'The Women's Room': Who Am I? Trivia Quiz

Answer: Mira

Mira Ward is an intellectual and the heroine of the story. The book is essentially divided into two halves; the first half focuses on her life as a young mother, and the second on her life at university with a new group of friends. She marries Norm, a doctor, and has two children with him, and makes friends among the neighbourhood women, though one of them, Bliss, betrays her by making another woman, Adele, think that Mira is having an affair with her husband Paul.

She becomes an immaculate housekeeper, but it is not enough; Norm announces he wants a divorce and Mira attempts suicide.

She enrols at Harvard to study English, befriends a group of women students and falls in love with Ben, a diplomat and activist. Unfortunately, their relationship breaks down when she discovers he wants to move to Africa and have a baby with her, without consulting her first.

Some of the younger students see her as an experienced mother figure. The final chapter reveals that she is the narrator, and is teaching at a small community college in a coastal town.

Answer: Iso

Iso, short for Isolde, is a graduate student at Harvard. She initially comes across as very aloof, is revealed to have travelled all over Asia, and invites Mira, Val and a few others to the house which she shares with Ava for a party. She opens up to Mira and Val after her split with Ava, and is revealed to have been in an intense on/off lesbian relationship with her. Iso's house often becomes a meeting place for the group, and she regularly invites people over.

She loves throwing parties and coming up with games or getting dressed up, and is good at talking to children. Both Clarissa and Kyla confide in her about their marriage difficulties and the three of them end up in a love triangle, though Kyla is with Iso for longer. Eventually, Clarissa and Kyla find out and confront Iso, and all hell breaks loose. Iso becomes determined to stop doing emotional labour for everyone and be more selfish.

She keeps in touch with all of the group after they graduate, and moves to England to do a PhD at Oxford, where she meets a female taxi driver.

Answer: Clarissa

Clarissa is a literature student in her twenties and married to Duke, who she met through her parents. Both of them come from well-off backgrounds and Clarissa has had a sheltered upbringing. Before coming to Harvard, she did voluntary work in Roxbury, teaching black children to read. Duke is stationed in Vietnam but comes home on leave, and is later stationed nearer Cambridge.

He does not fit in with Clarissa's friends and rarely participates in their games, and he disapproves of their anti-war politics.

This eventually drives a wedge between them, with Clarissa spending more time with Iso and eventually having an affair with her. She later divorces Duke and gets a job in television in Chicago, producing an innovative new programme.

Answer: Lily

Lily is one of the friends Mira makes when she lives in Beau Reve. She is married to Carl, an emotionally distant and abusive man from a violent neighbourhood. She, her mother and siblings were regularly beaten by her father as a child and when she tried to escape from home as a teenager, her father and priest tracked her down and forced her to come home. Lily has a high sex drive, and Carl withholds sex to get at her.

He briefly moves into a room over the garage because he gets fed up of Lily's nagging. Carlos, their son, is verbally abusive to Lily and bullies other children; a group of local kids try to hang him and Lily has a mental breakdown, fearing that he will never be safe. Carl has her institutionalised, and when Mira goes to see her, she has lost weight and is on drugs that make her ill.

She is then moved to another institution, where the women are made-up and encouraged to dress well, but given electric shock treatment if they step out of line. As far as Mira knows, she is still in there.

Answer: Chris

Chris is the daughter of Val and Neil, her ex-husband. She is mature for her age and has travelled all over the country with Val, and is used to her mother having various boyfriends. She has a boyfriend called Bart who likes to argue with Grant, one of Val's boyfriends.

Despite being a teenager, she often joins in with the group, and they go to the airport to see her off when she goes to university in Chicago. When she comes home to visit her mother, Tad, Val's boyfriend - who is closer to Chris's age - is jealous of the time the two women spend together.

He gets drunk and becomes abusive towards Val, and hits on Chris, claiming he loves her. Chris manages to negotiate with him, but he and Val split up soon afterwards and she kicks him out. While on the way home from a demonstration in Chicago, Chris meets a teenage boy, who rapes her.

She manages to talk her way out and later phones Val in hysterics. Chris presses charges, and the ordeal of going through the police station and seeing her rapist again mentally breaks her, to the point where she is too frightened to leave the house. Val sends her to live with some friends in a commune, but Chris is furious, thinking Val is trying to get rid of her, and never speaks to her again.

She returns for Val's funeral with Neil, but Mira does not know what happened to her afterwards.

Answer: Martha

Martha is part of the same crowd as Lily, and is married to George. She is very plain-spoken, often shocking Mira, and goes back to school despite being in her late thirties. She falls in love with David, her French professor, and has an affair with him.

However, David is revealed to have been lying to her and is still sleeping with his wife, who is pregnant. Martha is the one who finds Mira after her suicide attempt, and Mira returns the favour when Martha takes an overdose after breaking up with David. George also has an affair with a woman at his work, but he and Martha get back together because of money worries. Martha is the one who encourages Mira to go to university, and she herself gets a degree in law while Mira applies to various universities to do a PhD, and gets into Harvard. Mira goes to see her for one last time before she leaves for Cambridge.

Answer: Kyla

Kyla Forrester is an English graduate student from Ohio. She is the first of the group Mira meets, and she introduces Mira to other students, including Iso and Val. Mira bumps into her around campus and she becomes part of the friendship group that also includes Iso, Val, Clarissa and Mira.

She is married to Harley, a scientist who is cold and rational, and who Kyla feels does not take her or her work seriously. She is always biting her lip and nails, and has a tendency to get drunk and emotional, and Harley is furious with her when she humiliates him in front of his supervisor.

She has an affair with Iso, but Iso finds it a strain because Kyla expects a lot from her, but does not give back. Kyla goes on a road trip to Arizona with a group of friends while Harley is at a conference in Aspen, which bores her rigid.

She confronts Clarissa, who is living with Iso, and finds out that Iso is also seeing her, and is furious with Iso and hits her. After the group graduate, Kyla reads law at Stanford and gets a job as a barrister's clerk.

Answer: Val

Val is a mature social sciences student around Mira's age, and Chris's mother. She is tall and very outspoken, with radical ideas about sex, and has been in several relationships. She has helped register voters in the South, worked as a teacher and nurse on Indian reservations, and protested against strip mining companies in Appalachia.

When she first appears, she is going out with Grant, and then later gets together with Tad, a younger man who accompanies her to the group's parties, although they split up after he becomes drunk and abusive.

She goes to Chicago to look after Chris and support her during her interviews with the police, and is disgusted with what she sees. After Chris's rape, she becomes increasingly disillusioned with men, grows apart from the group and drops out of university, joining a radical feminist group. Mira is upset as she feels she will lose Val, especially as both she and Val know that having sons means she has to compromise.

After an argument with Ben, Mira hears from Iso that Val has been shot dead by police; she and several other women ambushed a police van, hoping to rescue a black woman convicted of murdering a man in self-defence, but an informant had tipped the police off. Val and the other women are machine-gunned to death, to the point where Val's body explodes, killing one officer and wounding another.

The group get together after her funeral, but her death basically signifies the end of the group. Mira feels that Val's ghost is haunting her.

Answer: Adele

Adele is one of the housewives Mira befriends when she and Norm move to Meyersville. She is Catholic and has several children, and another on the way, as she and her husband Paul do not use birth control. One chapter shows a day in Adele's life and how she struggles to cope with her children while doing her daily errands and trying to keep the house clean for Paul, who does not appreciate how hard she works. Paul flirts with other people's wives at parties, and has a full-blown affair with Bliss. Mira catches Bliss and Paul having an intimate moment, so the pair conspire to make Adele think Paul is having an affair with Mira. Bliss manipulates Adele while Paul flirts heavily with Mira at a party, and Adele ends her friendship with Mira.

Answer: Ava

Ava is from Alabama and is Iso's girlfriend. She is somewhat reclusive, and their relationship is very intense. Ava's real name is Delilah Lee, but she named herself after the actress Ava Gardner. She has a difficult relationship with her father; she recalls him beating her with a belt when she was five, for showing her knickers to him while showing off her new party dress.

She is afraid to go home because at a family meal two years ago, he slapped her for criticising Lyndon Johnson and she stabbed him in the stomach with a barbecue fork, and she worries that she might kill him next time.

She plays the piano, but hates being watched and gets embarrassed when Iso tells the others that she played with the Cleveland Symphony. She works as a typist to fund ballet classes.

She and Iso try to work things out over several months, holing up in their apartment, but it doesn't work and they split up. Ava later marries a man, though she does not love him, and achieves her dream of becoming a dancer, but worries that there is no hope for her as she is getting older and keeps falling over.

She and Iso keep in touch.