Story Circle Network
Austin Chapter
Reader's Guide

October 2002
What Her Body Thought

What Her Body Thought
by Susan Griffin

This challenging and provocative chronicle of an illness reaches far beyond the author's symptoms to incorporate the romance of Camille, a child's abandonment, the body's relationship to nature and to history, money, poetry, the environment, democracy, and the loss of a certain kind of consciousness. Griffin (The Eros of Everyday Life: Essays on Ecology, Gender, and Society, 1995, etc.) has been called "a great visionary'' by some critics; she clearly has a vision, but one that resembles a Moebius strip more than a straight line...

  1. How is this book organized? Are the titles of the sections and subsections apt and helpful or not? In what way?

  2. "Story" is threaded throughout the book. Griffin says, "In a sense, the drama of the body provides the drama for all narrative." Do you agree? Why or why not?

  3. At the end of each section is a collection of prose poems. How do these add to the section they follow? Or do they?

  4. What inspired Griffin to research and write the story of Marie Duplessis?

  5. Griffin expands her collection of stories. Does this enlarge the power of her narrative? Why or why not?

  6. What are some of the many themes and issues Griffin addresses? How effectively does she do so? How do they grow out of her experience of her own illness and the parallels in other women's stories?

  7. On page 101 Griffin writes, "Alongside the love story [of Camille] lay another theme I was beginning to discover, a veritable discourse on the private life of nineteenth-century capitalism." How does she develop this theme? How does it relate to her own story?

  8. On page 204 Griffin expands on "what her body thought." She says, "Histories of sorrow enter flesh and bone at the same time that they enter the mind." How does her own history demonstrate the truth of this statement?

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