What We talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver

Key facts:

He is credited with helping revitalize the genre of the English-language short

story in the late 20th century

About the author

Raymond Carver, in full Raymond Clevie Carver, (born May 25, 1938,

Clatskanie, Oregon, U.S.—died August 2, 1988, Port Angeles, Washington),
American short-story writer and poet whose realistic writings about the
working poor mirrored his own life.

Carver was the son of a sawmill worker. He married a year after

finishing high school and supported his wife and two children by working as a
janitor, gas-station attendant, and delivery man. He became seriously
interested in a writing career after taking a creative-writing course at Chico
State College (now California State University, Chico) in 1958. His short
stories began to appear in magazines while he studied at Humboldt State
College (now Humboldt State University) in Arcata, California (B.A., 1963).
Carver’s first success as a writer came in 1967 with the story “Will You
Please Be Quiet, Please?,” and he began writing full-time after losing his job
as a textbook editor in 1970. The highly successful short-story collection Will
You Please Be Quiet, Please? (1976) established his reputation.
 Carver began drinking heavily in 1967 and was repeatedly hospitalized
for alcoholism in the 1970s, while continuing to turn out short stories. After
conquering his drinking problem in the late 1970s, he taught for several years
at the University of Texas at El Paso and at Syracuse University, and in 1983
he won a literary award whose generous annual stipend freed him to again
concentrate on his writing full-time. His later short-story collections
were What We Talk About When We Talk About
Love (1981), Cathedral (1984), and Where I’m Calling From (1988). While
his short stories were what made his critical reputation, he was also an
accomplished poet in the realist tradition of Robert Frost.
Carver’s poetry collections include At Night the Salmon Move (1976), Where
Water Comes Together with Other Water (1985), and Ultramarine (1986). He
died of lung cancer at age 50.

In his short stories Carver chronicled the everyday lives and problems of the
working poor in the Pacific Northwest. His blue-collar characters are crushed
by broken marriages, financial problems, and failed careers, but they are often
unable to understand or even articulate their own anguish. Carver’s stripped-
down, minimalist prose style is remarkable for its honesty and power.

About the text

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love is a 1981 collection of

short stories by American writer Raymond Carver, as well as the title of one
of the stories in the collection.

Answer the following questions

1. As the story opens, what is the setting in time, place, and situation? How much

time passes inthe story? How do the setting and mood alter as time passes?
2. How would you compare and contrast Mel and Terri’s views of love? What
was her experiencelike with her first husband, Ed? How was Mel involved in
it? How do their views of Ed contrast? What does the contrast suggest about
their own relationship?

3. What do you understand about Mel’s remarks about the love represented by
knights? What appeals to him most about them? What is Mel’s basic concern
about love? Do Mel and Terri seem rathertoo preoccupied with their former
spouses? What do we learn about Mel’s first wife, Marjorie? How does he feel
about her now? Is this “spiritual love” or something more like the sort of
feeling represented by Terri’s first husband, Ed? What irony is involved here?

4. What do we learn about Nick (the narrator) and Laura? How does their
relationship compare with Mel and Terri’s? What advice does Terri give
them?

5. There is yet another couple in the story – the old couple injured in the car
accident. What astonishes Mel about their relationship? What stage of love
does each of these three couples represent?

6. What changes in the setting can you identify over the course of the story? How
does the setting correspond with the story presentation of the stages of love?

7. What is suggested by the final paragraph of the story? Is this ending

helpful, or not? 
8. In What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Mel describes different
types of love through the stories he shares about Terri’s ex-husband, the old
couple in the car accident, and his relationship with his wife. What is Mel
trying to say about love with these three examples?

9. How does the boy’s clearing the ice from his windshield work metaphorically
in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love?
 10.Do you agree with Terri that ”there was love there” in What We Talk About
When We Talk About Love?

11.What is the importance that setting plays in the development of the plot in
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love?

12.What has disturbed Nick and his friends after their extended conversation
about the nature of love in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love?

13.Why does the couple marry in What We Talk About When We Talk About
Love?

14.How is love shown in Carver’s story What We Talk about When We Talk
about Love?

Vocabulary Practice

1. Explain

1) To glow (with love)

2) To get on (onto) the subject of
3) An absolute
4) To be out of the action
5) To swell (up)
6) To set someone straight
7) The saving grace
8) To plug away (at)
9) To bungle
10) To make a production (out) of
11) To wind up
 2)Translate

1) In passing

2) The particulars
3) Fugitive
4)At one point

5)Make out a will

6) courtship
7)Pull through
8)On call
1) At all hours
2) Return the call

3)Match the synonyms

1) Grin, grant, spite, nibble, account for

Smile, explain, eat, allow, annoy
2) Pal, sliver, sawbones, party, laceration
Piece, surgeon, group, cut, friend

4)Transcribe

Cardiologist, suicide, neurologist, orthopedic, hemorrhage, enchanted, vessel,

vassal, sweat, gurney

1) Explain/translate the medical abbreviations: ER, OR, ICU, DOA