1) Marriage was a defining factor in a person's life in the early years of the last century. In what ways has that changed? In what ways is it the same?

2) Through out the book, the nature of heroism is explored. What are some of the various examples of it and in what ways do they differ? How much of heroism is character and how much is circumstance?

3) What do you think is the appropriate balance between duty and desire? How much importance do you place on passion? How would you have advised Lavinia?

4) The theme of loneliness, or being an outsider is laced throughout the book. In what ways is your sense of inclusion based on the familiar? What role does language play in securing your sense of connection ?

5) Lavinia and Gaston's affair plays out during the dark days leading up to World War II. How does this tumultuous backdrop influence the personal relationships depicted in the story? How important is the setting of this novel in the telling of its story?

6) Lavinia's mother refers to women who are swept into affairs with married men as being "condemned to live in perpetual twilight." Discuss this phrase as it relates particularly to Lavinia's situation. In what other ways does the theme of Twilight thread the novel?

7) Lavinia describes herself as being "raised by wolves."  What do you think she means? Discuss her role in the Gibbs family and how it influences her emotional journey. By the end of the novel does she truly break free from her family and upbringing? Does anyone?

Question:
Why did you write this book?

Katherine Mosby:
I found that after I had completed The Season of Lillian Dawes, I was not done with Lavinia Gibbs, a secondary character in that book.

I had become fascinated with her and the untold story that shaped her life prior to the point at which she enters the life of her nephew, Gabriel Gibbs, the narrator of The Season of Lillian Dawes.

This time however, I wanted to take a very intimate look at Lavinia, examining her sexual awakening, because it came at such a cost.

The only thing about her life that Gabriel knew prior to his meeting her was that she was a liminal character in the family, and perhaps the world, because of her affair. It seemed like the bravery of that choice had to be acknowledged if I were going to write her story.

It was also a challenge to find a different approach to the familiar theme of adultery which Flaubert likened to the subject of the nude in painting: painfully familiar but always individual.

Because Lavinia's on the outside in the adulterous triangle, she seemed much more vulnerable than Mme. Bovary for whom it was a way to escape marriage rather than simulate it.

To be true to the character of Lavinia, her story needed to feel almost disconcertingly candid.

I wanted the prose to have a distinctly different voice, told episodically, from pulse-point to pulse-point through the span of years, reducing Lavinia's story to a handful of moments: its emotional essence.

Twilight felt from the earliest inklings like it needed to be spare, and so tightly focused on Lavinia's interior, personal drama that the larger, public drama of WWII is peripheral, glimpsed only at the edges of the scenes, like a stray figure caught unintentionally in the background of a snapshot.

The compression of form mirrors Lavinia's experience of the affair, condensing weeks into hours, months into days, intensifying time in its reduction.

I think I wrote the book also because I was interested in exploring the role passion (or its lack) plays in the unfolding of character, as well as the unexpected ways in which character is redefined by circumstance.

The backdrop of war provided a terrific set of conditions with which to watch, like time lapse photography, the way in which personality is distorted or refined by external pressures.

I have always been interested in the question of heroism and how much is intrinsic and how much circumstantial. In Twilight I was able to take a look at the topic through the guise of a character I had come to care about deeply.