Margaux Bergen is the author of Navigating Life: Things I Wish My Mother Had Told Me. She has been involved with many book clubs and provided her personal experience on getting to the heart of a book club and making an impact on your readers. 

Book clubs house proud and persistent tribes. They have their genres, their literary inclinations and their customs of hospitality. When you are asked to talk to one you are being invited into holy territory. They are your readers and your critics. They are your loyalists and your adversaries. We write to be read. In this instance we also write to be heard. It’s a performance. Prepare yourself.

I do four things:

Mentally Prepare

I consider first who has invited me: a close friend, a work colleague, a stranger, my friend’s elderly mother? Your host has championed the book and will set the tone for the evening. It is up to you then to imagine what the group might want to hear and might want to learn.

I sit beforehand reflecting on why I wrote the book, and the process of writing it. Sometimes, but not always, I can anticipate their questions – this is both the delight and the anxiety of the evening – never quite knowing.

Mining the Book

I write a short introductory essay that gives some insight that can’t be gained just by reading the book: What inspired you to write the book? What did I learn from writing it? What was my daughter Charlie’s response to receiving a book written explicitly to her?

Then I choose a series of short key passages that introduce the reader to various themes and which also embody some of the relationship between myself and Charlie; this creates a unique narrative that changes each time, ensuring that every conversation is slightly different. (A recent discovery: try not to speak for longer than 15 minutes – text and passages included.) Receive don’t broadcast. Keep it short.

Creating Conversation Starters

Come prepared with ways to start the conversation in case the audience is shy or slow to come forward. Your host will usually jump in with the first question. If there is a lull, I talk about how friends and strangers, acquaintances and colleagues tell me how they are reading the book – where and with whom. I talk about the varied responses I receive when I refer to the sub-title of the work – Things I Wish My Mother Had Told Me – which range across the emotional spectrum: regret, curiosity, skepticism, delight, anger, some wistfulness.

Once the audience hears that parents are annotating passages and reading it with their children on holiday or young adults at college are reading it together over Face Time, theme by theme, the audience starts to engage – with me and with each other.

Responding in the Moment

Your host should structure the conversation allowing everyone a chance to ask a question and for you to respond. But the conversation should also be allowed to unfold in its way.

Responses in the moment can be very emotional. At one reading, a quiet older woman who arrived late, but who had read the book asked me: “Why do you think we, your audience, bring so much of ourselves to this conversation?” “Perhaps,” I responded, “because I reveal the hidden conversations we have with ourselves in our darkest moments and that allows you to do the same?”

The writing was an act of desperation, in response to a series of dramas that visited our family: addiction, illness, depression, job loss, divorce and death. It was a rearguard action, an attempt to sort out on paper how to cope with life’s more extreme circumstances. I wanted her to know how to survive life, while sharing what I had learned as I struggled to make sense of these multiple dramas. The book was also conceived as an extended love letter between a mother and a girl called Charlie. I wanted to harbor the secret world of her young life and remember it for both of us. I wanted to be both witness and guide to her unfolding life.

Each book club tribe has responded differently. Some people wonder aloud at the value of sharing their experiences with our children. Some people don’t want to know about the death of a parent; some people have told stories of sad opportunities missed in talking across the generations. Some have left vowing to share more of themselves.

Our readers come with their critique and their probing, their curiosity and their encouragement. Each response we remember and metabolize. Each of them makes us want to write better – for next time.

That is all I ever wanted for my book: a determination to talk to each other more, to beckon each other into an intimate connection as we all navigate this journey together. I am still convinced that there is a transformational power in revealing ourselves and the startling complexities of life as parents to our children.

An evening with your readers can create a great conversation to bind us all.

Sample of questions that I have been asked at book clubs:

• What did you learn about yourself from writing this?
• Where do you draw the line in what you share with your children?
• Do you think that the advice in this book applies to men, fathers and boys?
• What was your daughter’s reaction to the book when you gave it to her? And what does she think now?
• When did you know you were a writer?
• What is your writing process?