Reading Group Guide
1. What is your first impression of Elizabeth, Lilly’s mother? Does your opinion of her change throughout the course of the novel? How so? Discuss how Lilly’s discovery of her mother and Brooks Burns during the summer of 1962 changes Lilly’s view of her mother? How does it change Lilly?
2. The epigraph that opens the book quotes Dylan Thomas: “After the first death, there is no other.” How do you understand this quote? Does this quote apply in any way to your own life?
3. Lilly narrates the book as an adult, looking back at her life. The novel is, in part, about adolescence and the ways in which that period of our lives is so defining. How does Lily change and grow as a character throughout the book? How does she stay the same?
4. Siddons writes, “It was the full flowering of Camelot, the New Frontier, and the glamour and rigor of the young Kennedy administration brought with it strong feelings...It was, too, a time of exploration and flaming new cultural concepts, and the sound of tumbling mores was loud in the land.” How does the historical and social context manifest itself throughout the novel? Is it meaningful that Siddons chose to set this book during the 1960s? Why or why not?
5. Lilly’s mother believes that “magic is just as necessary for human beings as food and shelter, but most of us have forgotten it.” It can be said that there are moments of magic in this book, and Edgewater, in particular, seems to be a magical place for many of the characters. Do you agree that magic is a ‘necessary’ part of life? What do you think Siddons means by this?
6. Midway through the novel Lilly says, “Never think that the very young cannot love. Never think that. They love with a fierce, direct love.” Jon and Lilly have a very mature relationship for such young people. Do you think it’s possible for the ‘very young’ to experience mature and enduring love?
7. What do you make of Peaches? Is Lilly too hard on her when they are younger?
8. It can be said that Edgewater is its own ‘character’ in Off Season and early in the novel Lilly tells Cam that she was a different person at Edgewater, “a creature of water and wind and tides and rock.” What role does Edgewater play in Lilly’s life? Do you agree with Lilly that certain places have the power to completely change a person?
9. Is Lilly’s father too protective of Lilly after her mother dies? Do you think he is a good parent to Lilly? How does Lilly’s relationship with her father affect her relationship with Cam?
10. Lilly falls in love with Cam instantly. Is their love believable? Do you believe that love at first sight is possible?
11. Why doesn’t Lilly tell Cam about Jon? Why doesn’t Cam tell Lilly about his sister? Do you think it’s sometimes necessary keep childhood secrets even from those closest to you in adulthood?
12. The characters in this novel love very deeply. What price do they pay for this love? Does the novel suggest that it is important to love this deeply despite the risks involved in doing so?
13. When Lilly begins dating Cam she thinks, “Love and safety. Love and safety forever. I had never dreamed I could find both outside [my father’s] house.” What role does ‘safety’ play in Lilly’s marriage to Cam? Why does Lilly place so much value on safety?
14. The novel has a surprising ending. Discuss what happens in the final chapters and what the ending means for Lilly, her life, and her marriage.
Q & A with Anne Rivers Siddons:
Q. Many of your previous novels have been set in the South. Why did you decide to set this novel in Maine? You live in Maine part of the year. What do you love about it?
A. I love Maine with all my heart, and since my protagonist is a bit like me, I thought she would like Maine, too. There’s nothing I don’t love about it; there is a strength, clarity, and sparseness to it that I ache for sometimes – stuck as I am in the richest, hottest, most fertile part of the South, the Carolina low country.
Q. You create such wonderful, three-dimensional characters. Do you base your characters on real people or are they purely products of your imagination?
A. There is always a flicker or a seeming of someone real in most of my characters, but by the time I have developed a character enough to carry them through a book, they become their own selves and there’s no doubt about that. I never knowingly copy anybody – I’m not that good at it.
Q. Lilly’s summers in Edgewater are a very important part of her childhood. Did you have a summer home or summer community similar to Lilly’s when you were growing up?
A. Most of the summers of my childhood, we went to St. Simons or Sea Island in Georgia. We stayed in the same old cottages over and over again which gave me a sense that summer just ought to be about the same place – then it can have real magic.
Q. Off Season is in large part about Lilly’s relationship with her mother, Elizabeth. Many of your previous novels also examine the complexity of mother-daughter relationships. What do you find fascinating about such relationships?
A. I don’t think a woman becomes a whole woman without enormous input from her mother. I don’t think it’s possible. Even if we become totally something else, we still stand on our mother’s shoulders.
Q. Much of this book is about Cam and Lilly’s marriage, but you don’t romanticize the institution of marriage. How do you understand Cam and Lilly’s marriage?
A. I understand it first and foremost as a marriage of deep mutual need, but there is no doubt that their love is profoundly strong and enduring. I think it was Robert Frost who said, “only when love and need are one.”
Q. Like many of your other novels, this one takes place during the 1960s. What is it about this period of time that interests you?
A. Well, it was my time. And I lived in the epicenter of the civil rights movement and was a reporter during that time. I knew Dr. King and his lieutenants and besides, it was a time that literally changed the world we knew into something else.
Q. Your novels are often about the lives of women. In an interview you once said, “Maybe it doesn’t happen so totally and drastically to most of us, but I haven't seen many women fall into middle age without losing something that has always been a very important part of their lives, and either having to make a life around that, or find a way to go on, or change in order to go on. It seems to me that women are left to do the changing and accommodating.” Do you still believe this to be true? Why does it fall on the woman to “do the changing and accommodating”?
A. I believe in large part it is still true—it was, after all, Odysseus who sailed away and Penelope who stayed home and wove. And no matter what we say, and what great sentiments we have about women in the modern world, the vast majority of women I know are still left to do the accommodating and the changing. I think it is because it has always been so and we are a species very reluctant to change.
Q. The ending of Off Season is quite shocking. Without giving anything away, do you find it tragic or hopeful?
A. I find it basically tragic, but I also find it oddly hopeful that Lilly takes such comfort in talking to her dead husband and her cat. I think that whatever we do to cope with such enormity is valid and hopeful.
Q. Can you describe your creative a process a bit? How do you go about developing your stories? Do you usually have an outline to work from before you begin writing? Do you go through many drafts and rewrites?
A. For some reason, when I start out writing, I have a very clear picture of what the book should be from the beginning to end and what my characters should be. I don’t know where this comes from – perhaps a story I’ve heard, a person I’ve met, a situation I’ve observed – but something in me says, “wouldn’t that make a good book?” I don’t have an outline per se, but I do have a sense of trajectory for each character so I don’t have a bunch of people milling about on the page. I always know the ending. As for rewrites, no editor has ever asked me to do that.
Q. Lilly is a voracious reader and she finds comfort, knowledge, and escape through reading. She seems to particularly love myths and folklore. What were your favorite novels when you were growing up? Who are your favorite writers?
A. I read so much, it’s hard for me to remember. I read my way through the Campbell County library, but mythology – Norse and Greek –was the very bones of my childhood. Growing up, one of my favorite writers was J.D. Salinger. I have so many favorites now. Pat Conroy never wrote a word that wasn’t magical to me. Gabriel Garcia Marquez will always be a favorite, and Edith Wharton and Henry James have been important to me for a long time.
Q. OFF SEASON is such a wonderful novel that it leaves the reader wanting more. Are you working on anything new at the moment?
A. I always have three or four ideas in my head that I intend to make into novels one day. I have one I plan to begin in the fall that will be my second book for Grand Central Publishing. There will be more.
