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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. In Chapter Eight: The Republic, what does Deborah say a life without love is?

2. In Chapter Ten: X is Where I Am, what does Deborah say Clara thought Deborah's life was?

3. In Chapter Nine: Night Wandering, where does Deborah say she would buy the ice lollies from?

4. In Chapter Nine: Night Wandering, what possession of her mother's does Deborah say she kept?

5. In Chapter Seven: The Black and Blueish Darkness, what does Deborah say she struggled to pronounce?

Short Essay Questions

1. In Chapter Nine: Night Wandering, what possession from her mother does Deborah say she kept? What touched her most about this?

2. In Chapter Eleven: Footsteps in the House, who does Deborah say were her companions on the train? How does she say they interacted?

3. In Chapter Ten: X is Where I Am, what of Deborah's old house items does she say Clara picked up, and what does Clara say about them? What metaphor does she say Clara apply to this?

4. In Chapter Seven: The Black and Bluish Darkness, what does Deborah say her new life was about? Why does she say this?

5. In Chapter Eight: The Republic, who does Deborah say she met? What did Deborah advise?

6. In Chapter Eleven: Footsteps in the House, how does Deborah say she remembered her journey to Britain as a child? How does she say she thinks of it later?

7. In Chapter Seven: The Black and Bluish Darkness, what meeting does Deborah say she went to? How did she feel at the meeting?

8. In Chapter Ten: X is Where I Am, why does Deborah say she thought her sense of direction was lost? How does she say this related to her mother?

9. In Chapter Eight: The Republic, how does Deborah say she compared herself to Simone de Beauvoir? How are their lives similar and different?

10. In Chapter Eleven: Footsteps in the House, how do footsteps factor into the chapter? What do they symbolically represent?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Deborah's grief over her mother and the sense of unmooring from the physical places her mother inhabited are alongside her grief over her marriage and the sense of unmooring from everything Levy spent her life creating. How does Levy show these griefs as similar and different? How are they both dealt with and how are they mourned both by actions described or by the act of writing the book?

Essay Topic 2

Arundhati Roy's God of Small Things is a novel about how the small things of life both make up and allow relief from the big things of life. As it says in the novel:

"Even later, on the thirteen nights that followed this one, instinctively they stuck to the Small Things. The Big Things ever lurked inside. They knew that there was nowhere for them to go. They had nothing. No future. So they stuck to the small things (21.68)."

Consider the Big Things and Small Things in Levy's writing. How do the small things make up the big? How do the small things in autobiography and life allow escape from the big for brief periods of time? How does this fictionality of life, in Arundhati's novel, also lend to the fictionality and lived truth of Levy's life in writing and living?

Essay Topic 3

The beginning of the autobiography quotes, "You're always more unreal to yourself than other people are." Marguerite Duras, Practicalities 1990.

This quote is returned to by the narrator several times. Find three examples and discuss how they connect with the author's idea of herself at different times in her life. How does her writing self relate to the idea of being real or unreal?

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