Finding Mrs. Ford

On a sunny summer morning by the sea in New England, Susan Ford’s cocoon of privilege is threatened when an Iraqi man from her distant past boards a plane in Baghdad to come find her.
Mrs. Ford leads a privileged life. From her Blenheim spaniels to her cottage on the coast of Watch Hill, Rhode Island, she carefully curates her world. Hair in place, house in place, life in place, Susan Ford keeps it under control.
Early one morning in the summer of 2014, the past pays a call to collect. The FBI arrives to question her about a man from Iraq—a Chaldean Christian from Mosul—where ISIS has just seized control. Sammy Fakhouri, they say, is his name and they have taken him into custody, picked up on his way to her house.
Back in the summer of 1979, on the outskirts of a declining Detroit, college coed Susan meets charismatic and reckless Annie. They are an unlikely pair of friends but they each see something in the other—something they’d like to possess. Studious Susan is a moth to the flame that is Annie. Yet, it is dazzling Annie who senses that Susan will be the one who makes it out of Detroit.
Together, the girls navigate the minefields of a down-market disco where they work their summer jobs. It’s a world filled with pretty girls and powerful men, some of whom—like Sammy Fakhouri—happen to be Iraqi Chaldeans.
What happened in that summer of 1979 when Susan and Annie met? Why is Sammy looking for Susan all these years later? And why is Mrs. Ford lying?

Book club questions for Finding Mrs. Ford by Deborah Goodrich Royce

Use these discussion questions to guide your next book club meeting.

One of the central themes of Finding Mrs. Ford is that of identity. Do you think we might be different people under different circumstances? Or do you believe that a person’s core essence always percolates up to the surface no matter what life brings? How has your definition of yourself changed or remained consistent over the years?

Finding Mrs. Ford takes place in two main locations: Watch Hill and Detroit, in two different eras: 1979 and 2014. Yet events in the larger world—specifically the 2014 takeover of northern Iraq by the self-styled caliphate, ISIS, and the strange bedfellows relationship between Detroit and Iraq in the late 70s/early 80s (true fact: Detroit Mayor Coleman Young presented Saddam Hussein with the Key to the City of Detroit in 1980)—form a backdrop to the smaller lives of the characters. Do you think the characters’ personal stories are made more relevant by the sweep of history that underpins their lives? How have world events affected your life?

Susan and Annie are very different types of women. The archetypes of Scarlett and Melanie from the book and movie, Gone With the Wind, were inspirational. Annie, like Scarlett, is a woman who operates with a high degree of self-interest and self-preservation. Susan, like Melanie, is more self-effacing and willing to take a backseat to her friend. Do you identify more strongly with one or the other? Do you think all women have a little bit of both types inside of them?

“…the memory of her junior semester in France—her first trip abroad—was planted in her mind as her North Star, guiding her toward the future.” Young Susan is defined by a sense of longing. Like a duck, she imprinted on her experience of living in France and, in the midst of the losses that surround her, she focuses on returning there as the path to a happier life. Have you found yourself wishing to live in a different place, believing it would deliver a different you? Were you able to achieve that vision and did it turn out as you had imagined?

Susan follows Annie to Frankie’s Disco. She gets into the Corvette with Annie in the wee hours of the morning she is meant to go back to college. In both cases, she ignores her instincts that tell her she is making poor decisions. What occurs when a smart girl makes a less-than-smart life choice? Do you relate to the young Susan and the frequency with which she casts aside her better judgment to follow Annie’s lead? Do you relate to Annie’s recklessness that enables her to make such rash decisions? Do you have any memories of yourself in your younger days when you behaved like an Annie or a Susan in ways you later wished you hadn’t?

In the summer of 1979, Annie succumbs to the lure of cocaine. The first time she tries it “a sense of elation overtook her as she glimpsed her brokenness repaired.” As she continues to use it, however, her equilibrium vanishes, her personality becomes increasingly brittle, and her sense of paranoia ratchets up. Sadly, drug addiction has not disappeared in the decades since these scenes played out. Was it difficult for you to read about Annie’s descent into drug abuse? Do you have

Finding Mrs. Ford deals with many varieties of romantic love. Annie loves Frankie—or thinks she does—while Susan believes her friend gives in to obsession and passion. Young Susan feels a gentle love growing for Sammy, though she hardly knows him. In later years, Mrs. Ford finds deep love with her husband, Jack, and is given yet another chance with a mature Sammy. Do you think we are able to love more than one person in our lives, perhaps in different ways? Do you think that if one love ends, that love is diminished in retrospect? Or can it live on, even if the person goes on to love someone else?

The friendship between young Susan and young Annie is a cornerstone relationship in 1979, yet they are an unlikely pair, having different personalities and interests. They will not have the benefit of years to find out if their friendship has any lasting value. Have you ever found yourself attracted to a friend who is very different from you? Do you think there is some sort of “chemistry” involved in the bonds of friendship, or do you think lasting friendship is based more on shared interests and values?

It is evident early in the story that Mrs. Ford is concealing information about her relationship with Sammy Fakhouri. At first she claims not to know him and later claims they were only friends. It begins to be revealed just how much she is hiding when she and her stepson, Jack Ford Jr, run into Sherry Hopkins at the FBI office in Boston. While Mrs. Ford’s secrets are of a very large magnitude, do you think most people conceal parts of themselves from others? Have you ever found out something about someone that truly shocked you? How did you handle it?

“Susan closes her eyes and wills her mind to drift. This is a technique she has practiced for years, the reverse of the mindfulness of meditation. She has cultivated her own brand of mindlessness. Mind erasure, she might choose to call it—a prying of the jaws of her terrier brain off tenacious and troubling thoughts, a repositioning of them on more palatable pictures.” Mrs. Ford relies on a memory trick to reel herself back from the brink of panic. When her own secrets and lies close in on her, she employs an exercise in which she works to recreate happy experiences in her mind. This is based on an acting technique called a sense/memory exercise in which an actor summons past experiences in order to embody emotional states required for the scene at hand. Can you relate to this? What do you do to calm yourself in anxiety-provoking situations?

“Susan recognized the tightening stomach, the flush and tingle of rising adrenalin that was taking hold of her, and she acknowledged her familiar companion—fear. She looked at Annie, sitting across from her, appearing utterly fearless. Was she? Or was she just able to mask anxiety? Fear is an emotion that is doled out unevenly. Susan had always grappled with an overabundance of it.” In this excerpt, Susan acknowledges that she is dominated by fear. She then makes a decision to override her instincts and do something (leave Winklemans’ and go to work at Frankie’s Disco) because she is afraid to do so. Do you agree with Susan that “fear is an emotion that is doled out unevenly?” Do you think you might have made different/better decisions in your life if you had been less (or more) fearful?

When Sammy finally arrives in Watch Hill, he says to the older Annie, “You have made your luck. Luck appears, and you charge in after it. I don’t do that. I pull back. I pulled back with Susan, I pulled back with you. That’s what I do. Then that luck is gone. A life is gone.” Do you agree that people have different capacities to seize opportunities? Have you ever caught yourself passing up a piece of luck because you felt unable or unwilling to grasp onto it and do what was required to make use of it?

Annie says to Sammy, “There’s nothing for me here. With Jack and with my stepson, I was part of this place, and it was part of me. I belonged. I hadn’t felt like I belonged to anything for so many years, not since I was a little girl. I lost that for a long time—or I threw it away. But I found it again with Jack. And I won’t get to keep that now. Not here. Not as Mrs. Ford.” Finding Mrs. Ford is filled with characters who don’t belong in the places they find themselves. Whether—as in the case of Sammy—they are foreigners in a new land, or—as in the case of young Susan—they go “slumming” in worlds their parents would not approve of, or—as in the case of the mature Mrs. Ford—they take on an identity that is not their own and “pass” for someone else in a closed society that would not necessarily forgive them were the truth to come out. Have you ever felt like an outsider? Or do you live in a community in which you feel a cohesive sense of place and belonging? How have these experiences affected your life?

“And, for that brief moment—inspired by new life or induced by morphine—she grasped the whirling swirl of the cosmos. She saw that the world turned then as it turns now and would continue to turn ever after. Human bodies came together and moved apart, but no connections were ever truly severed. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. And, then that clarity left her.” In her hospital bed after giving birth to the child she will give up for adoption, Annie has a brief moment of insight into the meaning of life. Do you believes there is a greater purpose to the events that unfold in our lives? Have you ever had a glimpse into something greater? Do you do have a practice—such as prayer or meditation—that helps you gain access to that awareness?

Finding Mrs. Ford ends on a cautiously hopeful note. While specific details remain ambiguous—and while their problems are far from solved—it appears that Annie and Sammy will meet their daughter and that they will make some attempt at a life together. What about this ending is satisfying or unsatisfying to you? And would you like to read more about these characters in future books?

Finding Mrs. Ford Book Club Questions PDF

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Named one of the five must-read summer mysteries for 2019 by forbes.com
Named one of the top ten summer reads of 2019 by Good Morning America
Named one of the top fifty summer books of 2019 by Book Riot

This recommended reading and discussion guide are shared and sponsored in partnership with Deborah Royce.