- Jess says of her younger cousin Michael that they are “closer than anyone else in our supremely strange family—we’re like two survivors clinging to each other on a life raft.” What do you make of their relationship? How do such different people manage to save each other?
- Michael observes that Jess’s mother “comes from a long line of women who have specialized in being barely alive, even when they don’t have strokes to use as an excuse.” Do you know women like that? Is Jess truly in danger of meeting that fate? What saves her from it?
- When Jess and Michael find the box of Joe’s letters, Jess realizes “My whole life has been lived under the shadow of that lie, starved of light, quietly surviving, never thriving. It means the people I thought loved me the most, my mother and father, deceived me.” How would you feel in this moment? Does Jess’s reaction make sense to you?
- Jess’s decision to have her daughter takes her out of her family home. How is her home with Gracie and Joe different from the world she was raised in? Is it a better place, despite their lack of money? Do we trust Jess’s rosy memories of that time?
- Jess’s family tries to sweep her mental illness under the carpet—never speaking of her time in the hospital, or of Gracie’s death. Do they do that out of concern for her? Or for themselves? Is their silence protective or harmful?
- Jess says about her mother, “I’d really like her not to be evil—I’d like to remember her differently, but now I’m struggling.” Do you think her mother is evil?
- Why do you think Joe continued to send birthday cards for Gracie? Was it for him? Or for Jess?
- When Jess learns that Joe hid the truth about his foster family from his biological mother, she and Belinda “both seem to realize at the same moment that Joe must have lied—must have made up a pretty fiction to stop this broken woman from shattering into even more pieces.” Would you have done the same? How does that contrast with the lie that Jess’s parents told her, thinking it was for her own good?
- How is Jess and Belinda’s friendship central to Jess’s life? Could she have found Joe without Belinda?
- What do you think the future holds for Jess and Joe? For Michael? How do you envision their lives in the years after this novel ends?
