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This test consists of 5 short answer questions, 10 short essay questions, and 1 (of 3) essay topics.

Short Answer Questions

1. Who did Lillian Preston call the best photographer no one ever heard of?

2. What did Lillian install in the house when she stopped photographing outside?

3. What is Grete’s ethnicity?

4. How did Samantha respond to Lillian’s news that they were going to move out of Ken’s house?

5. Why did Lillian go back to the hospital after giving birth?

Short Essay Questions

1. How does Samantha characterize her reaction to her mother exhibiting photos that show her nude?

2. What effect does the narrator say Lillian Preston’s photography had on her when she discovered it?

3. How did Lillian become friends with Nina Pagano?

4. What led Lillian to take Samantha and leave the house where they had lived with Ken?

5. What were the advantages and disadvantages of the Ro-ro camera?

6. How does Lillian characterize her friendship with Nina?

7. How does Lillian characterize her attempt to get an abortion?

8. How did Lillian’s breakup with Ken affect Samantha?

9. What was Lillian Preston’s bequest to her daughter?

10. How does the novel characterize Lillian Preston’s relationship with her parents?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

How do you interpret the questions that surround the obscenity of the Samantha series? How does the novel represent the images? Who entertains which different views of the Samantha series? What questions do the images raise? How does the novel arrive at its verdict about their artistic value versus their obscenity?

Essay Topic 2

Compare and contrast the relationship between Myla Goldberg writing a novel about a artist mother and her daughter and the relationship between Lillian Preston making art about a mother’s relation to her daughter? How does the novel get at things a photographic series could not, and vice versa?

Essay Topic 3

Analyze the novel—which is presented as an exhibition catalog—as a capstone in the relationship between Lillian and Samantha. How does the catalog resolve tensions between them? What remains unresolved? What would it take to resolve what is left open?

(see the answer keys)

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