Book Club Discussion Questions for Tom Lake by Ann Patchett

1. For what reasons is Our Town, the play by Thornton Wilder, significant and lasting? What about the play made Lara say that it "spoke to us, made us feel special and seen"? When Lara says, "ours was that kind of town," what might she mean?
2. What issues explored in Our Town are particularly relevant to this novel, Tom Lake?
3. What's the significance of Laura changing the spelling of her name to Lara, after the character in Doctor Zhivago? In what ways are personal names powerful and important or not?
4. A young Lara believes that watching the untalented adults from town audition for the play—"the awkward way these men held their bodies," "seeing adults stumble and fail,"—was "the first day of [her] true education." What might she mean by this?
5. What is the substance of Lara's critique of the amateur actors? What does she mean when she says, "the dichotomy was neck-up neck-down"? Beyond talent, what qualities make a good actor?
6. What makes Lara decide to audition for the part of Emily? In what ways is she ideally suited for the part? What decisions does she make in her approach to the character that make her so good? Why is it powerful and important for her to "remember what it was like to be the smart girl?"
7. Why would Veronica "have made a truly great Emily"? What prevented her from engaging and expressing such talent?
8. Consider Lara's three daughters: Emily, Maisie, and Nell. What qualities and characteristics most define each of them? What does each care about? What does each of their intended professions suggest about who they are?
9. What might explain Emily's "genuinely frightening" teenage obsession with the idea that the movie star Peter Duke was her father? Why is it that her parents have "never completely gotten over being afraid of her"?
10. Why does Lara decide to tell her daughters the story of her relationship with Peter Duke? What concerns her about doing so? Generally speaking, what are the potential benefits or harms of parents sharing their personal life stories, their successes and failures, with their children?
11. In what various ways is the environment of Tom Lake strikingly different for Lara? How might such a landscape have influenced her? What does she mean that her "unremarkable room with the remarkable view of Middle-of-Nowhere, Michigan, was everything that had ever been written about freedom and possibility"?
12. What is Peter Duke like? What makes him attractive to Lara? What particular qualities make him such a talented and compelling actor? In what ways, for better or worse, do these qualities affect his behavior when not acting? What's the difference between "craziness," talent, and eccentricity?
13. What talent does Joe Nelson bring to Tom Lake as a director of Our Town? What is the director's job? In what ways is Joe similar or different in his work on the Nelson farm? What about Joe appeals to Lara?
14. What are Pallas' talents? What else is powerful and impressive about her? What particular complex challenges, subtle and not, must she navigate as a Black woman at Tom Lake and in the entertainment industry?
15. Why is Duke's brother Sebastian thought of by Lara and her daughters as Saint Sebastian? Why did Lara come to think of him as "the best of us"? In what ways was he particularly important to Duke?
16. Discussing the time Lara almost slept with Charlie to get to play the role of Emily on Broadway, Nell says, "there's always going to be someone with more power than you." What are the various kinds of power that women in particular have had to endure or confront? In what ways is this particularly and troublingly true of Hollywood and the entertainment industry?
17. What are the many sources of power—interpersonal, professional, political, cultural—that confront Pallas in particular as she works so hard to express and engage her significant talent? What does her performance of Emily reveal about the potential benefit or harm of small town values?
18. What might explain why among "actors and dancers, designers and techs of different races...and wildly different backgrounds" at Tom Lake, homosexual and interracial romantic relationships were much more accepted than in mainstream culture?
19. How and why is it that Tom Lake still "operated like the rest of the world" when it came to sexual inequality, men choosing the plays and directing, women making the food and costumes? Where else, throughout the novel, is racism revealed in the entertainment industry or in culture at large?
20. What is so powerful about the Nelson's cherry farm when the young actors all visit for the first time? What is particularly valuable about such a landscape for Lara, even decades later, when she tells of it as her happiest day at Tom Lake?
21. Lara admits to Maisie's dog Hazel that her acting career fell apart not because she wasn't very good, but because she "had ceased to be brave." What might this mean? Why does Lara not only not feel regret about the end of acting, but feel like she "just missed getting hit by a train"?
22. What might Emily mean when she says, "Getting married is bullshit...The whole institution is designed to drive women crazy"? Historically, how has marriage been limiting or oppressive for women? In what ways might it still not always be fair and equal as a partnership?
23. What are the implications of Lara's "simple truth about life: you will forget much of it"?
24. Consider the act of swimming as it appears throughout the novel. In what ways are these similar or different in mood and emotion? In what ways might Peter Duke's final swim off of Capri be related to swimming at Tom Lake?
25. What might explain why Lara was unable to successfully play Mae in Fool for Love?
26. Why has Emily decided not to have children, even if at some point she ends up wanting them? What, beyond desire, should be part of the decision to have children?
27. What does the fact that the story takes place during a pandemic change or add to the novel? How does the undeniable advent of climate change influence Emily and Benny as they plan to take over the farms?
28. What drives Duke that he would betray Lara with Pallas, would not visit her in the hospital, and would part without saying goodbye? Why might people still value or even admire a person who behaves so cruelly?
29. Lara admits that the Sam Shepard play Fools for Love "ran a person ragged, both the actors and the audience." Why is a play like this valuable? What might Lara mean that Duke and Pallas, in the starring roles, "were slender gods, brilliant and terrifying"?
30. Why is it Lara that Duke calls from the rehabilitation facility? Why does she agree to visit him? Why does she have sex with him, after the harm he has done to her?
31. What does Lara mean when she says, "good marriages are never as interesting as bad affairs"? What's important about this idea? What are the many and particular qualities of Joe and Lara's relationship that make it so solid and enduring?
32. In what ways is Lara's grandmother of great importance to her? What might she have accomplished as the smartest girl in her class? What powerful forces blocked her way?
33. What might explain modern culture's fascination and obsession with fame and the famous? What might Lara mean when she says that she doesn't buy gossip magazines that track the intimate lives of the famous because they are not good for her?
34. Why did Duke want to be buried in the family cemetery of the Nelson farm? Why did Joe and Lara agree that this made sense?
35. Lara comes to realize that Our Town taught her that "the beauty and the suffering are equally true." What does she mean? Why is this such a valuable lesson? What is the relationship between beauty and suffering? What are the implications of this regarding how to live life well?

Unless otherwise stated, this discussion guide is reprinted with the permission of Harper Perennial. Any page references refer to a USA edition of the book, usually the trade paperback version, and may vary in other editions.