The Night Sky is a moving novel about the solitary moral courage of a women raising a child alone and the complex resilience of family. Ivy Slovak is a jewelry designer and artist whose days are absorbed by the struggle to make an unreliable paycheck cover the needs of her infant son. Hungry for the freedom of the world outside her window, Ivy is haunted by the memory of her mother, who abandoned her when she was seven years old. She recalls the years spent with her loving but itinerant father, wandering the desert, hoping somehow to find the troubled, beautiful woman who had left them both. With quiet eloquence and deep compassion, The Night Sky establishes Morris as one of contemporary American literature's foremost chroniclers of the secrets and strengths of the human spirit.
Discussion Questions:
1. In manuscript, this book was originally called The Night Sky, but Morris's publisher felt she should change the title, so it was published first as A Mother's Love. At some risk Morris wanted Picador to republish this book with the original title. Why do you think Morris felt so strongly about this? Why is The Night Sky the real title of this book?
2. Why do we need the story in the past to inform the present?
3. How is Ivy's art reflected in the structure of the novel as a whole?
4. Ivy is named Ivy because her mother says she likes to cling. How and to what does she cling? Is her name a self-fulfilling prophecy?
5. In some ways this novel is a book about gambling. What is the role of gambling in the novel?
6. Sense of place is always important for Morris who is also a travel writer. What part does the desert play in this book?
7. Is Ivy a good mother? How is it in the end that we know what kind of mother she is or will be?
Mary Morris, in her own words:
"I came to domesticity backward," Morris explains. "First I had a child, then I had a husband." Morris was not married when her daughter Katie was born in 1987. In 1988, she met Canadian journalist Larry O'Conner at a conference in Virginia. After surviving the difficulties of a long-distance relationship, the two married in August 1989, spent a year traveling around the Southwest, and finally settled in Brooklyn, New York.
"I feel ill at ease with the notion of who I am. There are really three parts: who I am as a person, who I am as a writer, and then there are characters in my books. I think my fiction and nonfiction get blurred together in readers' minds. It may be that the parts people think are the most autobiographical are the least so, and the parts they think are the least [true] may -- on another, disguised level -- be the most faithful."
-- Publishers Weekly
About the Author
Mary Morris is also the author of the novels House Arrest, (available from Picador USA), Crossroads, and The Waiting Room; two travel memoirs, Nothing to Declare: Memoirs of a Women Traveling Alone and Wall to Wall: From Beijing to Berlin by Rail; and the award-winning story collections Vanishing Animals and Other Stories and The Bus of Dreams.Her new story collection is The Lifeguard. Mary Morris teaches writing at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband and daughter.
Overview
The Night Sky is a moving novel about the solitary moral courage of a women raising a child alone and the complex resilience of family. Ivy Slovak is a jewelry designer and artist whose days are absorbed by the struggle to make an unreliable paycheck cover the needs of her infant son. Hungry for the freedom of the world outside her window, Ivy is haunted by the memory of her mother, who abandoned her when she was seven years old. She recalls the years spent with her loving but itinerant father, wandering the ...