Sunday's on the Phone to Monday (37 page)

TOUCHSTONE READING GROUP GUIDE

Sunday's on the Phone to Monday

By Catherine Lowell

This reading group guide for
Sunday's on the Phone to Monday
includes an introduction, discussion questions, ideas for enhancing your book club, and a Q&A with author
Christine Reilly
. The suggested questions are intended to help your reading group find new and interesting angles and topics for your discussion. We hope that these ideas will enrich your conversation and increase your enjoyment of the book.

This is a love story about the Simone family. Claudio and Mathilde met when they were teenagers and created a romantic bohemian lifestyle in nineties Manhattan before having three children, each daughter unique. There's the eldest, Natasha, who possesses a cool and analytical outlook on life; Lucy, who tries to get through her debilitating heart condition by listening to classic rock and befriending her mentally ill aunt; and Carly, adopted from China, who develops a fascination with her true origins.

For Discussion

1. Discuss the device of capitalizing the word “Heart.” Why do you think the author made this choice? How do you think the “Heart,” both literally and metaphorically, threads through each character in different ways?

2. How does music, especially classic rock, factor into this book? How does it bond and define the Simones? Is there a song or artist your family bonds over, or one that instantly brings back a certain memory?

3. How do Mathilde's roles on the stage help her interpret her personal life? Has a piece of art, such as a book or film, ever reflected a problem in your life and helped you come to a decision?

4. How does Claudio and Mathilde's relationship change when they realize that Mathilde is pregnant with their first child? How do they try to adopt the “roles” of parents-to-be? What does our society dictate a good parent should be, and how is that similar or different from Claudio and Mathilde's idea of good parenting?

5. Do you agree with Sawyer and Claudio's decision to not tell their partners about Sawyer's marriage to Jane? In the chapter “Claudio's Debt Begins,” Claudio says of Mathilde, “She'd never let it happen,” and Sawyer says of Noah, “I'd never be able to pay him back.” Which reasoning do you relate to most, and what would you do in this situation?

6. In the chapter “Underling,” Otis's friend Darren says, “Love only works if both people are equally happy. Or equally miserable.” Think of your own relationships. How much do you agree with this? In what ways is Claudio and Mathilde's relationship a balancing act to reach this equilibrium?

7. How do the sisters complement one another? What is each sister's role in the Simone family?

8. Claudio and Mathilde were bohemian teens steeped in nostalgia, and don't care for with pop culture. Do you think their relationship would blossom differently if they'd met in 2015, and how?

9. Carly feels a sense of detachment from her sisters because she is not biologically related to them. To what extent is a family defined by biological relationships, and, in your experience, what else defines a family?

10. Claudio and Mathilde do not keep apace with modern technological devices, such as TV or computers, choosing instead to steep themselves in nostalgic items like old records. How does the prevalence of technology distinguish the Simone sisters' lives from that of their parents?

A Conversation with Christine Reilly

You've said that you're a big fan of
The Virgin Suicides,
and even have a tattoo that says
lux
. Which authors have had the greatest influence on you, and how important is it that writers read?

It goes without saying that writers need to read as much as possible. I love the feel of books on paper, but I also have the Kindle app on my phone and read during free moments—on the subway, while brushing my teeth, while in line. One of the perks of being a writer is that a writer can read simultaneously to develop craft and for pleasure.

But how difficult is that favorite author question? I will try my best. My favorite book is
Les Misérables
by Victor Hugo, followed by
Crime and Punishment
by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. My favorite authors are Jennifer Egan, Toni Morrison, Vladimir Nabokov, Joan Didion, Kazuo Ishiguro, James Baldwin, J. D. Salinger, Saul Bellow, Jeffrey Eugenides, David Gilbert, Aimee Bender, Tim O'Brien, Megan Abbott, and David Foster Wallace.

My favorite playwrights are William Shakespeare, Arthur Miller, and Anton Chekhov.

My favorite poets are William Blake, D. A. Powell, Ilya Kaminsky, Terrance Hayes, and Sappho.

My favorite nonfiction authors are Lawrence Wright and Elie Wiesel.

My favorite children's authors are Louis Sachar and J. K. Rowling.

My favorite young adult authors are Judy Blume, S. E. Hinton, and Stephen Chbosky.

Ernest Hemingway taught me how to write dialogue. Amy Bloom taught me how to understand characters. And a book I recently read that I love is
Station Eleven
by Emily St. John Mandel.

Is that enough? I don't think so. I can name hundreds of other authors who have influenced my work. Every time I am touched by a piece of writing, I try to email or write a letter to the author to let them know how moved I was.

How did your experience as a poet affect the writing process of this novel?

My background in poetry made the whole writing process painstakingly slow, but I cannot imagine writing any differently. As I write, I pay the most attention to the word, then the sentence, then the paragraph, and lastly the book as a whole. I have a microscopic palette.
Sunday's on the Phone to Monday
initially came into the world as a book of poetry when I was nineteen. Actually, it started with the last poem of the book
What Makes Me Anxious.
In grad school I studied poetry, but toyed with the idea of writing a novel as a side project. I created the Simone family, who didn't leave me alone for the next four years. Once I had something faintly resembling a finished novel, I queried a laundry list of agents, many of whom told me that the collection of words I had strewn together was beautiful, but in no shape or form a novel. “Too quiet”; “I'm in love with Lucy but what's the story?”; “Fascinating characters but no plot”—comments like that. Back to the drawing board. I spent that summer disassembling each scene and putting it in a different order, and voilà! A plot was born. I was the last person to know about it.

Music runs throughout this book and the Simones love classic rock, especially the Beatles. Did you listen to a particular playlist to inspire you as you wrote?

One playlist, no. Certain artists and albums—yes, absolutely. This seems obvious but all of the Beatles albums, especially
Abbey Road
—certainly its B-side medley. And the Beach Boys, and Bob Dylan. Those were probably the top three. Radiohead, Simon & Garfunkel, Air, Elliott Smith, Jack White, the White Stripes, Fiona Apple, James Taylor, Tom Waits, Ravi Shankar, Otis Redding, Janis Joplin also. But my playlists depended so much on when and where I was in my life. When I edit, I like to listen to Elton John, or Motown—Gladys Knight & the Pips, the Foundations, the Four Tops, the Jackson 5. I love old music, but I am discovering new music all the time. I love music festivals. My mom went to the original Woodstock when she was fifteen, so I like to think it's in my genes!

Growing up, I loved making personalized playlists for my friends. I do that as a writing teacher now, but with books: I “prescribe” each of my students certain books and authors to read, catering to what I think would resonate with each student and expand his or her mind. It's the same with music, and with all kinds of art, and it's so different for every person. I like to think that you only finally know somebody if you can make her or him a playlist they'd love.

You earned your master's in writing in New York and also teach and live in New York. To what extent is your experience of present-day New York different from the New York of Claudio and Mathilde's heyday?

My family is from New York—Queens, Long Island, and the Bronx. My mom knew the 1970s New York. She lived in Hell's Kitchen in her twenties . . . now Hell's Kitchen means designer cookie shops and restaurants. I've read books and seen films about New York from all eras, and of course I feel wistful about what I haven't experienced, but people are guaranteed to always feel that about some era. That's the thing about time. Safety is a priority—what I appreciate about present-day New York is not feeling like someone's going to stab me when I cross the street. But then I see art like that photography series where the CBGB has turned into a John Varvatos boutique and I think,
Something is destroyed when rents rise
. And I wonder,
Could anything have prevented such a demise of New York's character?
But there are little areas all around the city with history and grit if you look for them.

How did your experience working in a hospital inform your writing of Jane? What sort of research did you do to accurately portray a character with mental illness?

During my time at the hospital, I worked with several schizophrenic patients, who were the original inspirations for Jane. This is the most moving thing I remember learning about schizophrenia: living with the disease is many people whispering, speaking and shouting in your brain at all times. There's a recording that simulates the internal symptoms of schizophrenia, and after listening to it for a mere five minutes I felt extremely agitated. I had a difficult, difficult struggle imagining life with those voices
all the time
. In this sense, I entered Jane's heart before her head. And I pray that I did her justice. A couple of friends of mine who are doctors helped check the historical facts, such as medications in the 1970s and the like.

In the chapter titled “Freewheeling,” Sawyer says, “You can't choose the family you're born into. You have to love them.” Noah however, sees family as “Just a set of people who thought you were obliged to them, for whatever reason.” What do you think family is, and how has your idea of family shaped
Sunday's on the Phone to Monday
?

People feel deeply about their families, often more deeply than anything else in their lives. I want anyone who picks up this book to understand its emotional notes, much like how a musician can pick up a piece of sheet music and play it with soul, without ever hearing the music before.

Even though it's a work of fiction, one of my intentions for
Sunday's on the Phone to Monday
was [for it] to serve as a love letter to my own family. The only thing nonfiction about this book is that I've felt all the feelings all of my characters have felt, and [I] hope that it evokes the same for my readers. . . . Certain themes are always haunting me. For instance, I wanted to pay tribute to my grandfather. He survived five concentration camps during the Holocaust and his story is incredible. The fear of society forgetting was what drove that subplot forward.

And I wanted to write about race. We have a strange way of dealing with race in America, although that's not to say racism isn't a problem in other countries. I learned as a K–12 teacher how crippling and isolating identity bias can be. Children perform poorly if they are the only student of their race in a classroom—this makes sense. Children learn by seeing the differences and similarities among people, and by absorbing the negative biases about those differences.

I wanted this to be, when all is said and done, a hopeful novel. My favorite quality about human beings is resilience. I wanted the Simone family to struggle, to suffer tragedy, and yet to overcome, but not in a way where everything works out, because in real life everything may not always work out.

Enhance Your Book Club

Create a playlist of songs that appear throughout the book and listen to them while revisiting certain passages. How does music affect your sensory experience of the book? Try to pick out a playlist for the next book your group reads, too!

Try your hand at writing a poem about one of your favorite characters. What does it reveal about them? Share it with the group, and see what you discover.

Music in
Sunday's on the Phone to Monday

Songs (in order of appearance)

“Baby Love,” the Supremes

“Sixteen Going on Seventeen,” from
The Sound of Music

“It's Only a Paper Moon” (Muzak version)

“Walk on the Wild Side,” Lou Reed

“Hey, Hey, What Can I Do?,” Led Zeppelin

“Old Time Rock and Roll,” Bob Seger & the Silver Bullet Band

“I'm a Soul Man,” Sam & Dave

“Mr. Tambourine Man,” Bob Dylan

“Daydream Believer,” Monkees

“Piggies,” The Beatles

“Sexy Sadie,” The Beatles

“Lady Madonna,” The Beatles

“She's Leaving Home,” The Beatles

“She Came In Through the Bathroom Window,” The Beatles

“Help!,” The Beatles

“You Ain't Goin' Nowhere,” Bob Dylan

“There Is a Light That Never Goes Out,” The Smiths

“Fast Car,” Tracy Chapman

“Carry That Weight,” The Beatles

“Michelle,” The Beatles

“Lovely Rita,” The Beatles

“Come and Get It,” The Beatles

“For No One,” The Beatles

“Walk Like a Man,” The Four Seasons

“Tiny Dancer,” “Candle in the Wind,” “Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters,” “Empty Garden (Hey Hey Johnny),” “Little Jeannie,” “Bennie and the Jets,” “Honky Cat,” “Nikita,”

“Daniel,” “Levon,” “Your Song,” Elton John

“Visions of Johanna,” Bob Dylan