2. Why do you think the narrator considers several different points from which to begin the story? Where would you have started telling this story?
3. Elizabeth writes, “Ficre everywhere, Ficre nowhere.” How does a person’s death affect the way we think and talk about them? What do you think the role of memory is within the memoir? The role of distance?
4. What were your first impressions of Elizabeth, and how did they change over the course of the memoir—or did they not change at all? What about your impression of Ficre?
5. As an African immigrant and a polyglot, Ficre has a multicultural identity that does not fit into any simple categories. Elizabeth offers, “He was an African man, an Eritrean man, and an African man. He was a black man. He was not the descendent of slaves.” How does our understanding of Ficre’s multiculturalism shape our understanding of the hybridity of the text? Of our understanding of Ficre as a “citizen of the world?” How does Ficre’s relationship to music shape our understanding of Ficre’s relationship with the world?
6. Elizabeth offers, “To love and live with a painter means marveling at the space between the things they can see that you cannot see, that they then make.” How does our understanding of Ficre and Elizabeth’s relationship as painter and poet inform our understanding of their relationship as husband and wife?
7. How does the memoir shape your understanding of motherhood? Of the act of guiding ones children through loss?
8. Food is one of the recurring motifs in this memoir. The narrator includes the recipes for “Shrimp Barka,” “Sugo alla Bolognese,” and “Spicy Red Lentil & Tomato Curry.” Why might the author have chosen to include recipes through the course of the story? Why do you think food has such a place of prominence in a memoir about love and loss?
9. “I am getting older and he is not,” says Elizabeth, as she imagines Ficre might or could return. What do you make of this statement? Do our memories of the dead also become fixed or can they change with time?
10. When Elizabeth first goes into Ficre’s studio after his death, she says, “The life force within the space literally brings me to my knees. He is utterly present, but of course he is not present.” Where else does she find traces of Ficre’s presence even after he is gone? Is it more comforting or disconcerting to the narrator to feel his continuing presence? Does her reaction to this change over the course of the book?
11. Elizabeth asks, “What does it mean to grieve in the absence of religious culture?” In the absence of one religion, how does Elizabeth construct a spirituality to carry her through?
12. What do you make of Ficre’s habit of playing the lottery and his decision to buy one hundred tickets the night before his death?
13. Elizabeth writes, “The day he died, the four of us were exactly the same height, just over five foot nine…It seemed a perfect symmetry, a whole family the same size but in different shapes.” How does loss reconfigure a family? How does it shape our understanding of parenting, of sibling relationships, of teaching? How might this inform our understanding of Elizabeth’s role as a teacher of young people?
Questions for the author:
1. As a poet, your lyricism seems to carry over to your prose writing. Do you have a different approach to writing prose from your poetry? Why did you choose the medium of a memoir in this case? Have you also been writing poems about Ficre, about your loss?
I believe that poets always write “as poets,” with utmost attention to each word, the rhythms of the writing, and its musicality. For this book in particular, I was keenly aware that the writing came from the same “place” within me where poetry resides, somewhere lyrical and partially unknown such that the process of writing is a process of revelation. I didn’t choose this form, it chose me, for exploring this zone of intense love and grieving, as well as the indelible force of life and its power and beauty, giving me something new on the hopefully long journey of my artistic development.
2. What guided the structure of this memoir? Can you speak to the memoir’s sense of time?