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LOOKING FOR JANE

HEATHER MARSHALL

This reading group guide for LOOKING FOR JANE includes an introduction, discussion questions, ideas for enhancing your book club, and a Q&A with author Heather Marshall. The suggested questions are intended to help your reading group find new and interesting angles and topics for your discussion. We hope that these ideas will enrich your conversation and increase your enjoyment of the book.

INTRODUCTION

TOPICS & QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

  1. What do Angela’s, Nancy’s, and Evelyn’s individual and shared experiences offer us in our understanding of the legalization of abortion in their given time periods? How does Marshall’s narrative contribute to the larger conversation of abortion laws in the United States today?
  2. Due to an unfortunate mistake, the letter addressed to Nancy doesn’t arrive to her in 2010. How do you think her life might have been different if she received it then?
  3. What are some of the societal expectations of women we see throughout the novel? How do those expectations differ in each time period, and how do the women in the novel fulfill or circumvent these expectations?
  4. Evelyn’s narrative offers two different experiences (i.e., hers and Maggie’s) from their time at St. Agnes’s Home for Unwed Mothers. How do Evelyn’s and Maggie’s experiences differ, and what do we glean from their accounts about the events that occurred during their time there?
  5. What are the different factors that inspired Evelyn to become a doctor? What do you think she could offer to her patients that others couldn’t?
  6. Dr. Morgentaler warns Evelyn that the costs of illegally providing abortions are high. What risks do Evelyn—and others fighting for women’s rights—face? What sacrifices do these women take in order to contribute to this cause?
  7. Multiple groups of women contributed in some way to the advancement of women’s rights throughout the narrative. Offer examples of these groups and what the results of their actions entailed? How does this speak to the history of women who contributed to this cause?
  8. How does Angela’s storyline illustrate the evolution of women’s rights? In what way do they still need to advance?
  9. Some scenes throughout the novel highlight instances of extreme joy or, conversely, extreme sorrow. Consider examples of these extreme emotions and how they might further our understanding of the different experiences women have during their pregnancy.
  10. Contrast the experience Nancy has at Clara’s abortion against her own. What do their accounts offer to our understanding of the freedom of choice and the importance of accessibility?
  11. How did Angela, Evelyn, and Nancy each come to know about Jane? What were their individual contributions to the cause and how did they each help the women who came looking for her?
  12. Consider the encounter between Brenda and Nancy on p. 285. What does this exchange tell us about the importance of the phrase, “the right to choose”?
  13. The novel explores mother-daughter relationships, particularly through Nancy, but also Angela. How are these women shaped by their mothers’ decisions, and how do those choices affect their own attitudes toward pregnancy and motherhood?
  14. Consider the difference between Angela’s pregnancy and that of the women who look for Jane. How do these experiences contrast throughout the novel and how does it contribute to our understanding of bodily autonomy?
  15. What is the significance of the title Looking for Jane?

ENHANCE YOUR BOOK CLUB

  1. Research “the Jane Collective” and discuss their contributions to women’s rights. Consider your research in comparison to their representation in the novel.
  2. Discuss the Roe v. Wade court case and its impact on women’s rights in 1973. Consider how abortion laws have evolved throughout history and what those laws entail today.
  3. Watch Call Jane (2022). Consider the representation of the Jane Collective in the movie compared to the novel and your own research.

A CONVERSATION WITH HEATHER MARSHALL

Every woman in your novel contributes in some way to the furtherment of women’s rights. Besides the Jane Collective, can you share other women or groups of women that came up in your research who also made significant contributions to the women’s rights movement?

In Canada, one of the biggest political pushes came in the form of the Abortion Caravan, which is depicted in the novel. This group of women and allies traveled across the country stirring up media coverage to shine a light on the issue of abortion rights and reproductive justice. The abortion law was only vaguely relaxed in 1969 to be allowed under very restricted circumstances, and that happened because the recorded death toll from “back-alley” abortions got so high that the government was forced to address it in some manner. But the women of the Abortion Caravan pushed the issue further for abortion on demand.

Why was it important for you to include all three of Angela’s, Evelyn’s, and Nancy’s narratives and their given time periods? What did you hope readers would take away from each of their accounts?

I didn’t want to give just a snapshot of how reproductive rights affected women in a single era, like the 1960s or 1980s. I really wanted to showcase the evolution of reproductive rights in Canada over the course of several decades, from the 1960s when the birth control pill wasn’t even widely available yet and social mores put enormous restrictions on women’s bodily autonomy, options, and choices, all the way through to essentially the present day where abortion is legalized and people have access to procedures like IVF and IUI to aid in conception and pregnancy. I wanted to show how far we have come over the past several decades, but also how far we still have to go, in many ways. Reproductive injustices still exist in Canada and in other jurisdictions that have legalized abortion. Women of color, trans women, and women living in rural areas where maternal healthcare is more difficult to access are just a few examples of groups that face barriers to reproductive justice and equitable access. In terms of the characters themselves, I wanted to provide three narratives that were in many ways different from one another, but in many ways the same, in that all three of these women were seeking control over their own lives. And each of them was, in one way or another, looking for Jane.

You mentioned in your author’s note that you were pregnant while editing this novel. Can you speak to that experience and how being pregnant contributed to the narrative, and vice versa?

It’s interesting, but I’m so glad I wrote this book before I became pregnant and had my first child, because I don’t think I could have handled the research otherwise. It was some of the most distressing research I’ve ever done. I interviewed a lot of women about their personal experiences with pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood to ensure accuracy (keeping in mind of course that no two peoples’ experiences with these things are ever exactly the same), but because I was pregnant while editing it, it did give me a chance to include bits of my own experience, which gave me an even deeper connection to the story as the writer. It was difficult, though. I ended up editing the scene in the Goodbye Room when my own baby was only a few weeks old, and that hit me hard. The topics in the story became far more personally relatable to me once I had my own child.

Your author’s note speaks to the recent news of Roe v. Wade being overturned. How might your novel contribute to the larger conversation of abortion laws and what do you hope readers will learn from each of your characters’ experiences?

Since Looking for Jane was released in Canada and other countries, I’ve heard from so many readers that the book has spurred conversations about so many of the issues covered in the book, particularly all the gray areas of abortion (people exploring different angles of it that they hadn’t considered before, on both sides), and the dark aspects of motherhood that are often only whispered about and also carry a lot of stigma and shame, like infertility and miscarriage. I would certainly hope that the book helps galvanize readers into political action to ensure abortion rights are retained. But part of the reason I wrote the book, and also chose to have multiple points of view in different time periods, was to help put some faces on an issue that has become so politicized and disconnected from the real people who are impacted by laws surrounding reproductive justice. I wanted readers to connect with each of the characters to understand where they’re coming from, to walk in their shoes, to understand why they would make the choices they did, and perhaps to have a bit more compassion for others’ choices in the real world. Regardless of how you might feel about abortion, I hope we can come to a place that isn’t quite so polarized and politicized; where even if you would choose differently than the person standing beside you, that you can simply respect their right to choose and leave it at that.

Which point of view (i.e., Angela’s, Evelyn’s, and Nancy’s) did you find the hardest to distill? Which was the easiest?

That’s a great question. I think because Evelyn’s experience was so deeply traumatic, and that it echoed and stayed with her across the decades, influencing and even dictating her life choices in the aftermath of the trauma, it may have been the hardest to distill. I also really wanted to be able to explore Angela’s infertility struggle in more depth, but unfortunately I did have a word limit to stick to. There was just so much incredible, heartbreaking, and thought-provoking content in the research about the maternity homes and those women’s experiences, the history of the fight for abortion access, and my interviewees’ fertility struggles that a lot ended up hitting the cutting room floor. In some ways I only scratched the surface, but I hope we’ll see more books that explore these issues in an open and candid way.

Can you speak to Evelyn’s narrative and your decision to include Maggie’s experience via her perspective? Why did you decide to resolve their narrative in the way you did?

This was a creative decision with a couple of reasons behind it. First, the novel explores the concept of identity a lot, and their relationship with identity, particularly through both Evelyn/Maggie and Nancy’s perspectives, but also with Angela as an adoptee who knew her birth mother. I knew from the outset that the “real” Evelyn’s character was going to take her own life as a result of her trauma. As I played with the plot development, I thought it might be interesting and kind of powerful to have Maggie live for both of them into the future, and that her actions going forward after her time at the maternity home would be based in part on a need to deliver justice to Evelyn. Given the circumstances of how Maggie came to be pregnant, her parents’ rejection of her, the loss of her child, and the assault on Sister Teresa, it seemed likely to me that Maggie would have been seriously struggling with her own identity, the idea of taking on someone else’s might have seemed quite appealing, or even necessary. Also, as a writer it’s just fun to write a big plot twist. In terms of the resolution, again, from the very first thoughts I had about this book, I knew I wanted Maggie and Jane to have a reunion, and that that would be the final scene in the book, with the final line of “I’ve been looking for you.” That’s how the title came to be too. I knew as soon as I started writing it that it would be called Looking for Jane, carrying a few different meanings.

What inspired you to write a novel based on the Jane Collective?

The seeds for this novel were planted at two different times. Years ago when I was doing my history master’s, I wrote a paper on Dr. Morgentaler’s provincial court battles in Ontario and Quebec in the years leading up to the 1988 Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion in Canada, and at the time I thought “Wow, this would make a great novel.” It was such a naturally compelling and dramatic story, and I knew that as a consumer of historical fiction, that was something I personally would love to read about, and I didn’t think anyone had done it before. Years later, I stumbled across an article on the maternity home scandal and was shocked by what I was reading. I was a feminist history student and had never come across a reference to these homes or the 300,000+ girls and women who had their babies taken from them by force or coercion. So it made me wonder how few people knew that they existed and the trauma they inflicted on so many people. Three hundred thousand is a staggering number. At that point I was taking my writing a lot more seriously, and I was looking for a topic for a novel. I knew I wanted to tell the maternity home story. So I had these two different ideas for novels and couldn’t really get them to work on their own, and then one day it finally clicked for me that they were two threads of the same story: of women’s fight for control over their bodies and their lives. Once that clicked, the novel just poured out of me. During my research on underground abortion networks in various jurisdictions, I came across a reference to the Jane Collective in Chicago. Similar networks existed in Canada but didn’t have a particular name, so I called them Jane, too, because they were all facing the same battle and fighting for the same rights. In that sense, “Jane” still exists all over the world.