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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. In Chapter Eleven: Footsteps in the House, what does Deborah say her daughters were watching?

2. In Chapter Ten: X is Where I Am, who does Deborah say drove her around?

3. In Chapter Eight: The Republic, what book does Deborah say her student carried?

4. In Chapter Seven: The Black and Blueish Darkness, what does Deborah say she got her mother on her mother's deathbed?

5. In Chapter Eight: The Republic, what does Deborah say a woman wears?

Short Essay Questions

1. In Chapter Ten: X is Where I Am, how does Deborah say she felt after her mother's death? What did she ride instead of an e-bike?

2. In Chapter Seven: The Black and Bluish Darkness, what does Deborah say she needed to compose? How does she apply this as a metaphor?

3. In Chapter Eleven: Footsteps in the House, how do footsteps factor into the chapter? What do they symbolically represent?

4. In Chapter Eleven: Footsteps in the House, who does Deborah say appeared in her house? Why does Debrah say she was wary seeing her?

5. In Chapter Eleven: Footsteps in the House, who does Deborah say were her companions on the train? How does she say they interacted?

6. In Chapter Seven: The Black and Bluish Darkness, what meeting does Deborah say she went to? How did she feel at the meeting?

7. In Chapter Eight: The Republic, who does Deborah say she met? What did Deborah advise?

8. In Chapter Eleven: Footsteps in the House, where does Deborah say she went and why? What does she say this reminded her of?

9. In Chapter Ten: X is Where I Am, why does Deborah say she thought her sense of direction was lost? How does she say this related to her mother?

10. In Chapter Nine: Night Wandering, what does Deborah say happened when she read her book out loud at a festival in Berlin?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Deborah's grief over her mother and the sense of unmooring from the physical places her mother inhabited are alongside her grief over her marriage and the sense of unmooring from everything Levy spent her life creating. How does Levy show these griefs as similar and different? How are they both dealt with and how are they mourned both by actions described or by the act of writing the book?

Essay Topic 2

Arundhati Roy's God of Small Things is a novel about how the small things of life both make up and allow relief from the big things of life. As it says in the novel:

"Even later, on the thirteen nights that followed this one, instinctively they stuck to the Small Things. The Big Things ever lurked inside. They knew that there was nowhere for them to go. They had nothing. No future. So they stuck to the small things (21.68)."

Consider the Big Things and Small Things in Levy's writing. How do the small things make up the big? How do the small things in autobiography and life allow escape from the big for brief periods of time? How does this fictionality of life, in Arundhati's novel, also lend to the fictionality and lived truth of Levy's life in writing and living?

Essay Topic 3

Throughout the autobiography, Deborah Levy discusses the breaking of the patriarchy's story by women and the consequences they may subsequently face. Turn to page 133. Levy writes:

"There are plenty of tears, but it is better to walk through the bluish and blackish darkness than reach for those worthless jewels" (133).

What is the bluish and blackish darkness that Levy writes about here? Use Levy and two other women mentioned in the autobiography to discuss what this darkness is, and how, finding their way, these women walk through it to the other side.

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