READERS GUIDE

Questions and Topics for Discussion

1.      Morgan and Alice’s friendship was as close as it was consuming and competitive, built on an addictive relativity. What do you think bound them together, and what do you think created distance between them? Have you ever had a friendship like this?

2.      Many of the characters in The World After Alice are grappling with what it means to be exceptional—as a parent, as a spouse, as well as artistically, intellectually, and professionally. How do they manage these pressures in the novel, and how do you see it affecting their relationships? Is this something you struggle with in your own life?

3.      The characters in the novel are each privately implicated in Alice’s death, and have been living with the guilt and grief for years. Discuss how they have each digested this culpability, and how you think they formed their lives around it. Do you think there’s a right way to grieve?

4.      On p. 306, Linnie says that life is full of “moments the old you dies, and you become someone new.” Do you believe this is true? Have you had moments that have marked a beginning and an after in your life?

5.      How does the novel’s setting influence the story, both past and present? What do you think New York City represents? What about Maine?

6.      The novel is fundamentally concerned with how we live in the aftermath of tragedy. By the end, which characters do you think are able to grow and evolve beyond their dark pasts? Which do you think will continue to be burdened by guilt and grief?
 
7.      Discuss the role of ambition in the novel. What effect does achievement—and wealth, more broadly—have on the characters’ identities? What about their relationships? What do you think the novel is illuminating about the impact of class and upward mobility on personal relationships?
 
8.      The World After Alice contains a variety of ideas about philosophy, psychology, and religion, particularly regarding interpretations of death and the afterlife. Did any of these perspectives resonate with you personally? Is there a belief system that you turn to when it comes to reckoning with mortality and processing tragedy?
 
9.      In a way, Linnie is involved in two love triangles: with Alice and Ezra, and with Nick and Caro. How do these couples’ romantic histories haunt their current relationships? What do you think the novel is exploring about second chances and enduring connections, despite the separate paths these characters may take? Have you ever transformed a relationship from platonic to intimate or vice versa?
 
10.   Benji and Morgan had very different upbringings, with distinctive nuclear families. What kind of family do you think they will build together? What have you retained from your upbringing, and what have you chosen to discard?

About this Author

Much of the drama in the novel turns around weddings and funerals, which you craft so vividly. Why did you choose these events as cornerstones for the narrative? Are there any wedding and/or funeral texts or depictions that are lodestars for you?
 
Ah, the marriage plot—the engine behind many English novels. As George Eliot points out in Middlemarch, “We are not afraid of telling over and over again how a man comes to fall in love with a woman and be wedded to her, or else be fatally parted from her.” From a novelistic standpoint, the wedding is a tantalizing device. On what other occasion are people from disparate walks of life brought together and expected to feel a certain way? Then there’s the choreography of weddings—the rites and rituals that are fertile grounds for comedies of errors and dramas of manners. All this made Morgan and Benji’s lead-up to the altar the perfect stage for this novel.
 
It was evident to me from the start that in order for the matrimonial scenes to feel like scenes of aftermath, we needed to experience the “before”—the moment when the shards come flying apart. For me, the memorial service acts as that moment. Here, the characters gather, each holding a clue to the riddle of Alice’s death, which—surprise!—lacks any answer at all. While crafting these scenes, I drew inspiration from Tolstoy, in whose work Childhood readers encounter a young boy at his mother’s funeral. The boy is stunned by the theatrics of death; he is not yet acculturated to adult society, with its many pretenses. In the boy’s horror, the reader is made to experience death anew, to fully observe the inadequacies of ceremonial convention in the face of this incomprehensible event. (My heartfelt thanks to Tolstoy scholar Liza Knapp for sharing this insight.) In plotting Alice’s memorial, I aimed to have the adolescent Benji occupy a similarly defamiliarizing role to Tolstoy’s protagonist, resenting both his father’s inappropriate laughter and his mother’s strained attempt at a eulogy.
                                                                                 
Music plays a big role for both Morgan and Alice. As a musician yourself, how does your personal connection with music influence your work?
 
At one point in the book, Morgan likens her and Benji’s shared life back home to a rondo—a musical form in which the principal theme recurs amid contrasting sections. A sample rondo structure might be written as ABACA, with A representing the main theme and B and C denoting new sections. In my original configuration of this book, I envisioned the chapters mimicking this structure, thereby subverting the typical linear plot to more accurately mirror the cyclical nature of grief.
 
Given the significant role music has played in my own life, I’ve long hoped I would someday find the occasion to write about it. The violin marked my first introduction to artistic expression—how melodies and harmonies, rhythms and dynamics interplay like dappled light through tree branches. I imagine that music does for me what prayer does for others; it connects me to some eternal force, transforming the seconds of ordinary life into something extraordinary.
 
The novel has a wide cast of characters and multiple points of view. What was it like to inhabit the perspective of each of these characters? Did one character come to you first?

Linnie came to me first. I felt an immediate understanding of who this woman was—the delicate care applied to her external world in the hopes that such surface-level order would pierce her innermost core. Nick arrived next, though he remained elusive at first. In time, I delighted in his analytical mind, capable of performing whatever rationalizing calculus necessary to carry him through the day. I loved inhabiting his point of view and thinking about his frames of reference, which felt so distinctly far from my own. Morgan, meanwhile, emerged initially as a foil to Alice. Through her, I was able to explore one of my favorite subjects: female friendship, with its intoxicating mixture of obsession and resentment. As for Ezra, well, I believe his character was the most challenging, in part because his own self-conception is so fragile. He harbors many ideas about himself, all of which he’s afraid will be unmasked. There’s scant room in an ego like that for two people! Finally, I view Benji, Peter, and Caro as the story’s sources of cockeyed optimism. Benji’s hopes are pinned on the wedding as a site of collective catharsis and renewal, Peter’s on an unrequited love, and Caro’s on the promise of new life.
 
The most fun I had while writing the book was when I was able to bring characters in concert with one another, to see how they’d react outside the silos of their own minds. I especially enjoyed contemplating such scenes through the lens of the butterfly effect. What might Ezra say to Caro in passing, for instance, that could alter the trajectory of the whole novel?

The long shadow of Alice’s death shapes every character in the novel. What most interested you about how we metabolize grief?

One of my favorite quotes comes from Mark Twain: “Nothing that grieves us can be called little: by the eternal laws of proportion a child’s loss of a doll and a king’s loss of a crown are events of the same size.” A loss is a loss is a loss—how brutal; how true. The only guarantee in life is that we will form attachments, and then we will suffer due to these attachments. We will love and thus will be heartbroken. So, how to cope? This was the primary question I set out to explore in the book. Key to my interest was not only the immediate trauma of loss but also how the aftershocks of loss reverberate and morph through the years. Most pressingly, I wanted to debunk the notion that “time conquers all.” Time may put distance between us and our grief, but distance can sometimes prove its own harrowing ordeal. With distance, we may forget the sound of a loved one’s voice, the shape of their fingers, the quirk of their mouth. Distance erodes detail, makes what was once prominent into a blurry memory. I wanted to capture this juxtaposition—the healing that time brings, contrasted against the compounding sense of absence.
 
You are also the author of a poetry chapbook. How do you think about moving between genres? Did poetry influence the narrative style of your novel?

For me, the distinction between poetry and fiction is less a question of genre than it is one of scale. If poetry is a miniature box, à la Joseph Cornell, then fiction is the entire house. The former relies on distillation, compression, and assemblage; the latter, a comprehensive understanding of architectural design.
 
That said, poetry has shaped my fiction in innumerable ways. Consider, for instance, the opening lines of this novel’s prologue: “She stood coatless on the bridge in the cold. Cars pulsed by her, a ceaseless string of light. She did not see them. All, to her, was dark. Even the glittering city shone black.” If we combine the third and fourth sentences of this passage, each line consists of ten syllables. While the lines don’t adhere to iambic pentameter, they do follow a similar rhythmic framework. The book is filled with examples like this, as well as instances where the voice modulates to guide the reader toward a new insight. My hope is that such moments act on the reader invisibly, much like one submerged in the ocean hardly feels when a tidal swell carries them a dozen feet out from shore.
 
You delve into various philosophical and religious perspectives on death and the afterlife in The World After Alice. How did you go about weaving these ideas into the narrative? Did you find that your own beliefs or perceptions about these topics evolved in any particular way as you were writing?

Let me first speak to an ancient parable found in the Lotus Sutra. In this story, a man’s house catches on fire. The man’s children are too absorbed in their playthings to notice, forcing him to resort to other means to coax them outside. He tells the children that he has three carts for them to play with: a deer-drawn cart, a goat-drawn cart, and a bull-drawn cart. The children rush outside, only to discover that an even bigger cart awaits them there. In this parable, the burning house represents the follies that keep us mired in suffering, while the carts represent the vehicles that lead us toward liberation.
 
Just like the children in this parable, the characters in The World After Alice gravitate toward different means to stave off their agony. Some buffer themselves with philosophy, while others seek solace in the grace of God. Finally, there are the characters like Benji who rely on those around them for comfort, hoping to alleviate their anguish through familial love. No one modality invalidates the others, and none is more correct. Whatever gets us out of the burning house—this is the key.
 
As for my own beliefs and perceptions, I like to think that my time embodying these characters deepened the fount of my empathy. Life is transient, beautiful, cruel—this we know too well. How lucky we are, however briefly, to be alive here together.