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Discussion Guide

Our Wives Under the Sea

Leah is changed. A marine biologist, she left for a routine expedition months earlier, only this time her submarine sank to the sea floor. When she finally surfaces and returns home, her wife Miri knows that something is wrong. Barely eating and lost in her thoughts, Leah rotates between rooms in their apartment, running the taps morning and night. Whatever happened in that vessel, whatever it was they were supposed to be studying before they were stranded, Leah has carried part of it with her, onto dry land and into their home. As Miri searches for answers, desperate to understand what happened below the water, she must face the possibility that the woman she loves is slipping from her grasp.

By turns elegiac and furious, wry and heartbreaking, Our Wives Under the Sea is an exploration of the unknowable depths within each of us, and the love that compels us nevertheless toward one another.

These book club questions are from the publisher, Macmillan.

Book club questions for Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield

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

Discuss the novel’s first line: “The deep sea is a haunted house: a place in which things that ought not to exist move about in the darkness” (p. 3). How does that image set the tone of the novel to come? What role do ghosts and hauntings play in the story?
The novel alternates between Leah’s and Miri’s perspectives. How are their styles of narration and worldviews similar and different? Were you more drawn to one than the other? How did the dual-voice structure affect your reading experience?
Leah believes that “to know the ocean . . . is to recognize the teeth it keeps half-hidden” (p. 46). What is her relationship to the ocean throughout her life? What is Miri’s?
Miri struggles to fully capture her relationship with Leah: “loving is something we all do alone and through different sets of eyes. . . . It’s easy to understand why someone might love a person but far more difficult to push yourself down into that understanding” (pp. 48–49). Do you agree? How do you understand Miri and Leah’s marriage as described by each of them? How does it change over the course of the novel?
Miri reflects: “I used to think there was such a thing as emptiness, that there were places in the world one could go and be alone. This, I think, is still true, but the error in my reasoning was to assume that alone was somewhere you could go, rather than somewhere you had to be left” (p. 4). What do you think she means? Do you agree? How do Miri and Leah each experience aloneness in the novel? Is that the same as loneliness for them?
What do you make of Leah’s employer, the Centre for Marine Enquiry? What do you believe the true purpose of Leah’s mission was?
During the months they spend under the sea, Leah and her crewmates have no way of keeping track of time. How does that affect them? In what other ways is life different on the submarine? What is the dynamic between Leah, Matteo, and Jelka on board, and how do they each react to their circumstances?
When Leah is under the sea, Miri frequents a website for women who role-play that their husbands are in outer space, as well as a website for people with missing family members. She begins to understand that “the grief process is also the coping process and if the grief is frozen by ambiguity, by the constant possibility of reversal, then so is the ability to cope. It’s not grief, one woman posted, it’s more like a haunting” (p. 107). Why is Miri drawn to these websites? In what ways does her experience with Leah resemble those of the people on the websites? How does it diverge?
Leah tells us that she doesn’t know who she is writing for: “I’m not sure I really want [Miri] to know about it. I can’t say whether this is a story I actually want to tell” (p. 135). Why do you think she writes down her memories of the mission?
Compare Miri’s mother’s long illness to Leah’s transformation in the aftermath of her expedition. How are they similar and different? How does Miri react to both?
Before she goes out the escape hatch, Jelka is convinced she hears a voice speaking to her. After her death, Leah begins to hear it, too. How do you interpret the voice?
After the power comes back on the submarine, Leah persuades Matteo not to immediately begin their ascent: “I just want to know that it wasn’t for nothing. I just want to know what’s here” (p. 202). Do you sympathize with her decision to keep going, in an attempt to find life? When she does, she writes her name down in a logbook and “press[es] it to the window, so that the creature could see” (p. 211). Why do you think she does this?
What is a sea lung, and what is its significance in the novel? What does it represent for Miri, specifically, and what does it suggest about the nature of transformation and flux?
Juna tells Miri that “the thing about losing someone isn’t the loss but the absence of afterward. D’you know what I mean? The endlessness of that” (p. 217). How does this novel depict the experience of loss and grief for the different characters?
Do you think Miri made the right decision in releasing Leah into the sea at the end of the novel? What do you think the future holds for each of them?

Our Wives Under the Sea Book Club Questions PDF

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