book group | Thornfield Hall

The last time the book group met was in my back yard in 2000. We ate chicken, a salad, and dessert (something from the neighborhood bakery), and desultorily discussed John Updike’s Rabbit Is Rich.

I remember their faces, but can’t remember their last names.

Time passes. Details drift away, unless one needs to remember. And yet we met for four years, and I felt close to them. I had met these people at a support group. We socialized sometimes.

And so I organized a monthly book group, and I picked the books. We read some dazzling memoirs and novels, among them Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, Lisa Zeidner’s Layover, John Thorndike’s Another Way Home: A Father’s Memoir, Mick Jackson’s The Underground Man, Kaye Gibbons’ Sights Unseen, and Jay Neugeboren’s Imagining Robert.

One evening a cartoonist showed up at book group. She hilariously skewered one of my favorite novels, and was so witty that I hiccoughed with laughter. Really, it is and is not ideal to have a cartoonist in your book group!

At that last meeting, I was distracted, still packing for the move.

“You shouldn’t move. You have a lot of friends here,” said one of my favorites.

“I’ll miss you a lot. You’ve got to keep the book group going.”

“We won’t,” he said glumly.

But there must have been someone bossy enough to take over. I’d phoned them, arranged transportation (I’m a master of bus schedules and carpooling), and occasionally sent out a newsletter to remind them of our selection of the month.

As you can see, I have a clear memory of my bossiness, and/or powers of organization, and it makes me laugh. I remember the group vividly, but I wish I had a photo.

I don’t know about you, but I belong to a raucous book club. We read the book – we’re not like the women on TV shows, who, ha ha ha, forget the book and just drink wine – but we are so raucous that it is difficult to find a good venue. Although we have not actually been kicked out anywhere, we need a LARGE coffeehouse or restaurant, where we can sit at a remote table and not disturb the other people.

We live in Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, and Nebraska. Where’s the central point? Who knows? We don’t meet often, but we always pick a town somewhere off I-80 or I-35. Friends in central Iowa insist, “You have to meet in Iowa City.” Iowa City is a UNESCO City of Literature, and Pages from a Cold Island, our book club pick, was set partly in Iowa City. So one evening we met at The Mill, the famous bar where Writers’ Workshop classes reputedly used to meet. If anyone were too raucous, we figured, it would be workshop students guzzling beer and noisily critiquing one another’s stories.

And so we tromped into the bar and sat in what seemed to be a church pew. We ordered pizza and a couple of pitchers of Diet Coke. “We don’t have pitchers of Diet Coke.” We got the pitchers, because the employees, mostly college students, are unused to dealing with middle-aged and older crones. In fact, we don’t exist, which was an advantage: they gave us the pitcher gratis.

On this particular evening, we had a raucous discussion of the writer Frederick Exley’s auto-fiction. In his second novel, Pages from a Cold Island, published in 1974, he includes a description of his interview with Gloria Steinem, which goes awry after his demanding, follow-up, fact-checking phone calls. After he writes up the interview, he sobers up long enough to teach for a semester at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in Iowa City. But the talented workshop students turn out to be such brutal critics of each other’s work that he dreads the mayhem. He spends most of his free time drinking at Donnelly’s, a bar for hardcore alcoholics, and the Deadwood, frequented by his new friends, the Epstein brothers, who owned a bookshop.

Anyway, The Mill – which, I believe, has since closed – was suitably raucous, but we didn’t like the pizza. What can I say? If you’re at a bar, you need good pizza. And it was rowdy beyond our expectations. We weren’t particularly thrilled when a guy with a chest tattoo took off his shirt and drunkenly explained the tattoo’s genesis. Oversharing, we agreed.

Anyway, enough of Iowa City, which has only two bookshops left, alas. Next time we’ll go to a coffeehouse in Omaha, which is actually a very cool city.