How to be Both Reading Guide & Discussion Questions

Book Club Discussion Questions

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For supplemental discussion material see our Beyond the Book article, A History of Fresco that Leads to Francesco del Cossa and our BookBrowse Review of How to be Both.

Please be aware that this discussion guide will contain spoilers!

The questions, discussion topics, and reading list that follow are intended to enhance your reading group's discussion of How to be both, the playfully experimental, emotionally wrenching, and aesthetically inquisitive two-in-one novel by Ali Smith, which juxtaposes the stories of two young women from different centuries and different countries to explore the intrinsic values of art in the shaping of one's identity.


Introduction
Passionate, compassionate, vitally inventive and scrupulously playful, Ali Smith's novels are like nothing else.Borrowing from painting's fresco technique to make an original literary double-take, How to be both is a novel all about art's versatility. It's a fast-moving genre-bending conversation between forms, times, truths and fictions. There's a Renaissance artist of the 1460s. There's the child of a child of the 1960s. Two tales of love and injustice twist into a singular yarn where time gets timeless, structural gets playful, knowing gets mysterious, fictional gets real—and all life's givens get given a second chance.


Questions and Topics for Discussion

1. One of the many unique things about How to be both is the fact that the book has been printed in two ways, half with the section "Camera" preceding "Eyes" and half the other way around. Discuss among the members of your group (or, if you read this yourself, imagine) the way your experience of the novel as a whole was different depending on which section you read first. How does this first impression influence your ability to imagine the experience of the reverse order, too, or if you were to read the novel again the opposite way? Do you think one order is stronger than the other, and if so why?
2. What are some of the types of dualities or binaries explored in the novel, implicitly and explicitly? When characters are aware of them, does that recognition of a thing or scenario as being "both" lead to greater clarity or greater ambiguity?
3. Compare the first-person voice of Francescho with the third-person voice of George. How do these narrative differences reflect each of their characters as well as the question of what it means to see vs. seen?

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