Synopses & Reviews
From Monique Truong, the bestselling and award-winning author of
The Book of Salt, comes a brilliant, mesmerizing, beautifully written novel about a young woman’s search for identity and family, as she uncovers the secrets of her past and of history.
Growing up in the small town of Boiling Springs, North Carolina, in the '70’s and '80’s, Linda believes that she is profoundly different from everyone else, including the members of her own family. “What I know about you, little girl, would break you in two” are the cruel, mysterious last words that Linda’s grandmother ever says to her.
Now in her thirties, Linda looks back at her past when she navigated her way through life with the help of her great-uncle Harper, who loves her and loves to dance, and her best friend Kelly, with whom Linda exchanges almost daily letters. The truth about my family was that we disappointed one another. When I heard the word “disappoint,” I tasted toast, slightly burnt.
For as long as she can remember, Linda has experienced a secret sense — she can “taste” words, which have the power to disrupt, dismay, or delight. She falls for names and what they evoke: Canned peaches. Dill. Orange sherbet. Parsnip (to her great regret). But with crushes comes awareness. As with all bodies, Linda’s is a mystery to her, in this and in other ways. Even as Linda makes her way north to Yale and New York City, she still does not know the truth about her past.
Then, when a personal tragedy compels Linda to return to Boiling Springs, she gets to know a mother she never knew and uncovers a startling story of a life, a family. Revelation is when God tells us the truth. Confession is when we tell it to him.
This astonishing novel questions many assumptions — about what it means to be a family and to be a friend, to be foreign and to be familiar, to be connected and to be disconnected — from others and from the past, our bodies, our histories, and ourselves.
Review
"Truong is a gifted storyteller, and in this quietly powerful novel she has created a compelling and unique character." Booklist
Review
"Truong's engaging writing and complex character development almost overcome the deficiencies of this novel, but it is unlikely to touch readers as her debut novel did." Library Journal
Review
" Monique Truong burst onto the literary scene in 2004 with
The Book of Salt, the story of a gay Vietnamese man who becomes the cook for Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas during their years in Paris. By invoking Stein, Truong set the bar high, but the novel was justly hailed as a startlingly assured debut.
Bitter in the Mouth, her follow-up, tells of Linda, a young girl growing up in a dysfunctional family in a small Southern town in the 1970s. It appears at first like a more typical first novel (coming of age, etc), though, as in The Book of Salt, Linda tells her first-person story retrospectively, moving backward and forward in time, which allows a sophisticated perspective and voice." Maya Muir, The Oregonian (Read the entire )
Synopsis
The bestselling and award-winning author of The Book of Salt pens a brilliant, mesmerizing, beautifully written novel about a young woman's search for identity and family, as she uncovers the secrets of her past and of history.
About the Author
Monique Truong was born in Saigon and currently lives in New York City. Her first novel, The Book of Salt, was a New York Times Notable Book. It won the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, the 2003 Bard Fiction Prize, the Stonewall Book Award-Barbara Gittings Literature Award, and the 7th Annual Asian American Literary Award, and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and Britain’s Guardian First Book Award. She is the recipient of the PEN American Robert Bingham Fellowship, and was awarded the Hodder Fellowship at Princeton for 2007-2008.
Reading Group Guide
1.
Bitter in the Mouth is a novel that invites us to consider what it means to be a family.
How are families defined and constructed within its pages?
2.
Linda Hammerick begins her story with her great-uncle Harper because she believes that
"a family narrative should begin with love." How does her great-uncle, a.k.a. Baby Harper,
help her to understand what it means to be loved?
3. Linda's "secret sense," auditory-gustatory synesthesia, causes her to taste words. How
does her unusual relationship with "the word" shape Linda's personality and life? What
other characters in the novel have a unique relationship to "the word"?
4. According to Linda, “[w]e keep secrets to protect, but the ones most shielded—from
shame, from judgment, from the slap in the face—are ourselves. We are selfish in our
secret keeping and rarely altruistic. We act out of instinct and survival and only when we
feel safest will we let our set of facts be known.” Consider the secrets that are kept in the
novel and by whom. Do these instances prove Linda's assertion or disprove it?
5. Linda's grandmother Iris is the "family truth teller." What are the examples in the first
half of the novel of Iris telling us the truth? Did you understand them to be "truths" or were
they, in a way, hidden in plain sight?
6. Linda Hammerick and Kelly Powell have been best friends since the age of seven. What
did they have in common that brought them together?
7. "Fat is not fate." This is one of the ways that Linda distinguishes herself from her best
friend Kelly. What is fate then? What are the examples of fate in Bitter in the Mouth?
8. Author Monique Truong states that "while my first novel, The Book of Salt, features an
unreliable narrator, Bitter in the Mouth is a novel that plays with the idea of the unreliable
reader." She goes on to say that "the first half of Bitter is constructed as an invitation to the
reader to fill in the blanks."
What do you think Truong means by this? What were the blanks in Linda's story,
and how did you fill them in? Was your "fill in" based on the stories that Linda tells about
her immediate family, your own life experiences, or perhaps on what you know about the
author of the novel?
9. In the second half of the novel, Linda reveals a significant part of her life story to us. Did
the revelation of this fact change the way that you understand her and her story? Did you
go back and re-read the first half of the novel? If yes, what did you "see" that you did not
see upon the first reading?
10. Consider your first impression of Linda. Although her synesthesia is a rare
neurological condition, were there still ways in which you found yourself relating to her
sense (pun intended) of being different and disconnected from her family and from the
other children in Boiling Springs?
11. What if the author had switched the order of how she told you Linda's story? In other
words, what if "Revelation" came before "Confession," and you were presented with the
opportunity to identify and to relate to Linda based on her "outer" difference first, as
opposed to her "internal" difference. Consider how your own identification with Linda
would have been different. Would it have been lessened or heightened or unaffected?
12. Linda tells us that her first memory was a word that triggered a bitter
taste. What word do you think it was and who spoke it? What are the clues that lead you to
the word?
13. Is Linda Hammerick a southerner? Is Bitter in the Mouth a southern novel? Why or
why not?
Exclusive Essay
Read an exclusive essay by Monique Truong