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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 did the artist do to protest the custody arrangements that had been handed down by the court?

2. How does the narrator say it makes her feel when someone tells her "a story, a secret, a sharing of confidence" (27)?

3. Which member of Camila's family rarely spoke to the unnamed narrator during the trip to Italy in 2000?

4. The tenant stated that the graduate student dated the undergraduate for how long before he raped her at a party?

5. How many hours of supervised visitation with her children was the artist given as a result of the custody order?

Short Essay Questions

1. What is the main setting featured within the section entitled San Francisco, 2010?

2. At the end of the section entitled Los Angeles, 2011, the unnamed narrator describes an act she took with a teapot. What was it?

3. Discuss a moment in the novel when the unnamed narrator hints or states outright that she may be an unreliable narrator.

4. Describe the interactive element of the Swedish artist's exhibition.

5. Describe the four characters featured at the center of the gathering in Ann Arbor, 2002.

6. Describe the type of humor Popkey often uses within Topics of Conversation and provide an example.

7. For what reason was the narrator in Italy in the summer of 2000?

8. What information about the unnamed narrator's romantic life does the reader learn in Italy, 2000?

9. Discuss an instance when Popkey uses the second person point of view to connect with the reader.

10. Discuss the epigraph Miranda Popkey includes prior to the start of the novel Topics of Conversation.

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Discuss John's role within the events of the novel and explain how his character helps to further develop certain themes inherent in Popkey's novel Topics of Conversation.

Essay Topic 2

William Faulkner once famously claimed that the most important literature deals with the subject of the human heart in conflict with itself. Explain how the theme of Human versus Self is demonstrated within Popkey’s novel Topics of Conversation. Create a decisive, arguable claim and prove it with quotes from the novel.

Essay Topic 3

Examine the effects of stress on the novel's characters and the coping methods each character uses to deal with emotional turmoil. Which characters' methods are effective, which are ineffective, and how do these varying levels of efficiency affect the messages sent by Topics of Conversation within the text?

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