What Was She Thinking? Notes on a Scandal by Zoe Heller

From Barnes & Noble

Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers
More than a decade ago, Kazuo Ishiguro wowed readers with The Remains of the Day, a novel requiring readers to see past the self-deceptions of an uppity English narrator to understand the true significance of the story. In the same vein, Zoë Heller offers a riveting story of friendship, jealousy, and betrayal, with a narrator as unreliable as Ishiguro's infamous butler.

Heller's narrator is Barbara Covett, a British schoolteacher who lives a quiet, solitary life with an aging cat as her sole companion. For reasons she cannot comprehend, Barbara has never been good at making friends. But she is drawn to Sheba, a pretty new pottery teacher, and jealously tries to edge out the other teachers to win Sheba's friendship. When Sheba begins an inappropriate relationship with a young male student, it is Barbara in whom she confides. Soon, Barbara begins a written account of Sheba's illicit affair, detailing the actions of a woman caught in the grip of an obsession larger than herself.

As Barbara continues to infiltrate Sheba's life, their friendship acquires a dangerous undercurrent. And although the book title ostensibly refers to Sheba, readers might ask themselves the same question of Barbara, as this psychologically rich, complex tale unfolds. In penning her wickedly wonderful second novel, Zoë Heller certainly had her head squarely on her shoulders. (Fall 2003 Selection)

From the Publisher

Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize

Now the Major Motion Picture Notes on a Scandal

Schoolteacher Barbara Covett has led a solitary life until Sheba Hart, the new art teacher at St. George’s, befriends her. But even as their relationship develops, so too does another: Sheba has begun an illicit affair with an underage male student. When the scandal turns into a media circus, Barbara decides to write an account in her friend’s defense--and ends up revealing not only Sheba’s secrets, but also her own.

The New York Times

In the end, What Was She Thinking? isn't so much about the standard student-teacher affair as it is about the complicated weights and balances of female friendships. Some of the novel's funniest scenes show the women adopting a posture of honesty and ''supportiveness'' while privately judging or dismissing one another. It's a recognizable snit-fit of ''enough about you, what about me'' that pushes Barbara into her final betrayal. In a way, Barbara risks more for friendship than Sheba does for romance. The plot twist may not be a huge surprise, but Heller handles it with wry grace, managing to mock her characters without allowing their story to tip into farce. — Lisa Zeidner

The Los Angeles Times

What Was She Thinking? is a tartly readable portrait of terminal neediness, as sharp and merciless as any of Zoë Heller's columns. — Heller McAlpin

The Washington Post

In literature as in life, one of the most dangerous turns of events is to get what you want, and for all its surface tawdriness and chatty asides, What Was She Thinking? achieves some worthy literary aims indeed. — Chris Lehmann

The New Yorker

Barbara Covett, a sixtyish history teacher, is the kind of unmarried-woman-with-cat whose female friends sooner or later decide she is "too intense." Thus when a beautiful new pottery teacher, Sheba Hart -- a "wispy novice with a tinkly accent and see-through skirts" - chooses Barbara as a confidante, she is deeply, even rather sinisterly, gratified. Sheba's secret is explosive: married with two kids, she is having an affair with a fifteen-year-old student. The novel, Heller's second, is Barbara's supposedly objective "history" of the affair and its eventual discovery, written furtively while she and her friend are holed up in a borrowed house, waiting for Sheba's court date. Barbara has appointed herself Sheba's "unofficial guardian," protecting her from the salivating tabloids. Equally adroit at satire and at psychological suspense, Heller charts the course of a predatory friendship and demonstrates the lengths to which some people go for human company.

Publishers Weekly

Subtitled Notes on a Scandal, Heller's engrossing second novel (after Everything You Know) is actually the story of two inappropriate obsessions-one a consummated affair between a high school teacher and her student, the other a secret passion harbored by a dowdy spinster. Sheba Hart, a new 40ish art teacher at a London school for working-class kids, has been arrested for having a sexual relationship with a 15-year-old student, Steven Connolly. The papers are having a blast. Sheba is herself the object of fascination for her older colleague and defender, Barbara Covett, whose interest in Sheba is not overtly romantic but has an erotic-and at times malevolent-intensity. Barbara narrates the story of Sheba's affair while inadvertently revealing her own obsession and her pivotal role in the scandal. The novel is gripping from start to finish; Heller brings vivid, nuanced characterizations to the racy story. Sheba is upper-class, arty, carelessly beautiful in floaty layers of clothing, with a full life of her own: doting older husband, impossible adolescent daughter, a son with Down's Syndrome, real if underdeveloped talent as a potter. She never got a driver's license, she tells Barbara, because she is always given rides; people want to do things for her. Barbara's respectable maiden-lady exterior hides a bitter soul that feasts on others' real and imagined shortcomings: one colleague's carelessly shaved armpits, another's risible baseball jacket. Even characters on stage for a minute (a Camden barman who hams it up for Barbara) live and breathe. Author tour. (Aug.) Forecast: Some readers will pass this up as yet another take on the shopworn theme of student/teacher romance, but Heller's light touch will win over others and please reviewers. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Spinster schoolteacher Barbara Covett lives a somewhat lonely life (although that's not how she would describe it). She disdains her fellow teachers at St. George's, and her closest companion is her cat, Portia. When the bohemianly attractive Sheba Hart arrives at school as the new art instructor, Barbara strikes up a friendship with her, thereby becoming the only person who knows that Sheba is having an affair with a young student. But somehow the news is leaked to the school administration, and Sheba becomes the focus of a media avid for scandal. Anxious to protect Sheba and to run interference with her husband and children, Barbara persuades Sheba to move in with her and begins secretly writing a defense of her friend's behavior-the book we're reading-which inadvertently reveals more about Barbara than Sheba. Heller's (Everything You Know) first-person narrator seems totally self-deluded. Or is she? Are Barbara's motives saintly or sinister? This deliciously subtle novel about obsession, love, and (possibly) friendship belongs on most public library fiction shelves. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 4/1/03.]-Nancy Pearl, Washington Ctr. for the Book, Seattle Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

After Everything You Know (2000) comes the tale of a London art teacher, married with children, who has an affair with a student of 15. When Sheba (Bathsheba) Hart comes to St. George's school, she's completely inexperienced-as clueless about disciplining hormone-driven students as she is about how to dress, inclining toward the sheer, diaphanous, and fey when corduroy or tweed would be in order. More expert, however, is experienced faculty member Barbara Covett-40ish, single, lonely-who casts a cool eye on the exotic Sheba, gradually is drawn closer, and ends up an intimate friend: kind of Wuthering Heights's Nelly Dean to Sheba, making notes, keeping a timeline, and writing a narrative (this novel) of the whole debacle of Sheba's affair. Barbara's tale is often stiff and clumsy ("I daresay we shall never know for certain the exact progress of her romantic attachment"), but it neatly limns the contrast between Barbara's drab, spinsterish life and Sheba's charming, fecund, expansive domesticity, with her academic husband (though he's a snob), and her two healthy children (the older, though, a fiercely troubled teenager and the younger, doted on by Sheba, a victim of Down's syndrome). There's a major disconnect between all of this on the one hand and, on the other, Sheba's letting herself be seduced by the callow working-class Steven Connolly, then continuing the affair for months, keeping it a secret even from Barbara, until inevitable exposure and with it the promise of loss, penalty, breakup, dislocation, perhaps even imprisonment, though the story (wisely) ends with this last yet to come, leaving us only with a powerful sense of the piercing loneliness of Barbara of the inexplicablyself-invited ruin of the charming and yet utterly lost Sheba-her family ruined, her future depraved. Unbelievable yet compelling: it's almost as if Heller tried for a salacious potboiler and ended up-her talent refusing not to intrude-with a portrait that remains indelible. Watch for her next, whatever it may be. Author tour

Product Details

• Reading Group Guide
• Read a Sample Chapter

Reading Group Guide

This is the story of a scandal -- or rather, the evolution of one -- as observed by Barbara, a lonely, unmarried teacher whose only friend, Sheba, embarks on a torrid affair with an underage student named Steven Connelly. As the details of the affair unfold, opportunities arise for readers to explore the motivations behind Sheba's deception: Was it a longing for something absent from her marriage; a defiant attempt to recapture her lost youth; or a simple, if unlikely, crush? The affair also raises more serious issues for discussion, as book groups will be challenged to examine the legal and social ramifications of Sheba's actions. If she were an older man obsessed with a younger woman, would she be considered a sexual deviant? Can we place an age limit on emotional and sexual maturity? And, Sheba's subservience to Connelly suggests that although she is the older participant in the affair, is it not always clear who is the predator and who is the victim.

As the book's narrator, Barbara tells not only the story of Sheba's scandal but also of her own lonesome life on the perimeter of it. In her devout, cautious attempts to form a bond with Sheba -- and the hints of desperation in her past relationships -- readers will find much to discuss about the gray areas between the longing for companionship and sexual desire, between intimacy and dependency.

This book welcomes an exploration of the psychology of adultery, the rhythms of married life, the delicate boundaries present in all relationships and the circumstances under which they are crossed. Casting a keen eye on the nature of loneliness and blowing the lid off our notions about the wisdom that comes with age and experience, Zoë Heller's latest is sure to raise issues that are relevant to all our lives. Elise Vogel

An Introduction from the Publisher
What Was She Thinking? is the story of a scandalous relationship between Sheba Hart, the new pottery teacher at St. George's, and her fifteen-year-old student, and its aftermath. The novel is narrated by Barabra Covett, an older teacher who lives alone with her cat, and sees in Sheba the possibility of companionship. Barbara's repressed and solitary existence contrasts sharply with Sheba's chaotic life of privilege and marriage, the difficulties raising a sullen adolescent daughter and a disabled son. The disastrous results of the affair provide a way for Barbara to become indispensable to Sheba, and their friendship begins to develop. By turns poignant and satirical, What Was She Thinking? explores love, passion, envy, loneliness, and friendship from every angle to create a vivid psychological portrait of characters caught between circumstance and manipulation.

Discussion Questions from the Publisher
1. There has traditionally been a taboo on older women/younger men relationships. In the novel, the news media describes the affair between Sheba and Connolly as "despicable" and "unhealthy." Why do you think it has historically been viewed this way, and do you agree?

2. Heller expertly captures the insulating and sometimes claustrophobic atmosphere of academia. Give examples of this, and discuss the differences and similarities between Sheba and Barbara that brought them to teach at the same institution.

3. Connolly's unabashed admiration and innocence prove irresistible to Sheba. How are Connolly's attentions much different from the oglings of her academic colleagues since both indicate that they find her sexually attractive. Why is one so much more flattering?

4. What makes a woman like Sheba behave so irresponsibly? How easy was it for her to risk everything for the danger of the relationship? Does Sheba really think about the consequences of her actions?

5. Why does Sheba's friendship with Sue Hodges seem so ill-founded to Barbara? Why would Sheba choose Sue her as her confidant--she never mentions Connolly's visits to Sue. How does Barbara seduce Sheba away from Sue?

6. Barbara observes that Connolly's overt effort to please Sheba is like "the cynicism of all courtship." Discuss what she means by this.

7. Barbara asks why Sheba insists on seeing Connolly as gifted and extraordinary in a sea of fairly ordinary, untalented students. Does the element of class exacerbate the forbidden nature of the relationship? Is Connolly exploiting this? What is his culpability in the situation?

8. Why, when Barbara seems like such a prim and formal person, is she initially so sympathetic to Sheba's predicament? Why is she not appalled? She says she thinks that Connolly is actually benefiting from the relationship, not being abused by it. Is it her desire for Sheba's friendship or pure feminist support? Does she take vicarious pleasure in it?

9. Sheba is presented throughout the first portion of the book as a very appealing character, seeking few of the advantages her money and class could provide. She bemoans her own lack of ambition. How much do her feelings of insecurity, boredom, and her problems with Polly affect her vulnerability to Connolly?

10. What is Barbara's reaction when she finally finds out about the affair? Is this the cause of her betrayal? Does it lead to her punishment at St. George's? Does Barbara have the right to set down the events in writing? Discuss how their friendship provides as fertile ground for mutual misunderstanding, jealousy, and treachery as does the illicit love affair.

11. At the end which woman is more sympathetic? Is Barbara friend, guardian, foe, jailer, interloper, predator? Is Sheba a victim of circumstances, an understandably bored housewife, or a selfish woman spoiled by privilege?

12. The story is finally about the two women, and the many facets of female friendship. Discuss the ways in which Heller's device of having Barbara tell the story serves to enrich the novel by revealing both women's emotional lives.

Read a Sample Chapter

WHAT WAS SHE THINKING?

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY

Chapter One

My formal introduction to Sheba took place later the same day when Ted Mawson, the deputy head, brought her into the staff room at afternoon break for a "meet and greet." Afternoon break isnot a good time to meet schoolteachers. If you were to plot a graph of a teacher's spirits throughout the school day, afternoon break would be represented by the lowest valley. The air in the staff room has a trapped, stagnant quality. The chirpy claptrap of the early morning has died away, and those staff members who are not milling about, checking their timetables and so on, sprawl in lugubrious silence. (To be fair, the sprawling is as much a tribute to the shoddy construction of the staff room's three elderly foam sofas as an expression of the teachers' low morale.) Some of the teachers stare, slack-shouldered, into space. Some of them read-the arts and media pages of the liberal newspapers mainly, or paperback editions of the lower sort of fiction-the draw being not so much the content as the shield against having to converse with their colleagues. A great many chocolate bars and instant noodles in plastic pots are consumed.

On the day of Sheba's arrival, the staff room was slightly more crowded than usual, owing to the heating being on the blink in Old Hall. (In addition to its three modern structures-the Gym, the Arts Centre, and the Science Block-the St. George's site includes two rather decrepit redbrick buildings, Old Hall and Middle Hall, which date back to the school's original, Victorian incarnation as an orphanage.) That afternoon, several teachers who might otherwise have remained skulking in their Old Hall classrooms during break had been driven to seek refuge in the staff room, where the radiators were still operative. I was off in a far corner when Mawson ushered Sheba in, so I was able to watch their slow progress around the room for several minutes before having to mould my face into the appropriate smile.

Sheba's hair had become more chaotic since the morning. The loose tendrils had graduated to hanks and, where it was meant to be smooth and pulled back, tiny, fuzzy sprigs had reared up, creating a sort of corona around her scalp. She was a very thin woman, I saw now. As she bent to shake the hands of seated staff members, her body seemed to fold in half at the waist like a piece of paper. "Our new pottery teacher!" Mr. Mawson was bellowing with his customary chilling good spirits, as he and Sheba loomed over Antonia Robinson, one of our Eng. lit women. Sheba smiled and patted shyly at her hair.

Pottery. I repeated the word quietly to myself. It was too perfect: I pictured her, the dreamy maiden poised at her wheel, massaging tastefully mottled milk jugs into being.

She was gesturing at the windows. "Why are all the curtains drawn?" I heard her ask. Ted Mawson rubbed his hands, nervously.

"Oh," Antonia said, "so the kids can't look in at us and make faces."

Bill Rumer, the head of chemistry, who was sitting next to Antonia on one of the foam sofas, snorted loudly at this. "Actually, Antonia," he said, "it's so we can't look out at them. So they can smash each other up-do their raping and pillaging-and we're not required to intervene."

Antonia laughed and made a scandalised face.

A lot of teachers at St. George's go in for this sort of posturing cynicism about the pupils, but Bill is the chief offender. He is a rather ghastly character, I'm afraid-the sort of man who is always sitting with his legs aggressively akimbo, offering a clearer silhouette of his untidy crotch than is strictly decent. One of the more insufferable things about him is that he imagines himself tremendously naughty and shocking-a delusion in which women like Antonia are all too eager to conspire.

"Oh, Bill," Antonia said now, pressing her skirt against her thighs.

"Don't worry," Bill said to Sheba, "you'll get used to the gloom." He smiled at her magnanimously-the grandee allowing her into the little enclosure of his bonhomie. Then, as his eyes swept over her, I saw his smile waver for a moment.

Women observing other women tend to be engrossed by the details-the bodily minutiae, the clothing particulars. We get so caught up in the lone dimple, the excessive ears, the missing button, that we often lag behind men in organising the individual features into an overall impression. I mention this by way of explaining why it was only now, as I watched Bill, that the fact of Sheba's beauty occurred to me. Of course, I thought. She's very good looking. Sheba, who had been smiling fixedly throughout Bill and Antonia's droll exchange, made another nervous adjustment to her hair. As she raised her long, thin arms to fuss with the chopstick hair ornament, her torso lengthened and her chest was thrust forward slightly. She had a dancer's bosom. Two firm little patties riding the raft of her ribs. Bill's eyes widened. Antonia's eyes narrowed.

Sheba and Mawson continued on their journey around the room. The change that took place in the teachers' faces as they set eyes on Sheba confirmed my appraisal of Bill's appraisal. The men beamed and ogled. The women shrank slightly and turned sullen. The one exception was Elaine Clifford, a St. George's alumnus who teaches lower school biology. Assuming what is her characteristic stance of unearned intimacy, Elaine stood very close to Sheba and began to blast her with impudent chatter. They were only a few feet away from me now. After a moment, Mawson turned and beckoned to me. "Barbara!" he shouted, cutting off Elaine in midstream. "Do come and meet Sheba Hart."

I stepped over and joined the group.

"Sheba is going to be teaching pottery," Mawson said. "As you know, we've been waiting a long time to replace Mrs. Sipwitch. We feel tremendously lucky and pleased to have got her."

In response to these words, a small, precise circle of scarlet appeared on each of Sheba's cheeks.

"This is Barbara Covett," Mawson went on. "She's one of our stalwarts. If Barbara ever left us, I'm afraid St. George's would collapse."

Sheba looked at me carefully. She was about thirty-five, I estimated. (She was actually forty, about to be forty-one.) The hand that she held out to be shaken was large and red and somewhat coarse to the touch. "How nice to be so needed," she said, smiling. It was difficult to distinguish her tone, but it seemed to me that it contained a note of genuine sympathy-as if she understood how maddening it might be to be patronised by Mawson.

"Sheba-is that as in Queen of?" I asked.

"No, as in Bathsheba."

"Oh. Were your parents thinking of the Bible or of Hardy?"

She smiled. "I'm not sure. I think they just liked the name."

"If there's anything you need to know about anything concerning this place, Sheba," Mawson continued, "you must ask Barbara. She's the St. George's expert."

"Oh, smashing. I'll remember that," Sheba said.

People from the privileged orders are always described as having plums in their mouths, but that wasn't what came to mind when I heard Sheba speak. On the contrary, she sounded as if her mouth were very empty and clean-as if she'd never had a filling.

"Oh! Love your earrings!" Elaine said now. She reached out, like a monkey, to finger Sheba's ears and, as she raised her arms, I caught a glimpse of her armpits, which were violently pink, as if inflamed, and speckled with black stubble. I do hate it when women don't keep their personal grooming up to scratch. Better the full, bushy Frenchwoman's growth than that squalid sprinkling of iron filings. "They're so pretty!" Elaine said of the earrings. "Where d'you get 'em?"

Sandy Pabblem, the headmaster, is very keen on having former pupils like Elaine on staff. He imagines it reflects well on the school that they should wish to return and "give something back." But the truth is, St. George's alumni make exceptionally poor teachers. It's not so much that they don't know anything about anything. (Which they don't.) Or even that they are complacent about their ignorance. (I once heard Elaine blithely identifying Boris Yeltsin as "the Russian one who doesn't have a thingy on his head.") The real issue is one of personality. Invariably, pupils who come back to teach at St. George's are emotionally suspect characters-people who have surmised that the world out there is a frightening place and who have responded by simply staying put. They'll never have to try going home again because they're never going to leave. I have a vision sometimes of the pupils of these ex-pupils, deciding to become St. George's teachers themselves-and these ex-pupils of ex-pupils producing more ex-pupils, who return to St. George's as teachers, and so on. It would take only a couple of generations for the school to become entirely populated by dolts.

I took the opportunity, while Sheba was explaining her jewellery, to examine her face more closely. The earrings were beautiful,
as it happened: delicate little things made of gold and seed pearls. Her face was longish and thin, her nose ever so slightly crooked at the tip. And her eyes-no, not so much the eyes as the eyelids-were prodigious: great beige canopies fringed with dense lash. Like that spiky tiara that the Statue of Liberty wears.

"This is Sheba's first teaching post," Ted said, when Elaine had stopped talking for a moment.

"Well, it'll certainly be a baptism by fire," I remarked.

Ted laughed with excessive heartiness and then abruptly stopped. "Okay," he said, glancing at his watch, "we ought to get on, Sheba. Let me introduce you to Malcolm Plummer ..."

Elaine and I stood watching for a moment, as Sheba and Mawson moved off. "She's sweet, isn't she?" Elaine said.

I smiled. "No, I wouldn't have said sweet."

Elaine made a clicking noise with her tongue to indicate her affront. "Well, I think she's nice," she muttered.

During her first couple of weeks at school, Sheba kept very much to herself. At break times, she often stayed in her pottery studio. When she did come into the staff room, she usually stood alone at one of the windows, peeking round the curtains at the playground outside. She was perfectly pleasant to her colleagues, which is to say she exchanged all the standard, weather-based pleasantries. But she did not automatically gravitate to another female teacher and start swapping autobiographies. Or put her name down to join the St. George's contingent on the next march against government spending cuts. Or contribute to sarcastic group discussions about the headmaster. Her resistance to all the usual initiation rituals aroused a certain amount of suspicion among the other teachers. The women tended to the opinion that Sheba was "stuck up," while the men favoured the theory that she was "cold." Bill Rumer, widely acknowledged as the staff expert on such matters, observed on more than one occasion that "there was nothing wrong with her that a good boning wouldn't cure."

I took Sheba's failure to forge an instantaneous friendship as an encouraging sign. In my experience, newcomers-particularly female ones-are far too eager to pin their colours to the mast of any staff room coterie that will have them. Jennifer Dodd, who used to be my closest friend at the school, spent her first three weeks at St. George's buried in the welcoming bosoms of Mary Horsely and Diane Nebbins. Mary and Diane are two hippies from the maths department. They both carry packets of "women's tea" in their handbags and use jagged lumps of rock crystal in lieu of antiperspirant. They were entirely ill-suited-temperament-wise, humour-wise, worldview-wise-to be Jennifer's friends. But they happened to get to her first, and Jennifer was so grateful for someone being nice to her that she cheerfully undertook to ignore their soy milk mumbo jumbo. I daresay she would have plighted her troth to a Moonie during her first week at St. George's, if the Moonie had been quick enough off the mark.

Sheba displayed no such new girl jitters and, for this, I admired her. She did not exempt me from her general aloofness. Owing to my seniority at St. George's and the fact that I am more formal in manner than most of my colleagues, I am used to being treated with a certain deference. But Sheba seemed to be oblivious of my status. There was little indication, for a long time, that she really saw me at all. Yet, in spite of this, I found myself possessed by a strange certainty that we would one day be friends.

Early on, we made a few tentative approaches to one another. Somewhere in her second week, Sheba greeted me in the corridor. (She used "Hello," I was pleased to note, as opposed to the awful, Mid-Atlantic "Hiya" that so many of the staff favour.) And another time, walking from the Arts Centre after an assembly, we shared some brief, rueful comments about the choral performance that had just taken place. My feelings of connection to Sheba did not depend upon these minute exchanges, however. The bond that I sensed, even at that stage, went far beyond anything that might have been expressed in quotidian chitchat. It was an intuited kinship. An unspoken understanding. Does it sound too dramatic to call it spiritual recognition? Owing to our mutual reserve, I understood that it would take time for us to form a friendship. But when we did, I had no doubt that it would prove to be one of uncommon intimacy and trust-a relationship de chaleur, as the French say.

In the meantime, I watched from afar and listened with interest to the gossip that circulated about her in the staff room. For most of the staff, Sheba's dignified self-containment acted as a sort of force field, repelling the usual impertinent enquiries about home life and political allegiance.

Continues...

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Excerpted from WHAT WAS SHE THINKING? by ZOË HELLER
Copyright © 2003 by Zoë Heller
Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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