FOR BOOKCLUBS
To contact Susan Doherty for a book club event please send a detailed email via the CONTACT link (dohertys@selwyn.ca) in the header field. She would love to meet your group in person, or via Zoom.
“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
―Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood
Book Club questions for Monday Rent Boy and A Secret Music (see below): This list is constantly updated and reflects the questions asked at book clubs.
The role of mentorship…how can mentorship give a person a leg up?
Who were the bystanders?
Did Ernie’s love of animals help him or hurt him in the end?
Why did Ernie become an abuser when the experience was so heinous? Why did the author choose to focus on Men, when the proportion of women who have been abused is so much higher?
Which minor character did you relate to the most?
Did it add or subtract to have the setting in Somerset UK?
What were the recurring symbols or imagery in the book? Resilience. Secrecy. Shame. Sacrifice.
Khalil Gibran. Why was he on page one?
Who is the sacrifice? Gibran. Aslan. Ernie.
What is Khalil Gibran’s backstory? Gibran died to save his work. Aslan died to save Edmund. Ernie died to save Hughie and Arthur. Alice Munro’s relationship with her daughter died to save her work.
Were the characters developed to show their specific motivations?
Is Ernie forgivable? Arthur??
Could Arthur have saved Ernie?
What is Marina’s role in the story? Who are the other bystanders? What did she see in Arthur that unsealed her childhood?
Did the plot twists help to disguise a difficult theme??
What was Ernie’s true motivation at the end?
Why is Lisetta attracted to Arthur?? Why did Arthur let that relationship flounder?
Does Arthur or Ernie replace the child that Marina never had?
Can you ever recover from being sexually abused as a boy, and if so, what does it take?
Why did Arthur betray Ernie? Was that forgivable?
Is Ernie a good person? A good person who has done bad things or a bad person who did a good thing?
What would have happened if Arthur had supported Ernie in front of the warden?
Is Arthur capable of loving another person?
What was the dynamic between Arthur And Ernie?
What can we all learn from this story?
What is the central conflict?
Why were the mothers incapable of protecting their sons? Did the mothers know?? When did they know?
Why is there room in Ernie’s heart for Arthur’s mother?
Why do abusers think they can “get away with it?” Is pedophilia a sexual orientation, an abuse of power, access to minors, a mental illness? All child sexual abusers are pedophiles. Not all pedophiles are sexual abusers. Virtuous pedophiles know there is a victim.
Will Arthur be a good father to Hughie Digby?
List all the people who let Ernie down.
List all the people who raised Arthur up.
Explain the power dynamic of priests and altar boys, Boy Scout leaders, Hollywood, Jeffrey Epstein, Johnny Kitagawa
Why did Ernie remain so loyal to Arthur?? Was the boyhood bond strong enough to transcend the hurdles they both needed to navigate?
Are 12-year-old girls more resilient than 12-year-old boys? Do girls have a communication advantage?
Are parents aware of the dangers of online abuse, grooming, and the file-sharing that goes viral?
Why was Ernie given a backstory, whereas Quimby and the Zipper were not, which makes them less “understandable”?
Alice Munro controversy
Pornhub and sex addiction
Book Club questions for A Secret Music
Book Club Questions/Discussion
A Secret Music
Could you forgive Lawrence?
Could you forgive Christine? Did she feel like a survivor?
Was Francis likeable??
What was Muttney’s relationship to Francis?
Why did Lawrence play the wrong nocturne at Mr. Cushing’s Long Room?
The role of belonging. Who best fits that need?
Who had secrets?
Why was Patricia’s relationship with the Mother Superior so complicated?
Francis desperately wanted to be Protestant, not Catholic. There are so many small hidden examples. Can you find them?
Why was Mr. WInston, the milkman, in the book? What did he represent for Lawrence?
What and who were slaughtered?
From the Bible, who is John??
What was Lawrence thinking on the last page of the book? Was it right to dedicate the composition to his mother?
What was Lawrence's purpose in going to Camp Nominingue?
Discuss the idea of music or sculpture or art as a concept of immortality, (where the composer dies, and that Lawrence’s composition was an attempt to immortalize John)
Were you able to forgive Christine at the end?? Did she feel like a survivor? Did Muttney?
How was stigma about “Flattened anxiety” used in the book to show secrets (I made up the term flattened anxiety because depression hadn’t been coined)
Everybody in the family had a secret. What was Father Leo’s secret?
p.s. Did you know I was referring to the Pulitzer Prize? I made up a name so as not to disregard the real winners!! But the judges were the same, and on the very date, those circumstances all occurred at Carnegie Hall, including the music.
Cowell was in San Quentin for five years for a moral crime. He was a homosexual.
- What did you like best about the book? What did you not find
satisfying as a reader?
- Describe the pivotal role of the mother in a child's development into
adulthood, in this book and generally, if you like.
- How successful was the author in portraying the divide between English
and French, Protestant, and Catholic in pre-war Montreal?
- Is Francis' work running a slaughterhouse intended as a contrast to
the beauty of the music that governs Lawrence's and Christine's lives or does it represent his lowered status as a Catholic?
- How successfully did the author develop the sense of a specific time
and place? What techniques work well and what is less successful? As a
bigger question, does a work of fiction need to be accurate in all
details of a time and place?
- How successfully did the author convey attitudes to mental illness at
the time?
- How successfully does the author write about music?
- Francis was physically and mentally absent from the family, but how
successfully present was he as a character in the book?
- Why was the second half of the book more successful than the first
half? Or was it the reverse?