Summer Reading Program

Reader's Guide - Honky by Dalton Conley

Epilogue (pages 197-204)

Content Questions:

1. What sorts of friends did Conley make at Stuyvesant High School?
2. Where does he go to college?  Why?
3. What does his sister Alexandra do for a living?  What were her high school years like?

Discussion Questions & Journal Ideas:

1. Describe some of the differences Conley sees between Avenue D and Telegraph Avenue, New York and Berkeley.  How are they similar?
2. What does Conley mean by “gentrification” (200)?  What does he see as the outcome of such a process?
3. What are some of the changes that have occurred in his old neighborhood of Avenue D and the Lower East Side?  What kinds of things have remained the same?
4. Discuss what you think Conley means when he writes, “I cannot help but see my two-hour commute as a metaphor for the dynamics of race and class in America” (203).
5. In the last two paragraphs of this epilogue, Conley broadens his perspective, taking an aerial view of traffic patterns and looking at data sets of people from his generation.  What does this perspective add to the narrative of his early years on Avenue D?

Author’s Note (pages 205-207)

Here Conley reflects on the nature of memoir as a type of writing.  What does he say about how it allows the writer to “construct[. . .] reality” (205)?  How does such an act of reconstructing one’s life make it less scientific, but allow it to, in Conley’s words, offer “literary truths, not scientific ones” (206)?  And what does that mean, anyway?

 

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