Book Club Discussion Questions
Please be aware that this discussion guide will contain spoilers!
This discussion guide will assist readers in exploring
A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You. Hopefully, it will help create a bond not only between the book and the reader, but also between the members of the reading group. In your support of this book, please feel free to copy and distribute this guide to best facilitate your reading program. Thank you.
About This Book
"Amy Bloom gets more meaning into individual sentences than most authors manage in whole books."
--
The New Yorker
A great short story has the emotional depth and intensity of a poem and the wholeness and breadth of a novel. Amy Bloom writes great short stories. Her first collection,
Come to Me, was a finalist for the National Book Award, and here she deepens and extends her mastery of the form.
Real people inhabit these pages, the people we know and are, the people we long to be and are afraid to be: a mother and her brave, smart little girl, each coming to terms with the looming knowledge that the little girl will become a man; a wildly unreliable narrator bent on convincing us that her stories are not harmless; a woman with breast cancer, a frightened husband, and a best friend, all discovering that their lifelong triangle is not what they imagined; a man and his stepmother engaged in a complicated dance of memory, anger, and forgiveness. Amy Bloom takes us straight to the center of these lives with rare generosity and sublime wit, in flawless prose that is by turns sensuous, spare, heartbreaking, and laugh-out-loud funny.
These are transcendent stories: about the uncertain gestures of love, about the betrayals and gifts of the body, about the surprises and bounties of the heart, and about what comes to us unbidden and what we choose.
For Discussion
- In A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You, there are many different portraits of family. How do think Amy Bloom would define a family? How do her characters act like traditional families, and how do they differ? How do you define a family, and do you think Bloom's families would fall under your definition? Why or why not? In "Hold Tight", how is a new family made?
- Bloom's work has been praised for the way in which it portrays ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. Do you think this is correct, or should it be the other way around, extraordinary people in ordinary circumstances? Do these characters seem to be the people you come across in your life on a day to day basis? Why do you think Bloom would choose to make these people seem so everyday, so ordinary?
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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 Vintage.
Any page references refer to a USA edition of the book, usually the trade paperback version, and may vary in other editions.