by Spencer Hyde
5. Didi turns his struggle with language into a game, per his therapist’s request. Where he once shouted profanity, he now shouts his potentially embarrassing guilty pleasures, like HGTV. What TV shows or novels or movies are you afraid to mention for fear you might be wrongfully judged?
6. Addie copes with her obsessive thoughts by striving to maintain a lighthearted attitude about, well, everything. What strategies do you employ when coping with big issues? How have you used humor to cope with difficult topics in your own life?
7. Waiting for Fitz is a nod to Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot. Beckett’s work asks a lot of questions about what we, the audience, are waiting for. Addie discovers what this means: life is impossible to understand, and quite absurd, until something or someone comes along and gives it meaning. The characters in the play are left waiting. Meaning is hard to grasp. Life is difficult to coordinate. Addie and Fitz find one another and begin to make sense of the absurdity. Can you think back to a time when you were waiting for that significant something, that significant someone? How long did you wait? Looking back, what does that period of waiting now mean to you?
8. Near the end of the novel, the two main characters talk about scorched earth and how the Kirtland’s Warbler can only survive because the fire is integral to the life cycle of the Jack pines. What hardships in your life have led to new growth?
9. If the author wrote a sequel, what do you think would happen to the characters? How might Fitz react to his freedom?
About the Author
Spencer Hyde spent three years during high school at Johns Hopkins for severe OCD. He feels particularly suited to write this novel because he’s lived through his protagonists’ obsessions. Spencer worked at a therapeutic boarding school before earning his MFA and his PhD specializing in fiction, short humor pieces, and essays. He wrote Waiting for Fitz while working as a Teaching Fellow in Denton, Texas. Spencer and his wife, Brittany, are the parents of four children.