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Hello Book Club Members, Many thanks to you for choosing The Possibility of Everything as a reading selection for your group! Book club discussions, I believe, are integral to keeping passionate cultural dialogue alive. There are many, many excellent books to choose from this season, and I'm honored that you've decided to travel back in time with my family to join us on the wacky, wild, wonderful healing journey we took through Belize and Guatemala when our daughter was three years old. A number of readers have told me that the story in the book reads like a movie, and—since the Special Features section of a DVD is always my favorite part—I've put together some additional material for book clubs reading TPOE. Here, you'll find an expanded FAQ that includes some of the most common questions I've heard while on the road promoting the book, and additional photos of the people and places in the story. I've also included a list of discussion questions that might inspire conversation in your group. Finally, you'll find information about how your group can schedule a 30-minute visit, telephone chat, or Skype with me. Thank you again, and I very much hope you enjoy the book! Warmly, Hope Edelman Book Club FAQs
A: She remembers bits and pieces of it, mostly from the second half. The first few days after we left L.A. she had a high fever and was sleeping much of the time. I think she experienced most of the activity that occurred then as a dream state. She does have some very clear memories about the time along the beach in Placencia, which followed the rainforest portion of the trip. Interestingly, she's always remembered the scene on the porch swing where she and her father pretend to put on their moon boots and go to the moon. In the book, I say that these simple moments are the ones that help a family grow, and although I recognized this at the time I came to understand its profundity later, when I realized it was one of the few moments from the trip that Maya never forgot. The first dozen or so times I heard this question I was fascinated by it, because my intuition told me there was another question behind the question. As I've talked with more readers, I think what they really want to know is how much of the magic of childhood persists into the pre-teen years, and beyond—and whether it's possible to keep it alive. I believe it is.
A: She's a perfectly normal twelve-year-old, a seventh grader, into musical theater and hula hooping and all kinds of native flowers and plants. We went back to Belize as a family in 2008 and she became reacquainted with several of the characters in the book. She and Dr. Rosita now have a bond that's quite special.
A: For the most part, very positively. I've gotten some beautiful emails from readers sharing their own parenting challenges, or travel stories about Belize, or their experiences with shamanic healing. It's been interesting to see how, if you give this book to five people, they'll return with five different descriptions of what it's about. Proust was right when he said a book is a mirror held up in front of a reader that reflects whatever is going on in their lives. I'd say the most positive responses have come from readers who resembled me at the beginning of the book, people who are looking for a connection to something larger than themselves and are skeptical yet nonetheless open to the search. The harshest responses have come from other mothers who either disagree with my parenting choices or think I was over-reacting. That kind of criticism upset me at first—I mean, who likes to be referred to as "the biggest nutcase in the world"?!—but over time I've come to peace with it. To me, an important underlying message of the book is the importance of trusting one's intuition as a mother instead of automatically handing authority over to the "experts." My intuition told me that the feedback I was getting about my daughter's imaginary friend somehow wasn't matching what I was witnessing, and that I needed to pursue an alternate plan. If another mother's intuition tells her to do exactly what the pediatrician says, then equal power to her. I think that if the book inspires a mother to re-examine her parenting choices and articulate them, even if they're in direct opposition to mine, that's a good thing.
A: This speaks to one of the memoirist's main challenges: deciding which scenes to include and which to omit. If I'd included every scene that took place over the four-month period covered in the book, I would have had a 1,200-page manuscript that put readers directly to sleep. A memoir is a carefully shaped version of events, not a diary. Because of this, writers sometimes choose to compress characters or events in the interest of page counts or time. For example, we actually went to two Maya ruins in the first half of our trip: Xunantunich in Belize and then Tikal in Guatemala. Important scenes took place at both sites, although the day at Tikal was the more dramatic of the two. When I tried to include both trips in an early draft of the book, the two hours we spent at Xunantunich drained some of the power from our full day at Tikal. By the time we got to Tikal, which is by far the more majestic site of the two, it felt like, "Oh, they're going to another ruined Maya city; we've already heard about one of those." So I combined the events of both of those trips into the one Tikal trip. All the important scenes and discussions in the book that took place between the characters really happened, they just take place now in one excursion instead of two.
A: Every author has their own threshold for how much a memoir can be altered yet still be considered a true story. Recently, as many of us might remember, some notable authors have gone too far astray with that in the public's mind. I use roughly a 15 percent rule. If I've changed more than about 15 percent of the details in a story, I'll call it fiction. But that's just my personal benchmark. I know other authors who'd choose a much larger percentage, and others who believe that if you change even one detail you can no longer call the story nonfiction. That starts getting sticky, though, when the legal department at a publishing house asks you to change a character's identifying details for matters of legality. In The Possibility of Everything, I came in at just under the 15 percent mark, I think. Maybe 12 or 13 percent. I changed some very small details that only Maya, Uzi, or I would know about to help Maya feel that I wasn't writing so directly about her. This was part of the agreement we struck when I first started writing the book. The names of all the major characters—Victor, Ovencio, Rosita—are all real, with their permission, but most of the minor characters have pseudonyms. Uzi and I couldn't remember the real names of many of the people we met in Belize and I didn't know how to track them down, even though I had photographs of some of them, so I used pseudonyms for them all, on the advice of my publisher. Does that make the story a work of fiction? I don't think so. The events in the story took place, in exact or very similar form as they appear on the page, and the emotional truth of a story is the same whether a character is called Shakti or Isis or Deva.
A: I'd try to pump up the theme of gratitude a little more. I was much more grateful for what I had at the end of the book than I was on page one, and I wish I'd written more explicitly about my disconnection from gratitude at the beginning. I'd also want to add more about my teaching jobs that fall. I was teaching in two writing programs at the time, one of which was a night class with very talented yet very challenging students who took up a lot of my time and energy. I wrote some teaching scenes for the book, but they seemed to slow down the opening chapters and I was very conscious that I needed to get us down to Central America before page 100. Any scenes that weren't utterly essential to the main storyline therefore had to be cut. But the pages that remained made it sound, I think, as if we had a nanny living with us four days a week as an extravagance, when in fact we hired her because I was working 35 hours a week, some of them at night.
A: In the writing classes I teach, I encourage students to identify the stories behind their stories. Typically that means delving into the realms of archetype and myth. It was only after I'd completed The Possibility of Everything that I realized my story had quite a bit in common with the myth of Demeter and Persephone. Demeter was the Greek goddess of the harvest whose daughter, Persephone, was kidnapped by Hades, the god of the underworld. Demeter was so distraught about being separated from her daughter that she traveled to the underworld to retrieve her, and cut a deal with Hades to have her daughter returned to her for part of each year. In Greek mythology, that's the story behind why we have seasons: when Persephone goes back to the underworld the weather turns cold and dry, and when she returns spring begins. In some ways, it felt that I'd made a similar trek (in my case, deep into the rainforests) to retrieve the piece of my daughter that had departed when her imaginary friend arrived. I don't think of myself as any kind of heroine—I actually think some of my actions were cowardly rather than heroic—but I recognize that the story has some of the qualities Joseph Campbell refers to when he talks about the hero's journey in The Power of Myth. In the classic hero story, a protagonist ventures out into the unknown and returns home safely but fundamentally changed. So I'm hoping that sharing my story will inspire other mothers to talk about similar experiences they've had that have changed them, whether their travels have been to another culture or a new neighborhood or a different state of mind. Suggested Questions for Book Clubs
How to Arrange a Book Club Visit with the AuthorIf you're located in Southern California (within two hour's driving distance from Los Angeles), I might be able to attend your book club in person starting in early 2010. If you're located elsewhere, I'm available for 30-minute Skype or phone conferences, as well as by email. If you'd like to arrange either of these meetings, please send me an email at hopeedelman@gmail.com, and include the following information in the body of the email:
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