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How do you feel about Carmen’s response to Raina’s confiding? How does this response mirror the way larger society handles sexual assault?
11. What are your initial impressions of Marjorie in “Not Today, Marjorie” based on her recollection of her therapy session with Alex on page 149?
“‘Do your friends know how hard you are on yourself or how much you care about what other people think?’ Alex had asked just last week during their session. ‘Because it seems like your Christianity offers you grace, but you don’t seem to ever offer any to yourself.’ Marjorie almost told her about Coryn and Charles then, but she decided against it. Instead she said quietly, ‘I’m just trying to keep my hands clean, day by day. I’ve done a lot of bad things in my life, and I’ve asked for forgiveness, but I feel like I can’t stop doing them.’”
What do you believe about the concept of grace? Should Marjorie be completely honest with Alex and forgive herself?
12. It is often said that people repeat cycles until they learn the lesson they need to learn. In “This Todd,” we are introduced to Kim, an artist who repeatedly has unsuccessful relationships with disabled men. What must Kim learn in the way she handles these relationships? Is she tender? Was Brian right to call the police as Kim lugged a wooden leg into his home?
13. In “A Conversation about Bread,” we hear more of Brian’s story and spend time with him and his classmate Eldwin as they complete an assignment. Another character we see but do not hear from is the white woman listening in on their exchange. Thompson-Spires writes:
If Eldwin cared about the white woman—and he might have at some level, but it wasn’t a visible level—he would have seen that she was now very interested in the conversation. His theory, he had told Brian before, involved learning to ignore the white gaze until it no longer came to mind. Then, “and only then,” he’d said, “black people can be free from all that double consciousness bull.”
How would you define the “white gaze”? Do you believe it is possible for people of color to live outside of the white gaze?
14. Explain the significance of the title of the book. How did the theme show up in the different stories within the collection?
Enhance Your Book Club
1. Throughout the collection, how are you feeling in your own body? Did the collection make you more aware of the space you take up in the world by gender, race, and/or class?
2. Brian was not pleased with the way Eldwin portrayed the bread story. “I’d do more to try to distinguish the narrator from the other characters so it’s not like they’re some kind of monolith,” he states, along with other reasoning. In the end, Eldwin decides to go with another story. What do you believe convinced him to do so? Have you ever had a person tell your story from an angle that displeased you? How did that make you feel and what does it say about the ownership of certain narratives in society?
3. In “Wash Clean the Bones,” Alma has witnessed a lot of death in her life, from Terry to her patients to the bodies at the funerals. When she asks Bette, “But how would you protect him?” referring to her son, Ralph, what is the urgency and fear in her asking? How does this fear arise in other stories?
4. What surprised you most in the collection of stories? Did one story resonate very strongly for you? If so, why?
5. Of This World author Allegra Hyde wrote of Heads of the Colored People, “Nafissa Thompson-Spires explores what it means to come to terms with one’s body, one’s family, one’s future.” In what ways do you see the collection exploring what it means to come to terms with one’s body, family, and future?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Nafissa Thompson-Spires earned a PhD in English from Vanderbilt University and a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from the University of Illinois.
Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The White Review, Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly, StoryQuarterly, Lunch Ticket, and The Feminist Wire, among other publications. She is a 2016 participant of the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop and 2017 Tin House workshop, and a 2017 Sewanee Writers’ Conference Stanley Elkin Scholar. Born in San Diego, California, she now lives in Illinois with her husband.