Book # 4: Are You Sleeping (Truth Be Told), Kathleen Barber

Today we were lucky enough to have our second author appearance of the year. Kathleen Barber joined our book club discussion!! It was an honor to meet her and to discuss this book, Are You Sleeping. 

About the book:

The only thing more dangerous than a lie...is the truth.

Josie Buhrman has spent the last ten years trying to escape her family’s reputation and with good reason. After her father's murder thirteen years prior, her mother ran away to join a cult and her twin sister Lanie, once Josie’s closest friend and confidant, betrayed her in an unimaginable way. Now, Josie has finally put down roots in New York, settling into domestic life with her partner Caleb, and that’s where she intends to stay.

The only problem is that she has lied to Caleb about every detail of her past—starting with her last name.

When investigative reporter Poppy Parnell sets off a media firestorm with a mega-hit podcast that reopens the long-closed case of Josie’s father’s murder, Josie’s world begins to unravel. Meanwhile, the unexpected death of Josie’s long-absent mother forces her to return to her Midwestern hometown where she must confront the demons from her past—and the lies on which she has staked her future.

 Discussion Questions:  

1.    Do you understand Josie’s decision to lie to Caleb about her past?

2.    Given that Lanie was young and changed her statement early in the investigation, do you think Lanie should feel responsible for wrongly accusing Warren?

3.    Adam used the excuse that he cheated on Josie because of a case of mistaken identity. Turns out, earlier in Lanie’s life, she mistook her mother for Warren. Do you think Lanie subconsciously knew this was the second time she used “the mistaken identity” excuse?

4.    In Are You Sleeping, we are exposed to the many negative impacts that re-opening a murder investigation may have on the families involved. Overall, do you think Poppy’s podcast was a good thing or do you think the podcast was exploitative and should have had more sensitivity towards Josie and her family? 

5.    Erin’s letter of admission in Anna Karenina dotted all the i’s and crossed all the t’s in this novel. Did you appreciate that closure or would you have preferred to let the question linger a bit for more suspense?

6.     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?

7.     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?

8.     How do you see Josie’s feelings about her mother changing over the course of her visitation and death?

9.     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?

10.  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?

11.   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?

12.  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?

13.  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?

14.   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?

15.   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?