MH: Yet you’ve made Lily very strong and well-rounded, and I love that. I’d also like to know about the inspiration for the character of Thola, with her mixture of strength and vulnerability.
AEW: While researching the book, I learned about the Freedom Fighters who had left South Africa to train in Mozambique and elsewhere. They then returned to South Africa to fight against the apartheid government, and many were killed. Forgive Me began with the idea of a sheltered girl on Cape Cod, a girl who grew up to be Nadine, writing to a young South African girl, who was Thola. I envisioned Thola and Nadine as pen pals. Thola was always fully formed in my mind, a grand personality from the start.
MH: Forgive Me has a complex structure. Did you know how it would all come together?
AEW: Not at all. In fact, when I first told my editor about the book, I talked about South Africa and Nadine. We were sitting in her car, outside my hotel room in San Francisco. At the very end of our conversation, I said, “Then I keep hearing the voice of this boy who wants to be a star.” I told her a bit about him, and my editor said, “The boy is the heart of the story.” I remember going up to my hotel room thunderstruck. She was exactly right, so I picked up my hotel pad and pen and wrote, listening to what the boy had to say. Who he was and how his search for stardom would turn out all came later.
MH: What are you working on now?
AEW: I have a pile of newspaper clippings on my desk, and each one could be a novel. There are also some great stories I’ve heard that have stuck with me. I plan to take a few months to daydream and see what develops. This is the most wonderful time…. I get to wander around bookstores and museums, eavesdrop on people’s conversations, and come up with my next book, which is still perfect in my mind, before I write a word.
READING GROUP QUESTIONS AND TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION
1. If you have read Ward’s previous novels, How to Be Lost and Sleep Toward Heaven, did you find similarities between them and Forgive Me? How would you describe Ward’s writing style? To which other writers would you compare her work?
2. Was the depiction of apartheid in Forgive Me consistent with what you have heard or read, or did it change your sense of the conditions? Was the South Africa of the novel familiar or new to you?
3. Ward says she was compelled by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s model, “the concept of telling the truth and being set free.” What were your impressions of the TRC? Can you imagine how hearing a perpetrator’s story in his or her own words might influence your judgment of a crime?
4. How does forgiveness figure into the novel? Who seeks forgiveness? Who is able to forgive? Did the novel make you think about forgiveness in your own life?
5. What did you think of the Irvings? Could you forgive someone who killed a loved one?
6. After finishing the novel, did your reading of the epigraph change?
7. Did your feelings about Nadine change over the course of the novel? What parts of her character do you relate to the most? Does she do anything you found morally questionable?
8. One reviewer wrote that upon finishing Forgive Me, “readers will want to start all over again, looking for the clues they missed the first time around when Ward, like a cunning magician, so deftly led them astray.” Did you reread sections of the novel more than once, uncovering clues? How did the journal entries affect the unfolding story for you? What about them did you find most poignant? Misleading? Illuminating?
9. There are many ambitions in this novel—from Nadine and Maxim’s commitment to capturing the ravages of war, to Thola’s dancing career, to the aspirations charted in the “Nantucket to Stardom” entries. How does ambition define the characters in Forgive Me? How does it disappoint them?
10. In many ways motherhood is at the heart of this book. What do the mothers in the novel—Ann, Fikile, Sophia, Lily, and ultimately Nadine—have in common? How do their circumstances and choices distinguish them from one another?
11. How does growing up without a mother affect Nadine? In what ways does she seem to reconsider the role of a mother? Did you find the path she chooses unexpected or inevitable? Does it resonate with your own experience of reconciling work and family life?
12. Do you think Thola loved George? What struck you most about their story?
13. Maxim and Hank are very different characters, and yet each captures Nadine’s heart. What does each man represent to Nadine? Do they have anything in common?
14. What role does love play in the novel?
15. What do you think the title means?
AMANDA EYRE WARD is the award-winning author of How to Be Lost and Sleep Toward Heaven. She lives in Austin, Texas, with her family.
www.amandaward.com
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Praise for
Forgive Me
“Compulsively readable…a fascinating journey to salvation.”
––The Denver Post
“Insightful…Ward excels…in her deft examinations of nuanced human relationships.”
––San Francisco Chronicle
“Wonderfully crafted…Not only is this novel a literary gem, it’s as addictive as any nail-biting thriller.”
––Glamour (U.K.)
“Amanda Eyre Ward tells a compelling story in Forgive Me—full of hard truths, and no easy answers. This is a book readers will fly through—but also one that will linger and hau
nt.”
—DANI SHAPIRO, author of Family History
“With staccato bursts of vivid writing and dialogue…Ward offers the reader a glimpse into subjects both foreign and familiar and maintains interest to the end.”
––The Providence Journal
“[Ward] beautifully spans the physical and social divide between Cape Town, in the waning days of apartheid, and Cape Cod [and] avoids glib answers, preferring to question the differences between perpetrators and victims—and ask who deserves to be forgiven.”
––Texas Monthly
“A hard-bitten U.S. correspondent revisits the traumas of South Africa’s apartheid era…. A profound, engrossing read.”
––Sainsbury’s Magazine (U.K.)
“Powerful…an acute, sharp-angled love story with a rare sense of history.”
––Kirkus Reviews
“Upon finishing Ward’s tantalizingly spare yet precisely powerful novel, readers will want to start all over again.”
––Booklist
Forgive Me is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
2008 Ballantine Books Trade Paperback Edition
Copyright © 2007 by Amanda Eyre Ward
Reading group guide copyright © 2008 by Random House, Inc.
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
BALLANTINE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc. RANDOM HOUSE READER’S CIRCLE and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., in 2007.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ward, Amanda Eyre.
Forgive me : a novel / by Amanda Eyre Ward.
p. cm.
1. Women journalists—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3623.A725F67 2007
813'.6—dc22 2006050436
www.randomhousereaderscircle.com
eISBN: 978-0-345-50491-3
v3.0
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