I’ve never belonged to a book club. To be honest, no one ever invited me to join one. Perhaps because, like the little match girl, I’m always on the outside looking in, book clubs fascinate me. I once met a New York psychoanalyst who belonged to a book club comprised solely of other New York psychoanalysts. Their reading list was restricted to fiction that dealt with psychoanalysts. My editor at M&S spends her working life editing people like me, reading manuscripts and going to meetings about marketing and publicity. She thinks about books 16 hours a day, but she belongs to a book club. Our need to discuss what we read with others is clearly a powerful one.
Friday night, I had dinner with a six-woman book club: two of the women are lawyers; two are visual artists; one is an advocate for people dealing with employment issues and one is an academic. My novel “The Brutal Heart” was the book under discussion, and our host had gone to great lengths to create an atmosphere conducive to good talk. Before dinner we drank the Blue Sapphire martinis that in the novel, Joanne and Zack drink on Zack’s birthday, and our main course was the paella that is the favourite dish of Joanne and Zack’s daughter, Taylor. Dessert was the ganache to which Joanne is partial.
The members of the club were all close readers, and their questions were excellent, but what intrigued me was how at dinner we moved from discussion about specifics in the book to larger questions about our own lives.
Two examples: Joanne and Zack’s daughter Taylor is 14 and she is a prodigy. Her birth mother was a brilliant artist, and Taylor inherited her mother’s talent and her passion for making art. I told the book club about a talk I had with Darrell Bell, himself a talented artist and gallery owner. I asked Darrell whether he would ever have a show for a fourteen year old, and after a long and thoughtful conversation, he said he didn’t feel a fourteen year old had the life experience to say anything original in her art. The question of whether Darrell was right or wrong got us through the appetizers, the paella and a large quantity of excellent wine.
Perhaps because of the excellent wine, the next question evoked passionate discussion. One of the plot lines in “The Brutal Heart” involves high-end prostitution. The question of what successful married men are seeking when they use an escort service led us to the larger question of intimacy in marriage and that led us to a discussion about whether sex is always a bartering tool in a relationship. Exploring that question got us through the ganache.
The next day one of the women in the group sent me pictures she had taken of herself reading “The Brutal Heart” when she was in France and Corsica in February. I was thrilled. It was almost like being in a book club.