Which of these books seemed to you to have the strongest ring of truth? Which the greatest emotional intensity? What gave you these impressions?
In each of these books, events that might seem shocking to a reader from our white middle-class culture are told flatly, without emotional reaction or interpretation. Find one event from each of these two books and mark it for discussion with the group. What do you make of this kind of uninterpreted, flat narration? What does it say about the narrators? About the cultures? About the differences between our culture and theirs?
In what ways is the heroine of Mango Street different from the heroine of Gal? In what ways are they similar? Are there any similarities between the two of them and the heroine of Maya Angelou's memoir? What are they?
These two books have a number of important themes - often painful themes - in common. Jot down three or four, for discussion with the group. What do they reveal about the cultures each book depicts?
The House on Mango Street is a novel. Gal is a "true life." If you hadn't known this before you read the books, could you have told the difference? Why is it important to recognize the difference? Which book tells the more compelling truth, do you think?
Sandra Cisneros is an educated literary artist, with a B.A. in English from Loyola of Chicago and work at the Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa. Where do you find glimpses of this background in Mango Street?
Ruthie Bolton (not her real name) isn't educated and makes no attempt to create literary effects in her story. She simply tells it as it happened - and yet, as the jacket writer says, she writes with an "astonishingly eloquent simplicity." What do you find most compelling about her work? If you know Alice Walker
's The Color Purple, think about the similarities between that novel and Bolton's memoir. What are they? How are the two books different?
Frank McCourt (author of Angela's Ashes) says this about writing about poverty. "I really didn't want to write anything about slum life...It took me a long time. It's only because the kids in Stuyvesant High School [where he taught] were prodding me and they were intrigued with the idea of my life in Ireland...They were intrigued with the details of poverty, and I became a connoisseur of poverty because I realized then that there is very little writing done on poverty. You don't get the stink of it and I wanted to convey the stink of it." Which of these two books best conveys the stink of poverty, do you think? Why is it important for us to smell it -- even when we don't want to?
