

11. How did you interpret the ending of the novel? What is the best way for Helen to make amends or atone for what she did? Or is there no way for her to make things right?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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