About this guide
The following discussion questions and author biography are intended to enhance your group’s reading of Joanna Trollope’s novel Brother and Sister, a moving and thought-provoking exploration of the after-effects of adoption.
About this book
In her best-selling novels, Joanna Trollope has shown herself to be a provocative and insightful analyst of the pains and pleasures of family life. Family life is even more complex for those who are adopted. After years of simply accepting her identity as the adopted daughter of loving parents, Nathalie Dexter, the mother of a five-year-old girl, begins to feel an urgent need to discover who her biological parents are. She urges her brother David, also adopted but from a different birth mother, to do the same.
From childhood, Nathalie and David have shared a fierce loyalty; this bond, based on having been adopted and —to their minds--rejected by their birth mothers, has led them to rely on each other for support even in adulthood. Once they embark on the journey to find their birth mothers, David’s wife Marnie and Nathalie’s partner Steve feel even more shut out by the intimacy between David and Nathalie. The emotional reverberations of their decision to seek out their origins are felt by all those connected with them—their families, their co-workers, and of course, the women who gave them up for adoption decades before.
Exploring her subject with sympathy and imagination, Joanna Trollope sheds light on the crisis of identity that inevitably rears up for those who have been adopted. In this deceptively simple story, she exposes the rich complexity of love and pain in ordinary family life.
For discussion
1. David’s entry into Nathalie’s life is described on pp. 17-22. What do we learn of his early childhood, and what light does this information shed on the person he has become? How has the fact of having been adopted affected David and Nathalie differently?
2. How does the relationship between Nathalie and David interfere with their relationships with their partners? Given the description of their shared childhood, is Nathalie still the leader? Does their relationship change at the end of the novel?
3. What is the reason that Nathalie and Steve aren’t married? How tenuous is their relationship (3-4, 8)? One of the reasons Nathalie wants to get answers about her birth is so that she can “stop feeling so separate” (46). Why does she feel separate?
4. Early on, Nathalie says. “Being adopted allows you to choose to be the person you want to be. I can shuffle the cards of my past at will” (32). What causes Nathalie to reverse her beliefs about herself and decide to seek out her birth mother? Why does she experience a “great wave of shame” (86) after meeting with Sasha?
5. We learn of Cora that “so much of her life had been dedicated to making sure…that she didn’t get into situations where she would be reminded, and in consequence dragged back to a place shc could hardly bear to remember, let alone revisit” (137-38). How is Cora’s character presented? Is she living too fully in the shadow of her past? How does she react to her meeting with Nathalie, and what difference does the meeting with Nathalie make in her life?
6. What do Cora and Carole have in common? Have their lives evolved, essentially, in reaction to what happened in the period during which they became pregnant as unmarried women and gave birth to Nathalie and David (137-41,170-73)? How have they responded differently to their traumatic losses?
7. During their first meeting Carole says to David, “What right have you to ask me questions like this?” (204). Why is this meeting so painful for Carole? Is David correct in thinking that he is fully within his rights to ask the questions he is asking? How does David’s presence change Carole’s life? Does David get what he hoped from their meeting?
8. The novel dramatizes a tension between the desire for self-creation and the desire to identify oneself with one’s origins. Steve, for instance, seems to want to create a sophisticated image of himself, with his elegant office and design firm, in reaction to his family’s home above their pub. Reacting to the same impulse, Nathalie says, “I need to stop being this person of my own creation and find out what really happened” (46). How does this tension work differently for different characters?
9. What role does social class play in the relationships between Cora and Nathalie, once they meet? What did Cora’s social status have to do with the pressure she felt to give up her child for adoption?
10. In the fact that she and David are much closer than Steve and his biological sister Verbena, Nathalie finds vindication of her idea that “natural families couldn’t, in the end, hold a candle to chosen families, that real family life was a matter of free will and love, not of blood” (67). Do the events of the novel bear this idea out?
11. The novel ends with plans for two new businesses: one for Carole and her son Martin, the other for Nathalie and Steve. Why? What problems will these new ventures address?
12. What provokes David’s decision to move to Canada with his family? Is it a wise decision? What has changed for him that makes him decide to move on in this momentous way?
13. Elaine Price, the woman from Family Find, has told Nathalie, “Nobody regrets making this journey. …It’ll stop you defining yourself by loss. It’ll help you move on” (103-04). Is this true for Nathalie and David? What is resolved, and for whom, at the novel’s end?
14. How would you describe the novel’s structure, and how is the plot developed? How does the structure pull the reader in to the various complicated relationships that radiate from each character?
15. Choosing one or two scenes, discuss how Trollope uses small details to delineate a character, mark a mood, or emphasize the tension or connection between people.
16. Joanna Trollope has said, “I think about readers all the time. I owe them more than I will ever be able to express. And so, of course, they’re part of the process. And because my aim is to draw them in, I don’t want to tell them what to think and who to like and who to dislike.” How do these statements work in the context of Brother and Sister? What is the narrator’s relation to the reader? How does Trollope control, or on the other hand refuse to control, the reader’s response?
For further reading
Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre; Charles Dickens, Great Expectations; George Eliot, Silas Marner; Louise Erdrich, Love Medicine; Marianne Hancock, Looking for Oliver: A Mother’s Search for the Son She Gave Up for Adoption; Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge; Joshua Henkin, Swimming across the Hudson; P. D. James, Innocent Blood; Barbara Kingsolver, Pigs in Heaven; Mary Ann Koenig, Sacred Connections: Stories of Adoption; Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces; Brady Udall, The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint.
See also: Mike Leigh’s film, Secrets and Lies.
Joanna Trollope is the best-selling author of sixteen other books, including Marrying the Mistress and The Rector’s Wife. She divides her time between London and Oxford.