If Only
We all face forks in the road. The moments when life veers sharply from the plans we’ve carefully made. A sudden illness. A family crisis. A future quietly slipping out of reach. And in those moments, two words haunt us, laced with regret: If Only.
Andrew Dumont was a rising tech executive in New York City when a phone call on a subway platform split his life in two.His mother’s cancer diagnosis pulled him home. A novel illness permanently altered his body, leaving him fighting for breath in a medical system that couldn’t explain why. A long-awaited pregnancy ended in emergency surgery. The career, the city, the body, the future he’d planned. All of it was taken, piece by piece, over the course of years.
The regret nearly killed him, there were nights it almost did.
But years later, holding his newborn son, a boy who exists only because of every wrong turn, Dumont discovers something he could never have seen from inside the suffering. The life you didn’t choose might be building toward the very thing you’d never give back.
If Only is a memoir about chronic illness, faith, fatherhood, and the slow transformation of regret into recognition. It is unflinching about the cost of suffering. The loneliness, the dismissal, the erosion of the person you used to be, and honest that not every detour leads somewhere meaningful.
It is also a story about what can happen when it does. About the strange grace that visits us in the dark. And about the hope that waits on the other side of the worst years of your life.
For readers of Crying in H Mart, Between Two Kingdoms, Brain on Fire, and When Breath Becomes Air. Some pain produces nothing but more pain. Some questions remain unanswered.
But sometimes, the road you never would have chosen leads to the only place you were meant to arrive.
These book club discussion questions were prepared by Bookclubs staff.
Book club questions for If Only by Andrew James Dumont
Use these discussion questions to guide your next book club meeting.
When the book opens, Andrew is a rising tech executive in New York City. How much of his sense of self seemed tied to his career and the city? Did that change how you understood what he lost?
Andrew experienced the medical system as a caregiver for his mother, as a patient himself, and later as a partner going through IVF and an emergency surgery with Jordyn. How did his perspective shift in each role?
Have you or someone you love lived with a chronic illness? If so, which parts of Andrew's experience resonated with you? If not, what did you learn from his story? Were there costs of chronic illness - emotional, financial, social, or practical - that you hadn't considered before reading?
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Create My ClubWhat did you expect this book to be about going in? How would you describe it to a friend now? And who would you recommend it to?
Jordyn stood by Andrew through years of illness, and then he had to be there for her through an ectopic pregnancy and emergency surgery. How did their relationship change as they took turns being the one who needed support?
At one of his lowest moments, Andrew simply asks God for help. His health doesn't suddenly improve, but something inside him changes. How did you respond to the way he wrote about faith?
Andrew is careful not to claim that every terrible thing happens for a reason, and admits some suffering has no beautiful explanation. Why do you think that honesty matters to the story? Did it make the hopeful parts feel more believable?
Near the end, Andrew traces every hard thing that happened and realizes that if any one of them had gone differently, Hudson wouldn't exist. How did that moment change the way you looked back on the rest of the book?
The book is built around a phrase almost everyone has said: "if only." What were your own "if only" thoughts while reading? Did the book change how you think about a detour in your own life?
If Only Book Club Questions PDF
Download a printable PDF of these discussion questions to bring to your meeting.