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Love and Other Hazards
Love and Other Hazards is a novel about urban singles stumbling toward fulfillment in an odyssey of sex, love, and parenting.
Glenda Fieldston is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art with her seven-year-old daughter, Astrid, when Eugene Lerman comes walking by with his eight-year-old daughter, Meredith, a schoolmate of Astrid’s. The families spot each other, Glenda and Eugene engage in long-range cursory assessments, and then they go their separate ways.
But not for long. Glenda and Eugene cross paths professionally soon after, and circumstances at work bring them into close association. So begins a friendship fraught with complications. Glenda’s independence is self-imposed and fierce. Eugene’s was foisted on him by a wife who left him. Although Glenda’s and Eugene’s personal demons are incompatible, their longings are, confoundedly, in harmony. Their cautious friendship is further inhibited by past and present relationships, and it remains to be seen if they can break out of their set ways to make a break for uncharted love.
These discussion questions were provided by the publisher, River Grove Books.
Book club questions for Love and Other Hazards by Claudia Riess
Use these discussion questions to guide your next book club meeting.
How do Glenda's and Eugene's respective relationships with their daughters influence their relationship with each other?
In what ways do Glenda and Eugene modify each other's attitudes about love and intimacy?
What factors in both Glenda's childhood and Eugene's had the profoundest impact on their adult lives?
Glenda's and Eugene's peripheral relationships spark or impede their growing affection for each other?
How do Astrid's and Meredith's outlooks and behaviors change during the course of their imposed companionship?
Putting yourself in Glenda's shoes, how would you have responded to Eugene's spiking your tea --- and what followed?
Love and Other Hazards Book Club Questions PDF
Click here for a printable PDF of the Love and Other Hazards discussion questions
Author Bio
Claudia Riess is a Vassar graduate who has worked in the editorial departments of The New Yorker magazine and Holt, Rinehart and Winston books. LOVE AND OTHER HAZARDS is her fourth novel. Her first novel, RECLINING NUDE, was published by Stein and Day. Oliver Sacks, author of AWAKENINGS, had said her first book was “exquisite --- and delicate,” “a most courageous book, full of daring --- a daring only possible to a passionate and pure heart.”