For The History of Swimming
1. What do you think the title “The History of Swimming” means? Swimsuits through the ages? Does anybody actually go swimming? Do the characters go “swimming” in any place besides a pool? Can you go swimming - and stay perfectly dry?
2. Describe the characters of Tim and Kim that you’re left with after reading the book. How different are they - how similar? Do they fit your notion of twins? Is there something distinctive about their bond, or do they just seem like regular brothers?
3. Even though Tim isn’t a “present” character throughout the book - and exists mainly through flashbacks and his letters - do you still get as full a picture of him as you do Kim, who is telling the story? What was your response to Tim’s letters — do they help move things along, or do they slow down the action? Is it a valid way of creating a character in a book?
4. Imagine yourself as various incidental characters in the book - Stan, Sarah, Rob the swimmer who broke his back, Jess, the professors at Austin College. How would you feel if you picked up the book, not knowing you were in it, or even if you did, and started reading about yourself? In terms of memoirs, do you think authors have an obligation to tell their “characters” they will be ppearing in a book, or even to seek their approval?
5. In mythology, there’s a search known as “the hero’s quest” - where the main character’s search for something (the holy grail, or Dorothy searching for the witch’s broom in “The Wizard of Oz) is the driving force of the story. “The History of Swimming” certainly uses that device - Kim searching for Tim. Do you think that’s what gives the book its suspense and urgency - will Tim be found, dead or alive? Or do you think if the book had been written in a more straight-forward style, as more of a standard autobiography (we were born, we went to school, we went here, we went there) it would have had the same effect? In other words, is the power of the book the characters you’ve come to know by the end, or the specific way you get to know them?
6. Which character is in greater need of being found — Tim or Kim?
7. One of the thoughts Kim keeps coming back to time and again is the idea of being your brother’s keeper. Do you think it made him a prisoner to Tim in some way, the caretaking he imposed on their relationship, whether Tim asked him to or not?
8. Thomas Wolfe famously wrote, “You can’t go home again.” But was he right? Can you? Kim Powers certainly visits various “homes” he’s had along the way, in flashback if nothing else. What do you think Wolfe really meant by that phrase?
9. What do you think about the author’s decision to not really specify the date or year the “lost weekend” took place? Is it disconcerting - or liberating? What clues exist in the book, to give it a specific time setting? (And conversely: if the events took place today, with email and cell phones, how would they be different? Would they even be possilbe?)
10. Did you notice any symbolism in how the book was divided into three sections, three days - Friday, Saturday, Sunday? Do you think that was incidental, or is there some larger point to be reinforced by those specific days, and the fact that there are three of them?
11. Did the book successfully capture that feeling of an all-night road trip? The sensation of being hypnotized by the road, enveloped in a dark car, a coccoon, where you can tell your secrets, where you have nothing to do but talk, or reflect on the past? As Kim shares so much with Stan, the young college student he’s just met, were you reminded of times in your life when you struck up seemingly intimate conversations with strangers, because you assumed you’d never see them again? Is there something about that bond that makes it easier to tell your most private thoughts to virtual strangers, instead of to the people closest to you?
12. The book is primarily about twin brothers Tim and Kim, but did you feel you learned enough about the other members in their family - their mother, their father, their older brother Porky - to understand why the twins acted the way they day, to understand Tim’s sense, to some degree, of being an orphan?
13. Some readers have found the book to be very “spiritual”, however unlikely that might seem at first glance. What aspects of the book suggest it as a “spiritual” book — or do you think that’s not an appropriate adjective for it?
14. The book’s main two characters are gay, but did you feel it was a “gay book?” Many other issues are dealt with - family bonds, alcoholism, mental illness, co-dependency. Do you think there’s “something in it for everyone,” as the saying goes, or do you need to belong to one of those groups to “get it”?
15. What do you think about the author’s having told his own version of the twins’ story — essentially without giving Tim a chance to explain or “defend” himself? Is it “fair” that the book is more or less a one-sided version of events, or do you accept that as a given with any memoir you read? If Tim had been able to write his own version of this story - in first person - how might it have been different?
16. In various interviews, author Kim Powers has said the “afterward” to the book was something of an “afterthought” - that originally, the book had ended at the end of that three day weekend, with Tim found. Do you think the book would have had the same effect if you hadn’t been brought up to date on what happened to Tim and Porky after that long weekend?
Reader’s Group questions:
1. Did you previously know these basic facts of the relationship between Capote and Lee – that they were next door neighbors as very young children, and that they reunited again to work on In Cold Blood together?
2. Who would you say is the more important character in the book, the protagonist the book “belongs” to – Truman Capote, or Harper Lee?
3. If you’ve read To Kill a Mockingbird, does Capote in Kansas enhance your understanding of it; who Harper Lee was as a little girl, what her relationship with her lawyer father Amasa was, what her relationship with Dill Harris (aka Truman Capote) was, the role Boo Radley played in the neighborhood?
4. From reading To Kill a Mockingbird, how did you imagine the author Harper Lee – and how does the portrait of her in Capote in Kansas agree with that – or not? What was the most surprising thing to you about Lee?
5. Since relatively little of the book actually takes place in
6. Does the author’s disclaimer that this is a work of fiction (and his note detailing what’s real in the book and what isn’t) help you read this as something basically made-up – or did the fact that it’s about real people cause you to read it as more of a biography?
7. Have you ever done the same thing Truman Capote did to Harper Lee – call an old friend up out of the blue, after a many year absence? Why did you do it? What were you expecting to be the result?
8. How did you interpret the “ghosts” of the Clutters? Did you accept them as real ghosts coming to visit Truman and Harper, or figments of their imagination, or dreams? Why did they need to see Truman and Harper – or is it better to ask, why did Truman and Harper need to revisit THEM?
9. From how the events in
10. Why do you think the fictional Truman, at the end of his life, started sending these mysterious packages to Harper Lee? Does he seem as if he’s aware that he’s in his final decline, and he doesn’t have much time left to make whatever lasting peace he has to make with her? Why did he chose something so macabre – sending pictures inside little handcarved coffins – as a way to making peace?
11. Does Harper’s “legacy” – just one book — seem to pray on her, the same way it does to Truman? What do you think of Myrtle’s reflection on the legacy she will leave behind: the smell of wet clothes on a clothes line? Do you have to leave something “big” as your legacy?
12. When a book is as good as To Kill a Mockingbird, is it “okay” that the author never wrote another one? Is one great book the equal of several lesser ones? As an artist, did Truman Capote or Harper Lee have an obligation to continue writing for the public?
13. Does what the author has done to Truman Capote and Harper Lee – writing versions of their lives – seem to mirror what Capote and Lee did with the Clutters? Do you think that was deliberate on the author’s part? Even further, do you think the author was making an even bigger statement about that, as he wrote how Harper Lee turned parts of the life of Son Boular into Boo Radley?
14. What would these fictional versions of Harper Lee and Truman Capote say were the happiest times of their lives? Their childhoods? The time of their greatest fame, when their well-regarded books came out?
15. How were you affected by the relationship between Truman Capote and his housekeeper, Myrtle Bennett? Do you find it ironic that a man of such great fame and wealth would have one of his most intimate relationships with an uneducated maid, that he pays to work for him?
16. What was your reaction to the two letters Harper Lee writes to her dead brother Ed? Did it seem an effective device to let you into her inner-most thoughts, or did it seem bizarre, and unlikely? In the context of the book, did it make sense that the fictional Harper Lee would do something so unrealistic? Can you think of any other way the material in those letters might have been handled?
17. As monstrous as Truman Capote is in certain chunks of the book, and by reputation, what is your final opinion of him, by the end? A monster – but you understand why? Someone sad and sympathetic? When the kite unfurls the words “I’m Sorry” in the very last line of the book, do you think the character of Harper would respond, “You’re Forgiven?”
18. What do you think the real Truman Capote would have thought of the book? The real Harper Lee? If the book had been written as a “roman a clef” – where it was clearly about the characters of Capote and Lee, but their names had been changed – would it have been as effective?
