Book Club Discussion Questions and Guide for Enormous Wings by Laurie Frankel

1. So just for starters, do you buy the premise here? A pregnant seventy-seven-year-old? Are you able to suspend your disbelief? Are you convinced by Dr. Kim's explanations, or are you content to have an element of magic in a novel that is otherwise realist?
2. How does this remarkable pregnancy serve as a metaphor for issues of female agency and health care in this novel? What about issues of senior agency and health care?
3. What links are there between the choices elders get to make (and don't get to make) and the choices pregnant people get to make (and don't get to make)?
4. Pepper tells the reader about teaching a short story by Gabriel García Márquez called "A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings." How do the themes and moral of that story apply to this novel? How else do enormous wings feature here?
5. Pepper's three adult children are very different from one another. Whose approach to caring for Pepper seems best or kindest or most effective and whose least? Which of these parent/adult-child relationships was most relatable to you?
6. Maisie tells Pepper that Moth is very popular, and indeed, everyone wants to dance with him at Senior Prom. He could date just about anyone, which we suspect has been true for many years, but he chooses only Pepper, and chooses her at once and unwaveringly. Why her, and what does it tell you about him?
7. Pepper also falls in love with Moth at more or less first sight. She falls for Maisie and Dot just as quickly. Are relationships easier or closer as we age?
8. Why do you think the author opens the book with a profane Episcopal priest? What is Father Frank's role in this story?
9. Dot's reaction to her cancer diagnosis is "One of these days, you get something you won't live through. Happens to the best of us. And, come to think of it, the worst." How does Dot go about the process of dying? What role does her dying play in a book about new life?
10. Do you like Roger? Does Pepper? Discuss their version of divorce and their relationship all these years later.
11. Are you convinced by Moth's arguments that there are lots of ways it's easier for older adults to parent an infant? What have Darcy and Alice sacrificed to parenthood that Pepper and Moth wouldn't have to?
12. Pro-choice and anti-choice activists are both interested in Pepper as a spokesperson. Why does each side think Pepper embodies their cause? How do abortion arguments on both sides differ from the ones we all know when the abortion-seeker is an old woman?
13. How have Maisie, Dot, and Pepper's pre-Roe v. Wade memories shaped their positions on reproductive care? Are there other policy areas where we are or should be taking guidance from the wisdom of the elders?

Unless otherwise stated, this discussion guide is reprinted with the permission of Henry Holt and Company. Any page references refer to a USA edition of the book, usually the trade paperback version, and may vary in other editions.