Breaking the Bond Trivia Quiz

Answer: Muriel Spark

The Scottish writer Muriel Sarah Spark (1918-2008) published 22 novels, 8 short story collections, poetry and several essays. She received several awards and eight honorary doctorates for her work. Among her novels, published between 1957 and 2004, the most popular are: "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie", "The Driver's Seat" and "Memento Mori".

In 1937, Muriel married Sidney Oswald Spark and went to live in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). The following year they had a son named Samuel and she discovered that her husband was violently manic depressive. In 1940, Spark separated from her husband and put her son in a convent school. She returned to England, leaving her son in Africa since children were not allowed to travel during the War. In 1945, she brought her son to live with her parents in Scotland, maintaining a distant relationship with him. After World War II, Muriel began her career as a writer, under her married name, Spark. She lived in London, New York, and finally settled in Italy with the sculptor Penelope Jardine.

In 1954, Muriel Spark, who had a Jewish father and an Anglican mother, converted to Catholicism. Her son Robin chose to continue his Jewish faith, by his grandparents' beliefs. The relationship between mother and son, which had never been good, worsened when religious issues came to the fore and finally ceased. Upon her death, Muriel Spark left her entire estate to her friend Penelope Jardine.

Answer: Doris Lessing

Doris May Taylor (1919 -2013), known as Doris Lessing, was born to English parents in Persia (now Iran). In 1925, she moved to Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) where she attended a school run by Dominican nuns. At the age of 13, she dropped out of school and began working for a family. In 1937, Doris married Frank Wisdom, and had two children, John and Jean. A few years later, she left her husband and children. About their separation, she said that she knew she would have destroyed herself if she had not left her family. Doris remained in Rhodesia and joined a communist-leaning group, where she met her second husband Gottfried Lessing, with whom she had a son, Peter.

In 1949, after her second divorce, Doris moved to London with Peter. Her career as a professional writer began with the publication of the novel, "The Grass Is Singing." Throughout her career, she published more than 50 novels, poetry, short stories, opera libretti, non-fiction works, and autobiographies and memoirs.

Peter's life was not easy, as his mother wanted to do for him everything she had failed to do for her other two children. The children, who lived in Africa, visited their mother sporadically. John became a farmer and Jean managed to maintain a reasonable relationship with her mother. In 2007, Doris Lessing was finally awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Jean traveled to Stockholm to receive the award, as her 88-year-old mother was unable to attend the ceremony. She became the oldest person (to date) to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature and the third oldest person to receive a Nobel Prize in any category.

Answer: Gala Dali

Gala Dali (born Elena Ivanovna Diakonova, 1894-1982), was born in Russia into a family of intellectuals. At the age of 17, she was sent to a sanatorium in Switzerland for treatment of tuberculosis, where she met the future poet Paul Éluard. They became inseparable friends, and she always encouraged him to continue writing poetry. During this period, he nicknamed her Gala. In early 1914, both were considered cured and returned to their home countries. In 1916, Gala went to Paris to find Éluard. They married, had a daughter named Cécile. Gala was hoping to have a boy, and she did not accept a girl. Gala hated motherhood and mistreated or ignored her daughter.

Gala became involved with Éluard in the Surrealist movement and served as an inspiration to several artists. In 1929, the couple traveled to Spain, to visit the surrealist artist Salvador Dali. Gala and Dali became involved and married. She served as Dali's muse in many of his works, many of them religious. Several of the works were signed by both of them: Gala Salvador Dali. In their life, a world of celebrities, there was no room for Cecile, who was not only excluded from her mother's life but also from her will.

Answer: Ingrid Bergman

Ingrid Bergman (1915-1982) was a Swedish film and stage actress, famous for her beauty, her acting career, and the events that occurred in her private life. Her career, which began in Sweden and Germany, lasted about 50 years. During this time she received numerous awards, including three Academy Awards. Bergman spoke Swedish and German as her first languages, and English, Italian, and French. Her career in the United States began with the remake of the Swedish film "Intermezzo" (1939).

She worked in films directed by Jean Renoir, Ingmar Bergman, Alfred Hitchcock, and Roberto Rossellini. Ingrid Bergman was married to Petter Lindström, with whom she had a daughter, Pia. When Ingrid began an affair with the Italian director Roberto Rossellini (who was also married), they went to Italy to film "Stromboli", leaving her daughter Pia and her husband in the United States. Rossellini became her second husband (1950-1975) and together they had three children. Ingrid and her daughter Pia met again when Pia was 18 years old. It was Pia who went to Rome to stay with her three siblings, while Ingrid, already divorced from Rossellini, moved to Paris with her third husband, the Swedish theater producer Lars Schmidt.

Answer: Anna Karenina

"Anna Karenina" is a novel by Leon Tolstoy published in 1878 that has been adapted into film, opera, and theatre. This work addresses numerous themes: the changes that were occurring in Russian society in the second half of the 1800s, the discrepancies between urban and rural life, and family relationships such as marriage and betrayal. The central character of the work is Anna, the wife of the high-ranking government minister Alexei A. Karenin, and her affair with the single cavalry officer Alexei K. Vronsky.

When Anna separates from her husband to be with her lover, she leaves her 8-year-old son Sergei, who, abandoned by his mother, grows up trying to forget her and valuing his father much more. Anna and Vronsky have a daughter named Annie, to whom she is not very devoted. The relationship between Anna and Vronsky gradually deteriorates as Anna is rejected by the same society that Vronsky continues to frequent. Finally, Anna, unable to tolerate the situation, commits suicide, abandoning her two children.

Answer: Daughter

Ricardo Eliécer N. R. Basoalto (1904-1973) was born in Chile. He began writing at the age of 13. Since his father was opposed to his interest in literature, he began to publish under the pseudonym Pablo Neruda. He became a poet, writer, politician, and diplomat, and received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1971. In 1924 he published "Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair", a collection of poems that made him famous and is the author's best-known work. The following year he took an honorary consulship and served in several places in Asia: Burma, Ceylon, Batavia (today Jakarta), and Singapore.

In 1930, Neruda married the daughter of a Dutch bank employee named Marijke Antonieta Hagenaar Vogelzang, known as Maryka, who lived in Batavia. Neruda, with his wife, returned to Chile, worked in Argentina, was transferred to Spain, and became Chilean consul in Madrid. In 1934, his only daughter, Malva, was born, and she had many health problems, including hydrocephalus. Spanish poet Vicente Alexandre y Merlo wrote that Neruda was proud of his daughter when she was born, but that a month later he described Malva to his friend Sara Turnú as a "perfectly ridiculous being, a kind of semicolon, and a three-kilogram vampire." Neruda soon abandoned his daughter and wife, leaving with Delia del Carril, who became his second wife. After Neruda abandoned the family, mother and daughter went to the Netherlands, where Malva spent her short life with a foster family. Neruda, despite Maryka's letters asking for money for her upkeep, never helped them. It was up to the mother to work to support them. Malva died in 1943. Neruda did not mention his daughter in his memoirs, nor did he even write anything about her.

Answer: True

Arthur Asher Miller (1915 - 2005) was a famous American playwright, screenwriter and essayist, who was always in the media, whether for the success of his work, the awards he received or for his marriage to actress Marilyn Monroe. During the 20th century and early 21st century, through his plays, especially "All My Sons", "Death of a Salesman" and "The Crucible", he made the audience think about personal and political responsibilities. He wrote a lot about the relationship between parents and children.

Many people question the fact that he omitted, in his 1987 memoir, "Timebends", the existence of his youngest son Daniel, who had Down Syndrome. He was taken away from his family and spent many years in a clinic. Even in the obituary of Arthur Miller's third wife, photographer Inge Morath, Daniel's mother, published in the New York Times in 2002, his name did not appear. Arthur Miller's close friends said they never understood why Miller did not visit his son, did not speak of him, and kept quiet about his existence.

A September 13, 2007 article by Susanna Andrews, published in Vanity Fair, provides details about Daniel's life, especially about his relationship with his family after his father's death.

Answer: Rahna Reiko Rizzuto

Rahna Reiko Rizzuto (1963) was born in Hawaii, to a Japanese-American mother and an Italian father. She had a different life than her mother, who lived as a child during World War II in a Japanese internment camp in the United States. About this subject, Rizzuto published the novel "Why She Left Us" (1999). In 2001, married and with two children aged 3 and 5, she received a scholarship and went to Hiroshima, Japan, to collect material for her next novels: "Hiroshima in the Morning" (2010) and "Shadow Child" (2018).

After receiving visits from her children in Japan, Rizzuto decided that did not want to be a full-time mother. She stated on the "Today Show": "I had this idea that motherhood was an all-encompassing thing" and "I was afraid of being swallowed up by that". In the early 2000s, after 20 years of marriage, she filed for divorce and gave her husband full custody of their children. She moved into a place close to her children's home, actively participated in their activities and lives, and thus found time to live her own life. For this reason, she was heavily criticized and often threatened, called "human garbage" and "worse than Hitler"; she was treated like a mother who had abandoned her children.

Answer: A Doll's House

Nora Helmer is the central character in Henrik Ibsen's play "A Doll's House" (1879). The Norwegian Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906) was a theatre director and playwright and is considered one of the most influential playwrights of the 19th century. Between 1850 and 1899, Ibsen wrote 25 plays.

In 1879, his famous three-act play "A Doll's House" premiered at the Royal Danish Theatre in Copenhagen, Denmark. The play explores the themes of marriage, gender inequality, and the impositions made by society. It was written at a time when women were confined to domestic life and seen as frivolous and incapable of making difficult decisions. The play centers on the Helmer family, especially Nora, who believes that to be happy all she needs is to have a beautiful house and keep everything to the taste of her husband Torvald, who treats her like a doll to be shaped. When her husband discovers that she forged documents to get money for him to undergo treatment, he becomes furious and refuses to take the blame. Nora realizes that her marriage and her life are no longer sustainable and decides to leave her husband and children and start a new life. While the play pleased feminists, it also caused great indignation, and the discussions spread to the newspapers and society.

Answer: Meryl Streep

Meryl Streep (1942) is an American actress whose career spanned more than 40 years. She has acted in more than 70 films, where she has played a prime minister, a witch, a nun, and a factory worker. She has been a single mother, a sick and addicted mother, a negligent mother, and an abandoning mother.

Three of her films have as their central theme the mother-child relationship, whether to keep the children or pursue another life."Kramer vs. Kramer" (1979) tells the story of Ted Kramer (Dustin Hoffman) an executive who, upon informing his wife Joanna (Meryl Streep) of his promotion, is taken aback by her announcement that she is leaving both the marriage and their seven-year-old son. Months later, claiming that she is in a position to raise the child and that the child needs a mother more than a father, they fight a legal battle for custody of the child.

In "Sophie's Choice" (1982) movie, based on William Styron's novel, she plays Sophie, a Polish immigrant to America who hides a secret.
When Sophie was sent to Auschwitz with her two children, she was forced to choose which one would go to a children's camp and which would go to a gas chamber. In the end, both of Sophie's children are murdered, and Sophie, who survived the Holocaust, cannot live with the guilt and ends up committing suicide.

In "The Bridges of Madison County" (1995) Meryl Streep played Francesca, a housewife who lives in rural Iowa. While her husband and children travel to a fair, Francesca meets photographer Robert Kincaid (Clint Eastwood), who was in the region photographing the covered bridges of Madison County. The affair between Francesca and Robert was discovered after Francesca's death when her children found their mother's letters and diary.