Book Club Discussion Questions
Please be aware that this discussion guide will contain spoilers!
About this book
The questions and discussion topics that follow are intended to enhance your group’s reading of Caroline Leavitt’s profoundly moving novel,
Coming Back To Me. We hope you see these questions as inroads into a deeply-felt novel about love and loss, memory and redemption and the way families come apart—and together.
Gary, an orphan, and Molly, who feels herself orphaned, meet, fall in love, and marry, delighted to have formed a family unto themselves. But problems arise when the tightly knit, hardscrabble community they move into isn’t welcoming or approving. The community softens a bit when Molly gets pregnant, but then, days after giving birth, a devastating medical emergency arises and Molly is comatose. Gary finds himself caring for young Otis alone and facing a mountain of medical bills and the loss of his job. All hopes for happiness—and for Molly—seem to be evaporating, until a desperate Gary calls the only person left who can help them—Molly’s estranged sister Suzanne. Suzanne agrees to come only because she has no place left to go, but once she’s settled in Molly’s household, Suzanne gradually begins to appreciate the kind of life she used to ridicule, and to her amazement, she begins to fall in love with Gary. And then Molly awakens, and all three must now struggle to understand what has happened in the past, and what will happen now.
Told from the points of view of Gary, Molly and Suzanne, this is a novel that asks the question: how do you keep your loved ones safe? And provides the answer that if safety is not possible, community and family, and unexpected help from the most unexpected sources, sometimes is.
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
- Coming Back To Me begins with a preface, which unlike the rest of the book, is written in the present tense. Why do you think Leavitt chose to do that? What effect does the present tense create? Why do you think Leavitt started the book in the middle of the story and then backtracked to an earlier, happier time? What effect does that have? How would the book have been different if it was told in a linear fashion?
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Coming Back To Me deals a lot with the issue of community and the families we form, and how those families can ruin or protect us. Gary and Molly are drawn together because they both feel orphaned. When they move into New Jersey, they find a hardscrabble, tightly-knit community that perceives them as outsiders, which makes Gary and Molly so uncomfortable that they draw even closer together. What do you think Leavitt is saying about the notion of community? How and why does this notion change throughout the book?
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On page 301, Gary thinks: "Events didn’t always turn out the way you hoped they would. But the thing was that sometimes people came through. The most unexpected people in the most unexpected ways." Who were the unexpected people for Gary and how did they help? Why do you think this was this so surprising for Gary? Do you think his having been an orphan colored his thoughts on how things turn out in life?
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- How does the author develop themes of identity and belonging throughout the narrative?
- What role does the setting play in shaping the characters' decisions and relationships?
- Discuss how the ending reframes the events of the story. Were you surprised?
Unless otherwise stated, this discussion guide is reprinted with the permission of St. Martin's Griffin.
Any page references refer to a USA edition of the book, usually the trade paperback version, and may vary in other editions.
