Stage Seven

Stage Seven is largely a story about love. What are the different forms of love depicted in the novel? Which of the characters are most transformed by love in the course of the story?

Have you had personal experience supporting friends or family members with Alzheimer’s disease? What, if anything, did you learn about the disease from this book that you didn’t previously know?

Barbara and Vicky are sisters with very different personality types. Did you relate more to either one of these two characters? Are you more of a Barbara or a Vicky, and how so?

When siblings jointly care for a parent with dementia or another health problem, they may disagree on important decisions, but one source of conflict is the burden of care, which is often unevenly distributed. How did you feel about the way these issues are addressed in Stage Seven? Did anything in particular strike you as unfair, or is there anything you feel you would have handled differently had you been involved?

How are Sarah and Scott affected by their grandmothers’ Alzheimer’s diagnoses? How are they impacted by the affair between Barbara and Jack? What other role do these two younger characters play in the story?

Why do you think Barbara feels guilty about her affair with Jack? Do you think that Jack experiences guilt as well?  Do you think that he should? Why or why not? How did you feel about their involvement?

At the start of the book, Barbara has been divorced for fifteen years from an unfaithful husband. How has that experience shaped her general outlook on life? How does it impact her relationship with Jack?

Jack says, “When you’ve met one person with Alzheimer’s, you’ve met one person with Alzheimer’s.” How is this theory reflected in the characters of Dolly and Helen, the two dementia patients in the story? Despite their differences later in life, how were these two women similar before the onset of the disease?

Barbara’s story takes place in the present, mostly following her life over the course of a single summer. But Jack and Helen Winokur’s story jumps around in time, revealing different periods of their relationship in nonsequential order. What overall effect does this nonlinear style of storytelling have on the book as a whole?

“We knew they’d get worse,” Jack says to Barbara, referring to the inevitability of Dolly’s and Helen’s respective declines. Though there is no cure for Alzheimer’s, does the book offer a message of hope and comfort? In what way?