Dear Reader:
There have been times throughout the course of history when an event of stunning significance has occurred and yet, strangely enough, its memory has soon faded, taking with it all the hard lessons learned from the experience.
The eugenics movement, a “race-betterment” crusade popular worldwide in the first half of the twentieth century, is such an event. It had a profound impact on humanity yet has been all but forgotten.
In the U.S., this movement’s leaders—sociologists, doctors, biologists, and government officials—devised a plan to improve the American gene pool by weeding out so-called undesirable hereditary traits (those thought to lead to illiteracy, criminality, poverty, and a host of other social ills) by deciding and then controlling who should bear children and who shouldn’t. It was a plan that put powerful people in the position of determining who was deserving of creating life and who wasn’t , and it led to legislation in thirty states that allowed them to do something about it. In my home state of California alone, more than twenty thousand people were forcibly sterilized in the years when state eugenic laws were in place. Most people today are unaware, as I was until I began writing this book, that eugenic thinking and its accompanying practices were very much alive and well in America before Adolf Hitler came into power and took that same ideology to its worst zenith. Even fewer might be aware that Hitler began his appalling scheme to create a master race by first forcibly sterilizing people, just like what was already happening in the U.S.
Only the Beautiful is the story of two women impacted by this mindset. The first is Rosie Maras, a vulnerable teenaged orphan with a sensory anomaly who lives and works on a California vineyard in the late 1930s. The second is her employer’s sister, Helen Calvert, an American expat working as a nanny to a disabled child in Nazi-occupied Vienna. It is a story that imagines two people—one only seventeen, the other in her late fifties—caught up in the realities of eugenic thinking. They must find a way to survive in a ruling society that has decided who is perfect and who is not, who is beautiful and who is not.
As a historical fiction author, I’ve long believed we need to remember what we’ve lived through and learned from, even if the memory is chilling, because we know this is one of the ways we can prevent terrible mistakes from being repeated. With this book, I wanted to cast a light into a dark corner of the past, but also show the good that can happen when we choose to be a voice for the voiceless.
It’s a book that I hope will invite reflection and discussion. If you’d like for me to be a small part of a book club gathering via Skype or FaceTime or Zoom to discuss the novel, please visit my website at susanmeissnerauthor.com (click the book clubs tab) for details on how to arrange that visit.
You are the reason I write,
Susan MeissnerDiscussion Ouestions ˘
(SPOILERS AHEAD!)
1.
How are Rosie’s and Helen’s stories linked thematically? How are they separate?
2.
Rosie feels tremendous guilt over how she became pregnant. How much of what happened to her is her fault? Is any of it?
3.
Why do you think people often fear what they can’t explain or don’t understand?
4.
Was Rosie’s mother asking too much of Rosie when she made her promise not to tell anyone about her ability?
5
Why do you think Celine was so controlling? Did she have good qualities, too? Did Truman? What were his flaws? How do you feel about these two characters?
6.
Dr. Townsend tells Helen that Rosie’s synesthesia made her life miserable. Did it? Do you know someone with synesthesia?
7. Helen attributes her wanderlust to her deceased mother’s unfulfilled wishes to travel, but why else might she have stayed away for four decades? Do you think she had a happy life as a nanny?
8.
In chapter 35, Johannes tells Helen he assumes full responsibility for what happened to Brigitta, and yet Helen assures him they all failed her. What did she mean?
9.
Could Johannes have done more to save his daughter? What would you have done?
10.
Central to the story in Only the Beautiful is the recurring theme of complacency versus compliance. What is the difference, in your opinion? If you don’t speak and act out against wrong, does that mean you are supporting it?
11.
Do you see eugenic ideology as it played out in Only the Beautiful in our world today? In what ways?
