1. Life Without Go-Go Boots

2. Memoir: Written to share an event from the writer’s life that has shaped or changed time Personal Essay: Way for author to share thoughts, ideas, personal beliefs, and convictions. Many are written to persuade by using a personal anecdote or experience. Autobiography: A self-written account of the life of a person

3. Fashion says who we are
Kingsolver uses some fashion events to show what life was like as a teenager in the 1960s, and how it affected her becoming an adult and mother
Also makes a commentary on what it means in our society
Cultural context for the meaning of fashion in the 1960s through the 1990s in America.
Fashion is seen as a symbol of social status and a means of self- expression.

4. What is the author’s purpose?
How do we figure that out?
(odyssey video)

5. Who is the author’s audience?
How does she use diction to shape that? (odyssey video)

6. Discuss in groups What are the current fashions?
What do they say about the wearer?
What's your favorite article of clothing, and what does it say about you? Why?

7. Humor as a tool
Are stories that are told with humor more interesting, memorable, or thought-provoking? Why or why not?

8. Humor as a tool
Are stories that are told with humor more interesting, memorable, or thought-provoking? Why or why not?
Humor is used to:
to say something that might go against what's popular,
to poke fun at an amusing behavior often found in society, or
to relate to the audience in a nonthreatening way.

9. Humor removes any sting we might feel if we happen to be obsessed with fashion or insecure about how we dress. Humor allows us to be better able to see the ridiculousness in this common event in our society.
Does Kingsolver take fashion very seriously or light now?
For us girls, do you recognize any of her behaviors and/or do the same thing yourself?
Were these behaviors always funny to the author?

10. Ways Kingsolver uses humor
Diction (word choices) sets a lighthearted tone, or mood
But the underlying point is a serious one: The judgments others make about us, even those we make about ourselves, based on what we wear can be hurtful.
1. Exaggerating the underlying truths to be found in everyday life
2. Allusion, where she compares the topic to something amusing.
3. Make herself play the fool, or be slow to grasp something

11. Exaggeration
“Since it took me forty days and forty nights to make the thing, my moment of glory was brief. I learned what my mother had been trying to tell me all along: high fashion has the shelf life of potato salad. And when past its prime, it is similarly deadly.” “. . . forty days and forty nights—like the rain that floated Noah’s ark, or the time it took for Moses to engrave the ten commandments on stone tablets; shelf life of potato salad. And when past its prime, it is similarly deadly—out of date fashion can kill you.

12. Allusion
“She had excellent fashion sense, but during the three-year lag her every sleek outfit turned to a pumpkin.” (alluding to Cinderella) “But a small corner of my heart still harbors the Bride of Frankenstein, eleven years of age, haunting me in her brogues and petticoats.” (alluding to the novel character)

13. Allusion
She's in school now, and I'm very quickly remembering what school is about: two parts ABCs to fifty parts Where Do I Stand in the Great Pecking Order of Humankind?
What do these mean?

14. Playing the fool
fool
"… I became a novelist. … If we happen to look like an unmade bed, it’s presumed we’re preoccupied with plot devices or unifying theories or things of that ilk."
Kingsolver is making fun of herself for being a novelist and not caring about her appearance because she’s thinking of other things that are equally foolish.