The questions, discussion topics, and author biography that follow are designed to enhance your group's reading of Ann Beattie's My Life, Starring Dara Falcon, a novel that explores the obsessive side of female friendship and traces the events that impel one woman out of the cocoon of her marriage and into independence, but also into a web of moral uncertainty and self-questioning. 

Jean is a young woman whose parents died in a plane crash when she was six. Raised by a timid aunt whose yearly gambling vacations wiped out Jean's inheritance--the money paid to victims' families by the airline--Jean meets Bob Warner in college and drops out when she marries him in her sophomore year, only too pleased to settle into a routine domesticity in Bob's hometown. She spends her time running errands and tending to the needs of Bob and his extended family. 

But when Dara Falcon comes to town and befriends Jean, everything begins to change. Dara is beautiful, witty, sophisticated; she brings a jolt of extravagance and mystery to the sleepy little town of Dell, New Hampshire. An actress with a questionable past, she is a brilliant manipulator of people and their impressions of her. Jean soon becomes obsessed with Dara, flattered by her friendship despite disturbing hints that Dara is untrustworthy. Before long, Dara is wearing Jean's favorite alpaca jacket and has bought Jean's car for a dollar, while Jean has left Bob and gone back to college to finish her degree. And though eventually Jean begins to see that Dara is not everything one could desire in a friend, time spent with Dara goads Jean into a new self-awareness and a thorough questioning of what she wants in life.