About Susan Minot

Lust By Susan Minot About Susan Minot:

Susan Minot is a prize-winning American novelist and short story writer. Minot was born December 7, 1956 in Boston, Massachusetts. She attended Brown University, where she studied writing and painting; in 1983 she graduated from Columbia University School of the Arts with an M.F.A. in creative writing. Her first book, Monkeys, won the 1987 Prix Femina. She has also received an O. Henry Prize and a Pushcart Prize for her writing. Sexuality and the difficulties of romantic relationships are a constant theme in Minot's work. Her second book, Lust and Other Stories, focuses on "the relations between men and women in their twenties and thirties having difficulty coming together and difficulty breaking apart". Minot has also co-authored two screenplays that have been made into films: Stealing Beauty in 1996, and Evening (based on her novel of the same name) in 2007.

Terms: Style: The distinctive manner in which a writer arranges words to achieve particular effects. Tone: The author’s implicit attitude toward the people, places, and events in a story. Irony: A device that reveals a reality different from what appears to be true. Verbal Irony: Consists of a person saying one thing but meaning the opposite. It is usually not openly aggressive, but rather more subtle. Sarcasm: A form of verbal irony that is calculated to hurt someone by false praise. Situational Irony: Exists when there is an incongruity between what is expected to happen and what actually happens. Dramatic irony: Creates a discrepancy between what a character believes or says and what the reader understands to be true.

Discussion Questions: 1. What is/are the story’s tone or tones? Is the tone conveyed in the title? 2. What is your reaction to the narrator? What does she realize by the end of the story? 3. Do you think the depiction of both male and female reactions/responses to sex or sexual tension is true in the story?

Important quotes:

“Leo was from a long time ago, the first one I ever saw nude…He had a halo from the campus light behind him. I flipped.”

“The less they noticed you, the more you got them on the brain.”

“My parents had no idea.”

“He was the first person I ever knew who died, later that summer, in a car crash. I thought about it for a long time.”

“Some things I was good at, like math or painting or even sports, but the second a boy put his arm around me, I forgot about wanting to do anything else, which felt like a relief at first until it became like sinking into a muck.” “Just because you have on a short skirt, they yell from the cars, slowing down for a while, and if you don’t look, they screech off and call you a bitch.”

“You make out the dim shape of the windows and feel yourself become a cave, filled absolutely with air, or with a sadness that wouldn’t stop.”

“I kept the dial in my top drawer like my mother and thought of her each time I tipped out the yellow tablets in the morning before chapel.”

“I never saw him again after that but I thought, I could have loved that one.”

“After sex, you curl up like a shrimp, something deep inside you ruined, slammed in a place that sickens at slamming, and slowly you fill up with an overwhelming sadness, an elusive gaping worry.”

“You seem to have disappeared.”