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- How does the author’s choice to reveal many of the Buhrman
family’s secrets through social media, rather than from Josie’s
point of view, affect the way she structures the story?
- Josie spends a lot of time weighing her decision to lie to Caleb
about her past. When she does finally come clean, she explains to
him that she had told him her mother was dead because for all I
knew, she was dead. Do you agree or disagree with her
reasoning?
- How do you see Josie’s feelings about her mother changing over
the course of her visitation and death?
- Aunt A understands her sister’s abandonment of her children as a
symptom of guilt—over the deaths of her brother, her parents, and
finally her husband. For which circumstances do you feel Erin
rightly assumes blame?
- Josie’s feelings about Lanie and Adam’s union depends on whether
Adam confused one twin for the other when he first slept with Lanie.
How much consolation do you think it offers Josie to trust that the
affair started as a case of mistaken identity?
- Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina held an important place in
Erin’s heart during her life. How might she have related the novel’s
famous opening line—"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy
family is unhappy in its own way" to her own experience?
- When confronted with the argument that the unvarnished approach
of the Reconsidered podcast might have contributed to Erin’s
suicide, Poppy emphasizes that "it wasn’t a group of strangers" that
killed her, but "the ghosts of her own past". What do you think of
this interpretation?
- To what degree do you think journalists have an obligation to
treat living subjects with sensitivity? Does the need to inform the
public outweigh the risk crime reporting runs of commodifying the
pain and suffering of victims?
- Photographs appear frequently in the novel as windows into the
past and clues about the circumstances surrounding Chuck’s murder.
How do photographs like Lanie’s unhappy portrait at her wedding, the
snapshot of the family at Mount Rushmore, or the photo in the garden
with a glimpse of Melanie Cave in the background illuminate details
beyond the reach of memory?
- Consider the theme of memory in Are You Sleeping. In what
ways does Barber demonstrate how the mind alters or constructs
reality? How reliable should a child be as an eyewitness to the
murder of his or her parent?
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