Ann Patchett
To learn more about the author and her works: http://www.annpatchett.com/
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Ann has an independent bookstore in Nashville, Tennessee. The name of the bookstore is Parnassus Books. Her works have been translated into 30 languages.
Ann Patchett novels
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Discussion Questions
1. For what reasons is "Our Town," the play by Thornton Wilder, significant and lasting? What about the play made Lara say that it “spoke to us, made us feel special and seen”? When Lara says, “ours was that kind of town,” what might she mean?
2. What issues explored in "Our Town" are particularly relevant to this novel, TOM LAKE?
3. Consider Lara’s three daughters: Emily, Maisie and Nell. What qualities and characteristics most define each of them? What does each care about? What does each of their intended professions suggest about who they are?
4. Why does Lara decide to tell her daughters the story of her relationship with Peter Duke? What concerns her about doing so? Generally speaking, what are the potential benefits or harms of parents sharing their personal life stories, their successes and failures with their children?
5. In what various ways is the environment of Tom Lake strikingly different for Lara? How might such a landscape have influenced her? What does she mean that her “unremarkable room with the remarkable view of Middle-of-Nowhere, Michigan, was everything that had ever been written about freedom and possibility”?
6. What is so powerful about the Nelsons' cherry farm when the young actors all visit for the first time? What is particularly valuable about such a landscape for Lara, even decades later, when she tells of it as her happiest day at Tom Lake?
7. Lara admits to Maisie’s dog, Hazel, that her acting career fell apart not because she wasn’t very good, but because she “had ceased to be brave.” What might this mean? Why does Lara not only not feel regret about the end of acting, but feel like she “just missed getting hit by a train”?
8. What are the implications of Lara’s “simple truth about life: you will forget much of it”?
9. What does Lara mean when she says, “good marriages are never as interesting as bad affairs”? What’s important about this idea? What are the many and particular qualities of Joe and Lara’s relationship that make it so solid and enduring?
10. Lara comes to realize that "Our Town" taught her that “the beauty and the suffering are equally true.” What does she mean? Why is this such a valuable lesson? What is the relationship between beauty and suffering? What are the implications of this regarding how to live life well?
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Tom Lake by ISBN: 9780063327528Publication Date: 2023-08-01In the spring of 2020, Lara's three daughters return to the family's orchard in Northern Michigan. While picking cherries, they beg their mother to tell them the story of Peter Duke, a famous actor with whom she shared both a stage and a romance years before at a theater company called Tom Lake. As Lara recalls the past, her daughters examine their own lives and relationship with their mother, and are forced to reconsider the world and everything they thought they knew.
Read A-Likes
The Paper Palace (Reese's Book Club) by ISBN: 9780593329825Publication Date: 2021-07-06It is a perfect August morning, and Elle, a fifty-year-old happily married mother of three, awakens at "The Paper Palace"--the family summer place which she has visited every summer of her life. But this morning is different: last night Elle and her oldest friend Jonas crept out the back door into the darkness and had sex with each other for the first time, all while their spouses chatted away inside. Now, over the next twenty-four hours, Elle will have to decide between the life she has made with her genuinely beloved husband, Peter, and the life she always imagined she would have had with her childhood love, Jonas, if a tragic event hadn't forever changed the course of their lives.
One Italian Summer by ISBN: 9781982166793Publication Date: 2022-03-01When Katy's mother dies, she is left reeling. Carol wasn't just Katy's mom, but her best friend.To make matters worse, their planned mother-daughter trip of a lifetime looms: to Positano, the town where Carol spent the summer before she met Katy's father. Katy is now is faced with embarking on the adventure alone. But on the Amalfi Coast, Katy begins to feel her mother's spirit. And then Carol appears--in the flesh, healthy, sun-tanned, and thirty years old. Over the course of one Italian summer, Katy gets to know Carol, not as her mother, but as the young woman before her.
Every Time You Go Away by ISBN: 9781250043832Publication Date: 2018-07-24Jane Holcomb isn’t exactly a widow. She divorced her husband, Ben, ten months before he died of a heart attack at the beach house he got in the divorce settlement. Two years later, Jane returns to the house to clean it up in preparation to sell it. Much to her surprise, Ben arrives soon after her. He has finally learned his lesson, finally realized she’s the love of his life and that he blew things big-time by cheating on her—unfortunately, he’s only learned this after death. Jane has to contend with her ghost of an ex-husband discreetly while also dealing with the coming and going of various guests
