Windfalls by Jean Hegland

From the Publisher

The acclaimed author of Into the Forest mines our fears and explores our capacity to love in this epic tale of modern motherhood.

Young and pregnant, Cerise and Anna make very different decisions about how to direct their lives. While teenaged Cerise struggles to support herself and her young daughter, Anna finishes college, marries, and later gives birth to two daughters of her own. After the birth of her second child, a tragic accident tears Cerise's life apart, and she loses her already tenuous position in society. As the story progresses—and Cerise's and Anna's lives interweave and inexorably approach each other—both women are dramatically, forever changed. Unforgettable, awe-inspiring, and grippingly honest, Windfalls is a daring and mesmerizing tale.

Publishers Weekly

The decision whether or not to keep a child alters the lives of two young, single women in this moving if rather programmatic second novel by Hegland (Into the Forest). Telling parallel stories that ultimately converge, Hegland explores the value of work, art, family ties and the singular bond between women and their children. Anna, a graduate photography student, has an abortion, eventually marries and has two children; Cerise, a high school sophomore, keeps her baby, raises it on her own, ekes out a living and later has another child. In following the course of their very different lives, Hegland describes a full range of maternal emotions and experiences-the mind-numbing exhaustion; the weight of responsibility; the fierce desire to protect; the boundless joys and heartbreaking sorrows. When a tragic fire results in the death of Cerise's second child and the loss of her home, Hegland illuminates the plight of homeless people and demonstrates how easy it is to lose one's sense of self. Cerise hides behind a new identity, as "Honey," and finds a job at a day-care center, where her resolve and sense of purpose in the face of heart-shattering grief are remarkable. Meanwhile, Anna's life is upended when her husband's sudden unemployment forces a move to California from her family's Washington homestead. Circumstances force her back into the workforce, and Hegland brings fresh insight to the struggle working mothers face in juggling home life with their careers. When Honey becomes a caretaker for Anna's two young children, a curious bond develops between Anna and Honey as the two women strive to find a sense of purpose in their lives. The result is a powerful, life-changing experience for both of them, bringing Hegland's novel to a poignant, thought-provoking conclusion. (Apr.) Forecast: Hegland's unswerving focus on social issues-the cost of motherhood, the plight of the homeless-makes this a good prospect for reading groups. Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

In Hegland's second novel (after Into the Forest, a best-selling sf apocalypse tale), the lives of two women fatefully intersect after running parallel for years. Both Anna and Cerise become pregnant when young, but while graduate student Anna decides to get an abortion, high school-aged Cerise opts to keep her baby. Anna eventually marries and has two girls, while Cerise struggles as a single mom in poverty, only to get pregnant a second time by a guy she thinks will hang around (he doesn't). Eventually, tragedy strikes Cerise: she loses one child to a fire, and another runs away. Childless, homeless, and grief-stricken, Cerise walks the streets until she ends up in the town where Anna and her family have recently moved. Hegland, who has volunteered at a women's shelter, interweaves Anna's and Cerise's stories to create a powerful, extremely moving tale about motherhood, the choices we make, and the impact we can have on one another. Highly recommended.-Robin Nesbitt, Columbus Metropolitan Lib., OH Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

A vivid, lightly fictionalized Motherhood 101 as two women, worlds apart, find common ground in facing the challenges of child-raising. The two women-Anna, a noted photographer married to Eliot, a fellow academic; and Cerise, a single mother and high-school drop-out-neatly reflect current anxieties about parenting in this story that's yet more about plight than plot. In graduate school, Anna had an abortion, and she's still troubled-and has never told Eliot about it. Her daughter, Lucy, was an easy baby and a delight, and life was good. Then Eliot failed to get tenure and, now, they have to leave their farmhouse home and move to urban California. There, in an unfamiliar hospital, Anna gives birth to Ellen. The second birth is difficult. Ellen spends time in intensive care, and Anna, tired and depressed, later finds it hard to work at her photography. She's also lonely, and the once easygoing Lucy is now nervous and troubled by nightmares, especially about a local little girl who has disappeared. Good day care is hard to find, too, and expensive. Cerise is even worse off; she got pregnant in high school, dropped out to raise daughter Melody, and has worked as a cleaning woman for a nursing home. She didn't mind while Melody was young and still happy to spend her time with Mom. But now an adolescent, Melody is critical, has odd friends, is drinking and having sex. Cerise finds some consolation in an affair that produces baby Travis, but, though he's adorable, she needs to work when her welfare payments end. Shortly after, Melody runs off with her friends, Travis dies in a fire, Cerise loses everything and must move into a shelter-in the same town where Anna now lives. The two meet when Annais checking out day care for her daughters, and they're briefly able to help each other move on. Deftly rendered portraits of two "poster Moms" of today.

Product Details

• Reading Group Guide
• Read an Excerpt

Reading Group Guide

Questions and Topics for Discussion

1. Why do you think Jean Hegland chose to call her novel Windfalls? Do you think it is a good title for the book? Why or why not?

2. The novel opens with a lyrical description of one of Anna's photographs — of a lone tree on a barren windswept hillside beneath a stormy sky, its trunk split almost in two. What purpose do the tree and its photograph serve in the novel and in the lives of the two main characters?

3. Both Anna and Cerise find themselves facing unplanned pregnancies, but they make very different decisions about their lives. Were the choices they made the right ones for them at the time? Do they turn out to be wise decisions as their lives unfold?

4. Windfalls has been described as a deeply stirring novel about the choices that every woman faces. Discuss the ways that life circumstances either force choices on us or take them away from us.

5. Joelle Fraser, author of The Territory of Men, describes Windfalls as "an elegy to motherhood in all its painful, beautiful complexity." Talk about the rapturous joys and heartbreaking sorrows and terrors of motherhood depicted in Windfalls. What other novels have you read or movies have you seen that deal with the theme of motherhood and its rewards and costs? How do they compare with Windfalls?

6. What do you think of the way the author deals with the sensitive subject of abortion and a woman's right to choose? Are her own views about abortion made clear in the novel? Should they be? Is it possible for a work of fiction to simply explore the human dimensions of a highly controversial political, moral, or religious issuewithout taking a stand? If you knew that an author's views on a social issue you feel passionately about stood in opposition to your own, how do you think it would it affect your response to her novel?

7. In Windfalls, Jean Hegland also explores such volatile contemporary social issues as welfare and homelessness. In an interview she gave after her acclaimed first novel, Into the Forest, Hegland explained that regardless of how important an author considers the themes of her fiction to be, "in a novel, it's the story that comes first?It's a challenge because one can get so fervent, but more is less when it comes to fervency." Do you agree or disagree? Do you think she succeeds or fails in Windfalls in expressing the passions of her characters while keeping her own fervency in check?

8. Anna's decision to terminate her pregnancy is influenced by her impression of her sister's life. "Sally had been a painter before Jesse was born. She had studied in Italy, had won awards?but the woman she'd been then seemed to have vanished into the abyss of motherhood?Anna wondered how much art was lost to the world each time another baby was born. With a ferocity that nearly frightened her, she'd thought, I could never be like that." Later on, when Anna marries and has two children of her own, how do her views change? How does she balance the conflicting demands of art and motherhood?

9. Why do you think Anna asked to see what was taken from her body during the abortion? Did the request surprise you? How do you think her graphic image of what she saw affected her? Why do you think she never told anyone about her abortion, and why does she finally open up to Cerise toward the end of the novel?

10. When Cerise was a teenager she often would deliberately burn her wrists with a heated iron, a mysterious craving to hurt herself that she could neither understand nor stop, but which disappeared when Melody was born. She is frantic when she witnesses her 14-year-old daughter plunging her forearm against the heated element of the stove. She ached with pain both current and remembered — not the sting of blisters on tender skin as much as the hole in her soul those burns were meant to cauterize. Talk about the overwhelming mix of love, fear, anger, and self-recrimination Cerise — or any mother — experiences as she watches her child behave in dangerous and self-destructive ways.

11. What do you think of the way the novel is constructed — as a series of alternating sections on the separate lives of its two main characters? Talk about the way the author manages to intertwine their lives. How do these two women, of very different educational backgrounds, economic stations, and temperaments, become friends and what does each learn from the other?

12. What life lessons does Anna learn from her grandmother's story of her stillborn daughter? What is the significance of that one quietly spoken word, "Because"? How does the woman Cerise encounters in the forest help her to go on living when she longs to end her life? How does young Lucy help Cerise to cope with her grief over Travis? What does Cerise mean when she says goodbye to Anna and explains, "I need to find out what someone means by Saturday morning"?

Read an Excerpt

After all

A tree stands on a windswept hillside. Alone between the darkening heavens and the stony earth, it raises bloom-filled branches toward the sky. A low sun kindles the storm clouds that brood above it, warms the wood of its broken trunk, ignites the blossoms that cram its gnarled limbs.

The tree has been split almost in two — perhaps by lightning, perhaps by wind, or by the weight of its own fruit in some too-fecund autumn long ago. Half of it now sprawls unflowering along the ground. But the living half of the tree still reaches skyward, its limbs so cloaked in bloom that the blossoms seem to hover in the storm-charged air. White flowers cluster on even the smallest twig, and in the photograph each bloom shines like a candle flame.

It is that cloud of flower-light that first draws the eye. Soaring and trapped beneath the glowering sky, that unlikely multitude of blossoms holds the viewer cupped inside a single moment. Gazing at it, a viewer may be transformed, turned from an onlooker into a witness — and, perhaps, from a witness into a partner.

It is a lovely photograph, even a stunning one. Large but not huge, it has been printed full-frame on double-weight matte paper, and its velvet blacks, its pewter grays, its whites as rich as satin all attest to the craft — and maybe the heart — of its maker. But the purest white on the photograph is not the living white of storm light through apple petals, not the roiling brightness of slant-lit clouds. Instead it is the dead white gash that runs the length of the print — from ominous sky to bloom-laden branches and down through the rocky earth.

Someone has folded the photograph inhalf. Someone has folded it as if it were a letter or a newspaper clipping, and that fold has cracked the print's emulsion and left a long unhealing scar in its wake. It is shocking to see that photograph defiled. But the longer one studies it, the more one wonders.

Spread flat, the print buckles and curls, its corners bent, its edges worn. It appears to have been folded and unfolded so many times that the white crease now seems almost like a hinge. Simply by looking, it is impossible to say whether the photograph has been rescued or ruined, impossible to know if the person who last held it in her hands considered it a treasure or would have called it trash. But gazing at that marred and glowing image, a viewer — or a partner — might have to ask whether it hasn't served some purpose, after all.