Discussion questions for Mark Doty’s “Heaven’s Coast”

by Ryan Tofil

1) On the back of the book is included a line from the Washington Post Book World that says: “Doty is a gifted poet whose books have won numerous prizes, but even his considerable reputation could not have prepared readers for the astonishing beauty of these opening pages…. If one book survives the AIDS epidemic, it will be this one.”   I took the last line to mean that many books written about AIDS will come and go, but this book will remain worthy.   Do you agree and why?  Also, would you really consider this book to be about AIDS or more so a perspective on grieving?

2) As we’ve been discussing in class, there is more to “life writing” than just recalling the facts or recreating a scene verbatim to tell the whole story.  If you were writing the scene where Doty meets his lover for the first time (page 52 and 53), what would you write or show if this were a film?   In the book Doty writes: “And if in fact I could reproduce here our conversation, I imagine it would be perfectly sweet but also thoroughly banal, on the surface, just like the surface of any such encounter.”  How would you somehow include or at least try to capture the feeling Doty experienced when he wrote: “And what I found myself thinking was, Here you are at last.

3) In class we had a discussion about what is true art.  We all came to agree that Virginia Woolf definitely created art and not just literal true-to-life-story in her memoir.  I remember thinking in class, but never saying:  “It’s like saying what is a real representation of a human–an abstract human portrait by Picasso, a real photograph of a person, or a wax figure like one would see at Madame Tussauds Wax Museum?”  I remembered having thought that when I came to the lines in Doty’s memoir (bottom of page 30):  “When do we look at the plain nude fact of the lifeless figure?  Pure purposelessness–and thus, in the absence of the spirit, strangely and completely present.  Never having a chance to see it, to assimilate it our horror of it and go on to actually look, how would we know that the lifeless body is beautiful?”  The question I have is: What do you take from that section, or what are your reactions to Doty’s reflections on the lifeless body?

4) What are your reactions to not seeing any photographs included in this memoir?  Would realistic pictures have ruined the poetic fabric of the way in which this story was told?

5) On the surface we think of a person’s life as being linear:  birth, life experiences, and then dying.   Yet in telling the story of someone’s life: beginning, middle, end doesn’t always work.  Doty wrote in the PREFACE: “This book was written in the flux of change; I wrote it not from a single still point but in the forward momentum of a current of grief….  What is healing, but a shift in perspective?”  His opening reminds me that life, even on the surface, is not really linear.  That we continue to uncover, go back, or wonder about the future in any single moment.  The body may die, but does a spirit?  Is something only dead if it is fully forgotten?