2026 Reading Challenge
The Optimist's Daughter

Questions About The Optimist's Daughter

by Eudora Welty

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Answered Questions (2)

Any good book group discussion topics or questions for this book? Thanks!
Gaye Ingram Have you read it? I would be happy to share my views. When I first read the book, I was in my thirties. I hated it, mainly because I felt the protagon…moreHave you read it? I would be happy to share my views. When I first read the book, I was in my thirties. I hated it, mainly because I felt the protagonist, Laurel, was bloodless. She left a home in which she had grown up and that had been carefully tended by her mother to her widowed father's late-life second wife without resistance. That woman was tasteless, shallow, silly----everything her mother had not been. I was in my acquisitive stage. I wanted my great grandmother's bread bowl, a painting of my father's old homeplace, the silver sugar spoon I sneaked from my mother's silver drawer to dig in the sandbox. I bought antiques. I was bent on preservation. Last spring, all these years later, as I try to decide what to do with many of the things accumulated in that period of my life, I reread the book. And I liked it. I understood it and the protagonist, Laurel. She had lost a husband in war and knew one cannot hold back time, that a beloved parental home is home only when the family that made it beloved live in it. I've wondered if I read this book well. It reminds me of a short story by Peter Taylor in which a Southern woman living in Chicago loses a husband. Her extended family back in Tennessee expect her to return there, perhaps remarry. She expects that what she will do. But she doesn't. She moves into an apartment, sends most of the family heirlooms back south, and starts again. I didn't really get that one either when I first read it. Homeplaces and heirlooms matter a lot in traditional cultures like the American South and parts of New England. I wonder if we look at them differently in your youth and age?(less)
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How come a 40 year old woman can behave this badly? I find Fay to be very unrealistic. She’s almost comical, she’s so exaggerated. While her 45 year old stepdaughter is her absolute opposite, she’s gracious, polite, intelligent and loving, she’s everything Fay isn’t. To me Fays character seems very underdeveloped. Or is she supposed to be seen that way because the reader sees everything through Laurel’s eyes?
Mary I'm in the middle of the book, but agree that Fay is cartoonish, as are her crude and bumptious kinfolk, who drive to the funeral from their trailer p…moreI'm in the middle of the book, but agree that Fay is cartoonish, as are her crude and bumptious kinfolk, who drive to the funeral from their trailer park in Madrid, TX. They are meant to be laughably horrible.

This short novel was originally published in the New Yorker in 1969, and I think of Fay as a comedic foil, and a device for Laurel to reflect on her past, her parents, and on the nature of letting go. You wonder how a man like Judge McKelva could ever marry someone as silly as Fay, but if he married someone more genteel, intelligent and unobjectionable, there would be no story.

Also, the metaphor of vision (the story starts with the Judge's treatment for a detached retina in New Orleans) makes me think of the words from the hymn Amazing Grace: I once was lost, but now am found/ T’was blind but now I see.(less)
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