Thanks to my once writing group, who read first chapters forever and seemed never to tire of it (at least they didn’t tell me so): Lynn Hofflund, Kim Philley, Erin McClure, but especially to Tish Thornton, my remarkable friend and editor-on-call, who’ll pick up the phone at the drop of a hat to debate the uses of the semicolon, or just as easily pivot to the meaning of everything. Tish was part of a reading group five of us started to stay grounded through the strangeness of the pandemic year. While I was finishing the novel, fretting, doing the usual weird writer stuff, we read War and Peace and then Middlemarch to one another over Zoom, every single word. Which certainly puts being a writer in perspective. And makes you reconsider the semicolon, not to mention dependent clauses and lots of other points of grammar, not to mention what shapes people, and history. The experience would not have been the same without the deep understanding and friendship of Elizabeth Tullis and Lori Benton.

I’m grateful to the Alexa Rose Foundation and the Idaho Commission on the Arts for making my work possible, and the work of so many artists.

I’m always grateful to my father, who is the reason I’m a writer. But any book I write is for my children—Atticus, Phoebe, and Olive—a record of things I’ve meant to tell them, or that bear repeating, but also everything that they’ve taught me. This one is also for my best friend and touchstone, Josie Fretwell, who can run a pandemic reading group like nobody’s business, but who has also, for so many years, held my hand on this thorny, astonishing trip of being human, and a woman, in a world such as this. We’ve navigated so much of what’s in this book, as all women do: desire, dependence, despair, love, freedom, power, purpose. We grew up together, sometimes flailing, as we figured out how to argue for our subjectivity, our experience, our needs, as equal to any man’s—and not back down. I can never remember if she’s sun and I’m moon, or the other way around. We take turns, like light and shadow. I cannot imagine what my life would be without her.

Finally, David Nevin is my rock, the man who reads to me every night in his rich, honeyed voice that tells me everything will be all right, and if not, that love, and books, are the beauty we have right now.

Discussion Questions

PLEASE NOTE: In order to provide reading groups with the most informed and thought-provoking questions possible, it is necessary to reveal important aspects of the plot of this novel—as well as the ending. If you have not finished reading Love and Fury by Samantha Silva, we respectfully suggest that you may want to wait before reviewing this guide.

Love and Fury

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS