My Sister's Keeper - discussion guide

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Note: This study guide is based on the book, rather than the film.

Summary

Anna Fitzgerald has been in and out of hospital since she was born. She has undergone many procedures and operations. But she isn’t sick, her sister Kate is. Kate has been battling with leukaemia since the age of two. Anna was conceived through IVF so she would be a perfect donor for Kate; she is a genetically chosen child.

Kate is now sixteen and all the treatment she has received has led to kidney failure. Anna is thirteen, and Kate is her best friend. Having a sister who is always in and out of hospital has made it difficult for Anna to make friends, so she sticks closely to her family. However, she is fed up with not being noticed – Kate is always the centre of attention. Anna and her older brother Jesse, who has serious behavioural problems, feel marginalised. Anna desperately wants to be loved and noticed, but she also wants to be able to make her own decisions. She doesn't want to be a medical donor any longer, someone whose worth is only found in making her sister better. She takes the dramatic step of applying for medical emancipation from her parents, so only she has the right to decide what happens to her body. She instructs Campbell Alexander, a lawyer with his own struggles, to fight her cause. My Sister's Keeper is a thought-provoking novel filled with profound moral choices and heart-ache.

Background

Jodi Picoult grew up in Nesconset, New York, and was educated at both Princeton and Harvard. At 38 years old, she has already written eleven novels, including Songs of the Humpback Whale (1992), Mercy (1996), Keeping Faith (1999) and her latest novel Vanishing Acts, published in hardback in March 2005. She is married and has three children.

Picoult has been extremely popular in the USA since her first novel hit the shelves in 1992. Her success in the UK has been much slower, and it wasn't until My Sister's Keeper was selected as one of Richard and Judy’ Best Reads that she became a well-known author this side of the Atlantic.

Picoult has explained what inspired her to tackle this difficult subject:

I had been working on an earlier book, Second Glance, which was in part about the Vermont Eugenics project and, basically, a period of time in America when we were dabbling in racial hygiene, like the Nazis. As I studied eugenics, I kept turning up the story of an American couple that had conceived a child as a bone marrow match for a sibling with a rare cancer. The ill child had been in remission for four years – four years longer than she was expected to live; the brother's stem cells had been procured from his umbilical cord blood (something we routinely throw away in the US). I started to wonder what would happen if that sister went out of remission – if the brother would feel responsible. I wondered what would happen if it weren't a one time donation, but several painful ones. And I wondered what it would be like to grow up wondering if you'd been born only because your sister was ill. That became the beginning of My Sister's Keeper.' (www.thebookplace.com)

Questions for Discussion

1. What did you think of My Sister's Keeper? How did you feel as the story unfolded?

2. Which character do you sympathise with most and why?

3. How do you react to Anna as a character? How would you describe her? Why is she so confused about issuing the lawsuit?

4. Why do you think Jesse has such behavioural problems? What do you think of the methods his family use to deal with these?

5. What is your opinion of Sara? Why is Sara so desperate to keep Kate alive? Do you think she treats her other children as second best, and if so why?

6. Why does Campbell hide his illness? What else is he hiding from and why? To what extent is Julia also hiding?

7. Why are Sara and Brian always questioning whether they have done a good job as parents? What makes them feel so inadequate?

8. Why are the members of the Fitzgerald family so isolated from each other? What stops them relating openly and honestly to each other?

9. Do you think that it is morally correct to do whatever it takes to save a child's life, even if that means infringing on the rights of others? How does My Sister's Keeper deal with this central moral question?

10. How do you regard our modern culture's promotion of individual rights? What are its strengths and weaknesses?

11. What did you think of the final outcome of the trial? Do you think justice was done?

12. How does Jodi Picoult deal with the ethical and moral issues related to Anna being a 'designer baby'? What are the ethical and moral implications of this genetic selection? What conclusions have you reached about such medial technology? How does your attitude towards God affect your opinion?

13. At the beginning of the novel, Campbell and Anna discuss briefly the ability to sue God. What role does God play in My Sister's Keeper? How would faith in God have made a difference to each of the characters?

14. My Sister's Keeper is a novel overshadowed by death and the threat of death. How do the Fitzgerald's cope with this? Do you think they have considered what will happen to Kate after she dies, or whether there is life after death? How do you feel about the biblical idea that those who trust God for forgiveness through the death of Jesus Christ have eternal life?

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