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.”