Margaret_Mead_3119181k.jpg' alt='Lily King Euphoria Book Group Questions For The Mothers' title='Lily King Euphoria Book Group Questions For The Mothers' />Lily King Euphoria Book Group Questions For KidsLily King Euphoria Book Group Questions For MillersTo delight in Lily Kings new novel, Euphoria. Euphoria By Lily King. Brava to Lily King. The Guardian Back to home. Euphoria by Lily King the colourful love life of Margaret Mead. Lily Kings Euphoria. Euphoria King Lit. Manuales Tuning Fibra De Vidrio. Lovers. Page 1 of 4. Euphoria  Lily King, 2. Grove Atlantic. 28. ISBN 1. 3 9. 78. Summary. From New England Book Award winner Lily King comes a breathtaking novel about three young anthropologists of the 3. English anthropologist Andrew Bankson has been alone in the field for several years, studying the Kiona river tribe in the Territory of New Guinea. Haunted by the memory of his brothers deaths and increasingly frustrated and isolated by his research, Bankson is on the verge of suicide when a chance encounter with colleagues, the controversial Nell Stone and her wry and mercurial Australian husband Fen, pulls him back from the brink. Nell and Fen have just fled the bloodthirsty Mumbanyo and, in spite of Nells poor health, are hungry for a new discovery. Four Questions for Lily King. The euphoria of the title. Los Angeles Review of Books. Discussion Questions Euphoria by Lily King Source edited from. Nells search for a group of people who give each other the room to be in whatever. Euphoria Summary Study Guide includes comprehensive information and analysis to help you understand the book. Quotes and a Free Quiz on Euphoria by Lily King. Our Reading Guide for Euphoria by Lily King includes Book Club Discussion Questions, Book Reviews, Plot SummarySynopsis and Author Bio. When Bankson finds them a new tribe nearby, the artistic, female dominated Tam, he ignites an intellectual and romantic firestorm between the three of them that burns out of anyones control. Set between two World Wars and inspired by events in the life of revolutionary anthropologist Margaret Mead, Euphoria is an enthralling story of passion, possession, exploration, and sacrifice from accomplished author Lily King. From the publisher. Four Questions for Lily King. JULY 2. 9, 2. 01. Lilys Kings latest novel, Euphoria, was published by Atlantic Monthly Press earlier this summer. Inspired by the life of Margaret Mead, Euphoria tells the story of three anthropologists caught in a love triangle in 1. New Guinea. We here at LARB had four questions for her. MICHELLE HUNEVEN At a certain point in many novelists writing lives, they turn to historical novels, often when they have reached a limit even temporarily with more personal subject matter. Im thinking of Penelope Fitzgerald, Lily Tuck, and Alice Munro. Why did you decide to write a historical novel What was your methodDid you always know you were going to write about fictional counterparts, or did you once think you were going to write about Mead, Bates, and Fortune themselves the way, say, Doctorow wrote about the Rosenbergs How and when along the way did you make these decisions LILY KING These things never feel like decisions. They are strange unexpected impulses that dont fade away as you think they will. I certainly never decided to write a historical novel. The whole time I was writing it I never thought of it as historical. All the labels come later, after its out of your hands. What happened to me is that just as I was starting to write my last novel, Father of the Rain, I read a biography of Margaret Mead and got to this five month period in her life when she was doing fieldwork in Papua New Guinea with her second husband, Reo Fortune, and they meet up with the English anthropologist Gregory Bateson and have this intense intellectual and emotional love triangle while trying to piece together the lives of the tribes they were studying along the Sepik River. Their work and their feelings got all intertwined, and at one point they had this huge breakthrough that was all based around a rationalization of Meads and Batesons feelings for each other. That was all so fascinating to me, and of course when anything is fascinating to me I want to write about it, but that was an idea that seemed so outside my abilities anthropology PNG crocodiles and cannibalism I expected it to float off. But it didnt. It dug in and soon I was reading about Bateson, reading Meads memoir, reading her letters and her work based on that time and his work and his biography. There was no book by or about Reo Fortune. I did all this while I was writing Father of the Rain, which was a novel that required long breaks because it could really take me down emotionally. I started taking notes and getting ideas and writing those down, and by the time I was done with FOTR, I had a full notebook of ideas for the next book. It seemed a bit too late to turn back, but I was daunted. I had about 6. 0 pages of another novel, too, an easier, more reasonable novel, and I spent a summer trying to decide what to do. At the end of the summer, I went with the anthropologists in 1. Initially I thought I would stay within the confines of the biographical details I could find about Mead and Bateson and Fortune. I seemed to have forgotten I was a novelist, and once they started talking and moving around on the page they became my characters and belonged to no one but my imagination. That was just the way it had to be. I think Id changed their names by page three, and by the second chapter I understood that it wasnt even the female anthropologists story in the end. She wasnt the one telling it. That changed everything. Now I had an Englishman for a narrator, and everything about the book had to be reimagined. The euphoria of the title is a brief state of blissful involvement in ones work. Your character Nell says it comes around two months into an anthropological field study when the work is completely absorbing its perhaps the first jolt of joy that all is working out. This idea reminds me of a couple of things a runner who said it took her three months and three miles to get to her first endorphin rush, and of the idea of flow, when one is so absorbed that the clock hands twirl and work seems rich and intense, yet almost effortless. Do novelists experience a similar euphoria Did you experience any when writing this novel If so, at what point Was it brief Did it ever come back Yes, I think there is a sort of delusional euphoria Nell does say its a delusion, this conviction eight weeks in that you understand the tribe youre studying when youre just starting a novel and you like the beginning and the rest is all glorious potential. I always think of T. S. Eliot, his Between the idea And the reality Falls the Shadow. When youre at the beginning you dont have to see the Shadow. You can almost pretend that it will never fall. With this novel, though, apart from that one afternoon when I wrote the second chapter and felt how close I got to my new character Bankson, and how quickly, I can remember no euphoria. I was just so far out of my comfort zone the entire time. Okay, maybe one other day was sort of euphoric close to the end when I wrote a scene in which a dead body and a lot of blood appear. I had never written a dead body or even a bleeding body before and was thrilled by the power of it. I understood why people like to do that. It wrote itself, and for once I didnt have to worry that it might feel to the reader that nothing was happening. A. I love how this is a novel about love and work, and how they can conflate. I especially loved how Nell, in particular, finds the sharing of work inextricable from the erotic. It made me think of the film My Architect, about Louis Kahn and his mistresses who worked with him. How necessary was an erotic component to Nells work What do you think about eroticizing ones work Is it something to aspire to Do you think its possible for novelists, whose work is so interior and solitary, to share that kind of eroticwork connectionDo you know of any novelists who do Okay this is a question I have not gotten before. Wow. First, I clearly need to see My Architect immediately. No question that the way to Nells desire was via her brain. Fen disgusted her simply because he was turning away from the intellectualization of the work. He was becoming more and more attracted to the life of the men he studied, the hunting and canoe making, the physicality of that life, and less interested in the cerebral analysis of it. Then along comes Bankson and she can play with him in that way. She can banter and argue and parry and it drives her sexually crazy. Im not sure its so much the work itself that is eroticized but the intellectual process, and finding a mind compatible with your own that feels like utter freedom. She had all these ideas, unconventional, ahead of her time ideas, and he did not dismiss them. He let them flourish. She could become more herself, discover herself, with him. What is more erotic than that I imagine for many writers words are a strong erotic trigger, but Im not naming names. B. On the other hand, the dark side of conflating the erotic and the professional occurs when one partner especially, and I hate to say it, the woman is more successful than the other. This shift of balance or power in a relationship can inflame competitiveness and jealously. The collaboration turned rivalry between Nell and Fen has turned violent this is intimated on the very first page, He had broken her glasses by then and forms the main conflict in your novel.