DISCUSSION GUIDES

Summary: In her most revealing and powerful memoir yet, Glennon Doyle, the activist, speaker, bestselling author, and “patron saint of female empowerment” (People) explores the joy and peace we discover when we stop striving to meet others’ expectations and start trusting the voice deep within us.

Summary: At thirty-nine, Josie Bordelon has left behind her career as the "it" black beauty of the '90s and is now the director of admissions at San Francisco's most sought after private school. While managing the shenanigans of over-anxious parents at school, Josie is also trying to keep her seventeen-year-old daughter from making the same mistakes she did.

Summary: On a sunny summer morning by the sea in New England, Susan Ford’s cocoon of privilege is threatened when an Iraqi man from her distant past boards a plane in Baghdad to come find her.

Summary:

A New York Times Notable Book of 2020, now a Hulu Original Series!

"'Saint X' is hypnotic. Schaitkin's characters...are so intelligent and distinctive it feels not just easy, but necessary, to follow them. I devoured [it] in a day."
-Oyinkan Braithwaite, New York Times Book Review

When you lose the person who is most essential to you, who do you become?

Recommended by Entertainment Weekly, included in Good Morning America's 20 Books We're Excited for in 2020 & named as one of Vogue's Best Books to Read This Winter, Bustle's Most Anticipated Books of February 2020, and O Magazine's 14 of the Best Books to Read This February!

Hailed as a "marvel of a book" and "brilliant and unflinching," Alexis Schaitkin's stunning debut, Saint X, is a haunting portrait of grief, obsession, and the bond between two sisters never truly given the chance to know one another.

Claire is only seven years old when her college-age sister, Alison, disappears on the last night of their family vacation at a resort on the Caribbean island of Saint X. Several days later, Alison's body is found in a remote spot on a nearby cay, and two local men-employees at the resort-are arrested. But the evidence is slim, the timeline against it, and the men are soon released. The story turns into national tabloid news, a lurid mystery that will go unsolved. For Claire and her parents, there is only the return home to broken lives.

Years later, Claire is living and working in New York City when a brief but fateful encounter brings her together with Clive Richardson, one of the men originally suspected of murdering her sister. It is a moment that sets Claire on an obsessive pursuit of the truth-not only to find out what happened the night of Alison's death but also to answer the elusive question: Who exactly was her sister? At seven, Claire had been barely old enough to know her: a beautiful, changeable, provocative girl of eighteen at a turbulent moment of identity formation.

As Claire doggedly shadows Clive, hoping to gain his trust, waiting for the slip that will reveal the truth, an unlikely attachment develops between them, two people whose lives were forever marked by the same tragedy.

For readers of Emma Cline's The Girls and Lauren Groff's Fates and Furies, Saint X is a flawlessly drawn and deeply moving story that culminates in an emotionally powerful ending.

Summary: From the author of Me Before You, set in Depression-era America, a breathtaking story of five extraordinary women and their remarkable journey through the mountains of Kentucky and beyond.

Summary: #1 best seller on Amazon for biographies/memoirs! Little Sister is the captivating and beautifully written memoir of a young woman who is reared in a religious cult in Massachusetts during the 1950s and 1960’s and how she managed to leave and become a successful businesswoman – a story of resilience and hope.

Summary: Raised by his grandmother in Chicago’s South Side, young Claude McKay Love hopes going away to college in Missouri will help him escape the havoc of his life there, but he discovers in this coming-of-age story that it’s not so easy to leave your past behind—or find a safe place to land.

Summary: In this captivating dual narrative novel, a modern-day woman discovers remarkable parallels between her own life and her home’s previous owner, a quintessential 1950s housewife whose hidden notes inspire her to discover what it means to be a wife fighting for her place in a patriarchal society.

Summary: Olive, Again is a novel-in-stories by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Olive Kitteridge. A New York Times Bestseller. Prickly, wry, resistant to change yet ruthlessly honest and deeply empathetic, Olive Kitteridge is “a compelling life force” (San Francisco Chronicle). The iconic Olive struggles to understand not only herself and her own life but the lives of those around her in the town of Crosby, Maine. The unforgettable Olive will continue to startle us, to move us, and to inspire us—in Elizabeth Strout’s words—“to bear the burden of the mystery with as much grace as we can.”