Author's Note Chapter Excerpt Purchase

More Than You Know

Reading Guide

This spare, piercing, and unforgettable novel bridges two centuries and two intense love stories as Hannah and Conary's fate is interwoven with the tale of a marriage that took place in Dundee a hundred years earlier. Hannah says, "I don't suppose you have to believe in ghosts to know that we are all haunted, all of us, by things we can see and feel and guess at, and many more things that we can't." But she knows that ghosts are utterly real, as well as metaphoric, and is haunted by the sense that if she could have learned who this ghost was, and what it wanted, she might have made a difference.

Ghosts haunt places where they have been deeply happy or intensely bitter in life. But this one's places have been disturbed. The house where it is seen was no one's home; it was first a schoolhouse, and originally stood not in Dundee but in an island village now abandoned and lost. What happened in that place, to a family trapped in a murderous pattern that seems to echo eerily through time, becomes the question that haunts Hannah and Conary and will keep you guessing until the last, chilling page.

Questions for Discussion

What does the title mean? To whom, other than the "boy of my heart" (p. 229), does it refer?

Hannah begins the story by writing "Some-body said 'True love is like ghosts, which everyone talks about, and few have seen.' I've seen both, and I don't know how to tell you which is worse" (p. 1). What does this mean? Why doesn't Hannah know how to tell which is worse? What prevents her?

Both Amos and Conary die tragically at young ages. What are the similarities and differences between the two deaths?

Much of the tension in More Than You Know derives from knowledge and mystery. What do characters' relationships to the search for truth and truth itself reveal about each character? What is your relationship to the truth in this nove?

Misunderstandings and arguments between Edith and her stepdaughter leave Hannah feeling utterly alone and desperate to get out of the house. What is Sallie's relationship with her mother? What role do Hannah's and Sallie's rather detached fathers play in their daughters' lives?

Hooks probes the gap between the values many people "claim to hold and their willingness to do the work of connecting thought and action, theory and practice" (p. 90). How does our culture reward those who nurture this gap? What changes would we have to make in society to nurture and inspire the closing of this gap?

Why does the ghost serve as the catalyst for Conary's death just as he's chosen to return to Dundee with Hannah?

If Hannah is the narrator of her own story, and if Mercy takes over the telling of the Haskell family story with excerpts taken from her manuscript, who is the narrator from whom Mercy's manuscript takes over? Who is telling that story? What is the effect of switching perspectives?

Discuss the way in which Beth Gutcheon uses music in this novel.

Hannah, Claris, and Sallie struggle with their families and feel hemmed in by parental strictures. How do their familial relationships prepare them for love? Is romantic love any less true if it serves as the vehicle for escape from troubles at home?

What binds the two stories together? Is it an accident of geography, or is there a greater force at work?

"I know there are feelings that survive death, but can they all? What if only the bitterest and most selfish are strong enough?" (p. 266) are Hannah's final questions. Does the novel provide answers?

Recommended Further Reading

The House of the Spirits
Isabelle Allende
The Laughing Place
Pam Durban
Somewhere Off the Coast of Maine
Ann Hood
The Inn at Lake Devine
Elinor Lipman
Evening
Susan Minot
While I Was Gone
Sue Miller
Beloved
Toni Morrison
Complete Stories and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allen Poe
Drinking the Rain
Alix Kates Shulman
This is my Daughter
Roxana Robinson
Ethan Frome
Edith Wharton


About the Author: Beth Gutcheon is the critically acclaimed author of five novels: The New Girls, Still Missing, Domestic Pleasures, Saying Grace, and Five Fortunes. She is the writer of several film scripts, including the Academy Award nominee "The Children of Theatre Street." She lives in New York City.


Author’s Note
The Story Behind the Book: More Than You Know
by Beth Gutcheon

I began writing this story fifteen years ago when it came to me that being an adolescent in an unhappy family is a lot like being haunted: You are wrestling with strong and bewildering forces that are new to you, and invisible, and often it appears to the adults in your life that you are falling in love with the wrong people and doing those things to your hair merely to annoy. It seemed to me interesting in a story about a very unhappy mother-daughter relationship to add a real ghost to the mix, one who is experienced by Hannah but not by her mother. The ghost appears to Hannah precisely because she is at that point in her life when she is acutely aware that we are all influenced and tugged around by forces we can't see or sometimes even think about. This is a truth that Edith (her mother in early drafts, later her stepmother) does not acknowledge, which is one of the things that makes Edith so unpleasant and even destructive. Edith (and other characters in the 19th-century part of this story) believes and behaves as if she acts in rational and moral ways when in fact she does not for a moment see that other people's feelings are as real as her own or as important as her own (without which knowledge there is no truly moral behavior).

The rest of the story came together with the setting, the coast of Maine, and the nature of ghosts themselves. Ghosts are very place-specific; they tend to appear to or communicate with people about whom they had strong or unresolved feelings (good or bad) in life; when their people are gone in the natural course of events, they keep appearing in the places where their intense emotions played out. The trouble for a novelist, especially one who is as interested in why the ghost is so stuck in limbo as in what its appearance does to the living, is that once a ghost appears in a place, in a story, you've got little more to do than research who lived in the place and what happened there. But in Maine, they move houses. And Maine was settled first from the sea, starting with small and then quite large villages on the seaward edges of coastal islands. When such villages were later deserted, the buildings on them were often moved to the mainland, which made it possible for me to extend the mystery by having the ghost appear in a building that was not originally a house and did not stand where it stands in Hannah's story.

Hannah's story alternates with that of another family living in the same village many years earlier, a story of another very unhappy mother and daughter and a domestic snarl so intense that it led to a murder. The reader quickly understands that some character from that earlier story must be the defiantly balky and twisted spirit who has refused to move on from life after the body to wherever normal spirits go. Hannah is trying to sort out the puzzle of who the ghost was and what it wants in the hope that if she knew, it might make a difference in her own story. The reader has a more complex puzzle, because the reader has much more information than Hannah ever does, and in the end can solve most of the puzzles to which Hannah wants the answers so badly. Though perhaps not all of them.

Chapter Excerpt

Chapter One

My children think I'm mad to come up here in winter, but this is the only place I could tell this story. They think the weather is too cold for me, and the light is so short this time of year. It's true this isn't a story I want to tell in darkness. It isn't a story I want to tell at all, but neither do I want to take it with me.

If you approach Dundee, Maine, from inland by daylight, you see that you're traveling through wide reaches of pasture strewn with boulders, some of them great gray hulks as big as a house. You can feel the action of some vast mass of glacier scraping and gouging across the land, scarring it and littering it with granite detritus. The thought of all that ice pressing against the land makes you understand the earth as warm, living, and indestructible. Changeable, certainly. It was certainly changed by the ice. But it's the ice that's gone, and grass blows around the boulders, and lichens, green and silver, grow on them somehow like warm vegetable skin over the rock. Even rock, cold compared to earth, is warm and living, compared to the ice.

For miles and miles, the nearer you draw to the sea, the more the road climbs; I always think it must have been hard on the horses. Finally you reach the shoulder of Butter Hill, and then you are tipped suddenly down the far slope into the town. My heart moves every time I see that tiny brave and lovely cluster of bare white houses against the blue of the bay.

The earliest settlers in Dundee didn't come from inland; they came from the sea. It was far easier to sail downwind, even along that drowned coastline of mountains, whose peaks form the islands and ledges where boats land or founder, than to make your way by land. In many parts of the coast the islands were settled well before the mainland. This was particularly true of Great Spruce Bay, where Beal Island lies, a long tear-shaped mass in the middle of the bay, and where Dundee sits at the head of the innermost harbor.

Not much is known about the first settlement on Beat Island, except that a seventeenth-century hermit named Beat either chose it or was cast away there, and trapped and fished alone near the south end until, one winter, he broke his leg and died. Later, several families took root on the island and a tiny community grew near March Cove. Around 1760 a man named Crocker moved his wife and children from Beal onto the main to build a sawmill where the stream flows into the bay. The settlement there flourished and was sometimes called Crocker's Cove, or sometimes Friends' Cove, or Roundyville, after the early families who lived there. In the 1790s, the town elected to call the place Sunbury, and proudly sent Jacob Roundy down to Boston to file papers of incorporation (as Maine was then a territory of Massachusetts). When he got back, Roundy explained that the whole long way south on muleback he'd had a hymn tune in his head. The tune was Dundee and he'd decided this was a sign from God. "God moves in a mysterious way, his wonders to perform: He plants his footsteps in the sea, and rides upon the storm" went the first verse. The sentiment was hard to quarrel with, though there were those who were spitting mad, especially Abner Crocker, who had to paint out the word SUNBURY on the sign he had made to mark the town line, and for years and years faint ghosts of the earlier letters showed through behind the word DUNDEE.

There are small but thriving island settlements on the coast of Maine, even now. On Swans, Isle au Haut, Frenchboro, Vinalhaven, the Cranberry Isles. But no one lives on Beal Island anymore. Where there were open meadows and pastures a hundred years ago, now are masses of black-green spruce and fir and Scotch pine, interrupted by alder scrub. Summer people go out there for picnics and such, and so do people from the town, and so did I sixty years ago, but I'll never go again.

Traces of the town have disappeared almost completely, though it's been gone so short a time. Yet the island has been marked and changed by human habitation, as Maine meadows inland were altered by ancient ice. Something remains of the lives that were lived there. When hearts swell and hearts break, the feelings that filled them find other homes than human bodies, as moss deprived of earth can live on rock.

When my children were little, they used to pester Kermit Horton, down at the post office, to tell about the night he was riding past Friends' Comer and the ghost of a dead girl got right up behind him on his horse and rode with him from the spot where she died till he reached the graveyard. I'd heard Kermit tell that story quite a few times. When someone asked him who the girl was, and how she died, he usually said that no one knew, though once he told a summer visitor she'd been eaten by hogs.

I didn't know Kermit when I was very little and made brief visits to my grandparents. But I remember him well from that summer Edith brought me and my brother back to Dundee. And I remember Bowdoin Leach. Bowdoin liked me; he always told me he had been fond of my mother. I was seventeen that year, and I needed the kindness. Bowdoin was bent with arthritis, but he was still running his blacksmith shop out in the shed behind his niece's house. There were some who didn't care to talk about Beal Island, where he had grown up. Bowdoin seemed to like to, if asked the right way.

The foregoing is excerpted from More Than You Know by Beth Gutcheon. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced without written permission from HarperCollins Publishers, 10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022