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This test consists of 5 short answer questions, 10 short essay questions, and 1 (of 3) essay topics.

Short Answer Questions

1. What happened when Nicole was 10 centimeters dilated?

2. What does Nicole say she was surprised by, in talking about her adoption with her mother, now that she had found her birth family?

3. What does Nicole say fueled her long correspondence with Cindy?

4. What does Nicole say about the public role she has taken, now that she has found her birth family?

5. Why did Nicole tell Abigail that she did not miss her mother?

Short Essay Questions

1. How does Nicole get Cindy to discuss the hard things she had originally wanted to avoid talking about?

2. How do the routines of new parenthood change Nicole’s view of her own early months?

3. How does Nicole characterize her relationship with the newborn baby?

4. What is the question Nicole never asked her father? Why did she not ask?

5. What does Nicole’s father tell her about his family’s lineage?

6. What did Cindy say made her apprehensive about getting pregnant?

7. Under what circumstances did Nicole’s birth mother call her?

8. Where does Nicole say the real lessons came from, in her experience of searching for her birth parents?

9. How has Nicole’s understanding of adoption changed throughout the course of All You Can Ever Know?

10. How did Cindy get her father to admit that there was another sister?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Evaluate All You Can Ever Know as a bildungsroman, a coming-of-age narrative. What are the challenges Nicole faces in rites of passage in this memoir? How does she overcome these challenges, and what does she learn at each stage? What kind of person is she at the end?

Essay Topic 2

When is All You Can Ever Know most itself? What is its characteristic passage, or moment? What makes that moment or passage the most representative of the book as a whole? Are there any places where the book seems to depart from its typical self, as if to become a different book?

Essay Topic 3

What does All You Can Ever Know tell us about the adoption process? What do we learn from Nicole’s process of searching for birth parents? What do we learn from conclusions? How does this portrait of adoption resonate with you?

(see the answer keys)

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