What's the Girl Worth?: A Novel

by Christina Fitzpatrick

Overview

Sipping on "kiddie" cocktails, eight-year-old Catherine plays a game called "What's the Girl Worth?" with her father and the rest of the regulars at the Blue Lagoon bar. That would be Catherine's last memory of her father ... before he abandons her.

Catherine — feisty, hard-edged, and weary of men — has put herself through Boston University working as a cocktail waitress. Wanting to control her future rather than give in to the fate predetermined by her unresolved issues, she takes a summer internship in Madrid. It is in this glamorous city, with the encouragement of her new friends, that she is swept into the seductive Spanish nightlife — reveling in the exhilaration, the miraculous thrill, of being young and far from home. But it is also where she eventually confronts her past and the man whom she has missed and forever hoped for — the father who is as foreign to her as the beautiful, bright world of Spain.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780060958756
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	07/08/2003
Series:	Harper Perennial
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	416
Product dimensions:	5.31(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.94(d)

About the Author

Christina Fitzpatrick received her MFA in 1999 from Sarah Lawrence College. She has worked as a bartender for the past ten years. The author of Where We Lived, she has also taught writing at Iona College, Gotham Writers' Workshop, and Valhalla's Women's Prison. She currently teaches ESL in Rome and remains affiliated with Teachers and Writers Collaborative in Manhattan. She divides her time living in New York City and abroad.

Reading Group Guide

Introduction

We were silent, and I couldn't help but feel sitting in that empty bar
full of its loud brightness that that silence meant something.
My father didn't want to be my father anymore. I could feel it.

Catherine Kelly -- hard-edged and weary of men -- recalls her childhood trips to the Blue Lagoon bar with her father and the game they used to play, "What's the Girl Worth?" When her parents get divorced and her father moves to Maine, his contact with Catherine becomes less and less. The most monumental loss in her life, her father abandoning her as a child, is revealed to us. Within Catherine's detailed portraits of her father, we see a man who is charming and an alcoholic, a man who regularly takes his seven-year-old daughter to a bar and plays games with her, amuses her -- instills her with such adoration, such comfort, that she will spend the rest of her life, once he leaves, pining and pining for him.

Now in her 20s and working as a cocktail waitress, Catherine dreams of a world beyond school, work, failed relationships, and her unresolved issues with her father. Against the advice of her roommate, she takes a summer internship in Madrid. But she will soon learn that even the color and glamour of Madrid can't camouflage the darkness of her past.

Swept into a circle of Spanish friends, Catherine introduces us to the seductive Spanish culture and some intriguing characters: her sophisticated roommates Celia and Isabel who take her under their wings; Monica, an intrusive and suspicious girl who is obsessed with Catherine's relationship with her father; Esteban, a older gay man who has a surprisingproposition for Catherine; and Felipe, an admirer she's never met. Back home, her troubled roommate Harlan also demands her attention and her mother arranges the unthinkable -- a visit from the man who haunts her still, the person who will force her to finally answer the question, "What's the Girl Worth?"

An exploration of the effects of abandonment, What's the Girl Worth? is "a coming-of-age story full of wonder and surprises" (Kathleen Cambor).

Discussion Questions

1. As a child while playing the game "What's the Girl Worth?" with her father, Catherine recalls, "the more ridiculous my response, the more points I earned, and, as a consequence, I was worth more," (page 20). Her father found value in being silly and playful. Do you think that Catherine grew up to be such a serious person as a way of rebelling against the father that abandoned her?
   
   
2. Discuss the main male characters -- Catherine's father, Harlan, Esteban. How do they each exorcise their demons?
   
   
3. American food products appear throughout the novel. Do you think the author was trying to symbolize something? What do they represent?
   
   
4. "It was one of my greatest peeves: That stupid belief that your parents, and what happened to you as a kid, controlled who you were," (page 68). Catherine is referring to Monica but do you think that she is also scolding herself? Why or why not?
   
   
5. Catherine disagrees with her mother on the subject of her father and men in general: "'It's like all you want to do is show your father that he had no right to ignore you, to leave you like that…. You want to prove to your father,' my mother said, 'to all of the men who think they can just leave you that you aren't some worthless thing," (page 71). Do you agree with this analysis or do you think her mother is, as Catherine says, "an expert in the field of magazine article psychology?"
   
   
6. What purpose do you think Kansas Katy serves in the story?
   
   
7. "[A]ll humor to me, was not the symptom of a happy light-hearted person. If that was the case, drunks wouldn't be so funny, and crazy people wouldn't be laughing all the time. Humor was, and always would be, in my mind, the rejection of all you felt, of every dark thing that loomed over you -- it was your own personal fight," (page 146). Do you agree with Catherine's statement or do think humor can be created by the content and happy?
   
   
8. Catherine's romantic relationships with men -- Rick, Lenny, Borja, and Felipe -- reflect the evolution of her own maturity. Discuss what she learns about herself from each of them.
   
   
9. Catherine takes her father to a bullfight: "It seemed impossible not to like the sufferer better -- particularly after having watched that same bull run like mad, sprint from one side of the ring to the other, charging one cape and then another; sword after sword had been stuck through his back, yet he kept running, kept moving. He never backed off," (page 280). Is she merely describing a bullfight for us or is Catherine thinking of the wounded men in her life? Or is she, perhaps, talking about herself?
   
   
10. Why did Catherine get so upset when she saw the couple fighting in the club Arabia?
    
    
11. "There were parts of people, very hidden parts, that could only be revealed by the people they chose to care about, the people they felt were theirs," (page 334). Who did Catherine care about and what do they reveal about her?
    
    
12. When she finally takes Raul up on his offer, what does Catherine discover about the shopkeeper?
    
    
13. Catherine's father is an alcoholic who abandons her as a child and only visits her in Spain at her mother's request. Despite these flaws, do you think he is a sympathetic character? Do you want Catherine and her father to bond? Or do you want her to abandon him?
    
    
14. Were you satisfied with the novel's ending? Why or why not?

About the author:

Christina Fitzpatrick received her MFA in 1999 from Sarah Lawrence College. She has worked as a bartender for the past ten years. The author of Where We Lived, she has also taught writing at Iona College, Gotham Writers' Workshop, and Valhalla's Women's Prison. She currently teaches ESL in Rome and remains affiliated with Teachers and Writers Collaborative in Manhattan. She divides her time living in New York City and abroad.

Editorial Reviews

Conflict between mother and daughter is a staple of fiction today. But conflict between father and daughter the core of Fitzpatrick's absorbing if long-winded first novel (after the story collection Where We Lived) is less frequently dissected and certainly not with the sharpness Fitzpatrick brings to the project. Her narrator and protagonist, Catherine Kelly, is putting herself through Boston University by working as a cocktail waitress. Wary of men because her father left her when she was a child, she shares an apartment with the only man she can get close to, an adoring and adorably fey gay man. The year she turns 20, Catherine takes a summer internship in Madrid. The job is negligible, but her roommates are charming, introducing Catherine to their circle of friends, who sweep her up into Madrid's nightlife. But halfway through her stay, her father shows up, and in the week he visits, Catherine begins to know, and to confront, him. Fitzpatrick ably weaves scenes from Catherine's past through those set in Madrid, building suspense in a story that could have become a travel journal. With incisive description and biting, lively dialogue, Fitzpatrick nails her characters, especially the men in Catherine's life. Both Harlan, the gay man Fitzpatrick rescues from stereotype, and Catherine's father, with his toupee and Aqua Net, are unforgettable. Moreover, Fitzpatrick captures precisely the peculiarities of bar life, while never veering far from her themes: how men value women and how Catherine values men. Fitzpatrick does go on, however: too many bars and far too many headlong sentences explaining Catherine's thoughts. As a witness and narrator, though, Catherine is completely credible, which is why the reader keeps reading and cheering her on. Agent, Wendy Weil. (Aug. 2) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

Fitzpatrick's first novel follows quickly on the heels of her short story collection, Where We Lived. Here, the protagonist is Catherine Kelly, a twentysomething undergraduate at Boston University who works several nights a week as a cocktail waitress. She goes to Spain for a summer internship in public relations, and through a series of flashbacks, we learn about her gay male roommate in Boston, the alcoholic father who has been absent from her life since her childhood, and her uncomfortable relationships with men. While the flashbacks are skillfully interwoven, readers will soon tire of the narrator's immature, artless prose (she "felt so lucky, it was pathetic") and limited insight. Catherine prides herself on making a new start in Spain, unaware that her behavior hasn't changed: she is still squandering her time in bars with unpleasant men. Her depiction of Spain is limited to a catalog of nightclub interiors, drink orders, and clothing descriptions. Finally, her father appears for a week-long visit and reconciliation. Catherine takes him to several bars, of course, but at least they get to a museum. A marginal purchase for light fiction collections. Reba Leiding, James Madison Univ. Libs., Harrisonburg, VA Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

A hard-shelled 20-year-old Boston University student on a summer internship in Madrid receives a visit from her longtime deadbeat dad. Catherine has come to Madrid mainly to take a break from her nowhere job at a cocktail waitress at Shooters, in Boston, where she is working her way single-mindedly through school. Brought up largely by her mother-since her father, a drunk who hit his wife over the head with a brick, left home when Catherine was eight-Catherine has grown tough and wary of men ("how little you could trust them"). In Madrid, she works desultorily in a p.r. firm, living with two pampered sisters and going out often and late with a wealthy gay man, Esteban, who may or may not be a pimp. The summer is defined by her "frigidity," as one rich, nosy acquaintance, Monica, describes it, until Catherine's father arrives for a week of sauced, awkward encounters in Madrid that help Catherine come to a sense of her own self-worth. (The title refers to a bar game the father and daughter played when she was small and he took her on long afternoon binges.) Second-novelist Fitzpatrick (Where We Lived, 2001) has a touching father-daughter drama going in flashbacks that set up the new meeting between them in the present; she also, however, indulges in a lot of meandering and childish venting of pent-up emotion (between Catherine and her fragile gay roommate, Harlan, back in Boston, and other dubious male specimens) that leak away the story's potential impact. Fitzpatrick's method is to pour it all in, when selection might have been more effective. Moreover, Catherine, a girl with some chutzpah and ponderous first-person reflection, rarely speaks in more than one-liner expletives, so that theother characters' attraction to her is left unclear. Long-winded buildups and lots of drinking in upscale Madrid bars for a plucky American-in-Spain and her loser father.

Kirkus Reviews