Five Tuesdays in Winter

Though “Creature” takes place over the course of only two weeks, it reads as a coming-of-age story. How do we see fourteen-year-old Carol—who seems by turns precocious and heartbreakingly innocent—move out of her childhood, finally and irrevocably, in this story? What does she gain, and lose, during her time as a babysitter for the Pikes? How does writing play into her journey and maturation?

Both Mitchell in “Five Tuesdays in Winter” and Oda in “North Sea” are single parents struggling to connect with twelve-year-old daughters. Discuss King’s depiction of parental love, and of preteen girlhood. How do Mitchell and Oda each navigate the challenge of parenting? How do Paula and Hanne’s actions reflect how they feel, even when words might not?

In “When in the Dordogne,” the main character sees his familiar surroundings from a new perspective when he plays basketball with Grant and Ed on the town court: “I looked around at my town: the gazebo, the swings and jungle gym, the baseball diamond . . . I’d never seen it from right here” (p. 87). How is this representative of other ways that unlikely but tender caregivers Grant and Ed help him see his life from a new vantage?

In “North Sea,” Oda reflects: “Adults hid their pain, their fears, their failure, but adolescents hid their happiness, as if to reveal it would risk its loss” (p. 113). Do you think this is true? Why?

Talk about the end of “North Sea.” What did you make of this scene? Is it an act of cruelty? Is it the only way Hanne can express her own need to be cared for? Both?

Do you imagine Hanne and Oda’s relationship will have changed when they return home from their vacation? Will this experience bring them the returned closeness Oda longs for

In “Timeline,” Lucy describes William’s perspective on his open marriage: “they let each other be exactly who they were in any given minute . . . as if after sixty seconds you became someone else” (p. 133). Several other stories in this book explore the idea of identity and its capacity to change—or not change—over time. How do you experience your own identity? Do you feel you have basically stayed the same person, or do you remember other versions of yourself from other times in your life?

In the final moment in “Hotel Seattle,” the main character finds his boyfriend Steve waiting for him in the hotel lobby after he spends the night with Paul. “He was older than me and wise as God,” the main character thinks of Steve before they walk home together (p. 168). Discuss this scene. Did it surprise you? How is “Hotel Seattle” not only a story of violence and pain, but a love story?

In “Waiting for Charlie,” the nurse tells Charlie’s grandfather that smells “trigger memory quicker and deeper than any other kind of stimulant to the senses” (p. 172). Do you experience this connection between scent and memory in your own life?

In “Mansard,” young mother Audrey becomes captivated by Ben Yardley, the elegant and semi-estranged father of her friend Frances, when he unexpectedly reenters Frances’s life. Why is Audrey so drawn to Ben? What do you make of her subsequent futile efforts to find him? Is she truly searching for him, or for something else unnamable?

Discuss setting in “South,” in which young mother Marie-Claude drives her two children from DC to South Carolina. Why do you think “South” takes place in a car? Do car rides allow for different kinds of conversations? Revelations?

Marie-Claude becomes frustrated when Flo corrects her on the details of her “Austrian ghost story.” She realizes her ex-husband must have told Flo the story, but left out a detail key to Marie-Claude’s experience. Have you ever felt that one of your own experiences or stories was co-opted by someone else after you shared it? Are there family stories in your life that you feel a sense of ownership over, even if you were not there to experience them?

“The Man at the Door,” in which the main character is tormented by a visitor as she attempts to finish writing a novel, makes a stylistic departure from the rest of the collection. What demons does this visitor represent for the main character? Does he represent forces of evil that recur across many of the stories in this book? What is the effect of King’s choice to personify them in this way? What do you think of the story’s ending?

The ten stories in this book take place generations and oceans apart—from Germany to Seattle, from the early 1950s to the late 1980s—and center a wide variety of main characters, yet the collection feels deeply cohesive. What common threads link them? What themes recur? Why do you think King chose to group these stories together? How do you see them in conversation with one another?

King writes from both male and female perspectives in these stories—many of which feature characters who, in large and small ways, either subvert or struggle with traditional gender roles and patriarchal expectations. What are some of these moments of subversion, struggle, or both?

What is the role of place in these stories? How do King’s evocatively rendered settings—the coastal Saxon town where Oda and Hanne vacation in “North Sea,” the Vermont apartment Lucy moves into with her brother in “Timeline,” the coastal New England town where Carol lives and babysits in “Creature”—influence each one’s tone and mood?

Many of the stories in this collection address pain and cruelty head-on, yet ultimately feel uplifting, buoyed by small acts of incredible love and generosity. How does King hold both brutality and tenderness in her stories?